I’m sick and tired of the SNP claiming to speak for Scotland – they simply don’t

LET me hazard a guess that on at least one occasion in the four years it has dominated the news agenda you have dipped your toes in the Brexit debate with another person living in Scotland.

You need not wade in far to encounter the violent currents of diverging opinion.

As recently as yesterday I had an exchange of views with a colleague and, although we are both Remainers and resident in Scotland, we were within moments sharply divided on the question of a second referendum.

The previous evening, over pizza out after the pictures, my dining companion and I clashed over the likely consequences for the UK of calling the whole thing off and telling Brussels sorry, midlife crisis thing, let’s go home and cuddle up again.

Unless you confine yourselves to social media echo chambers, you will probably even have encountered people who voted a different way from you in the 2016 referendum. You may even have argued the toss with them.

There were, after all, more than a million Scots who voted Leave and some 1.6million who voted Remain. I imagine there must be lines of communication.

Assuming all this is so, you will be aware of myriad divisions not just among Leavers and Remainers but among those ostensibly playing for the same team.

Aye, you may well have concluded with a shake of the head as our great grannies might have done if they had lived to see our present pickle, it’s a sair fecht and no mistake.

Unless, of course, you have no interest in an accurate representation of the Brexit picture in Scotland.

In that case you may wish to take a leaf out of SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford’s book.

‘Westminster is in chaos,’ was the imperious comment from the member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber in the Commons this week, ‘but in Scotland we stand united.’ Consider these extraordinary words. Is the suggestion that, while the two biggest parliamentary parties rip their innards out over Brexit, we in Scotland think with one mind, speak with one voice and tap at our watch faces as we wait for our views to be acted upon?

Let us hear what else our nation’s spokesman has to say on behalf of Remain voters like my work colleague, my dining companion and me – all of whom disagree on where we go next – not to mention one million-plus Leave voters who, apparently, he speaks for too.

‘Scotland voted overwhelmingly to remain and we will not allow our country to be dragged out of the European Union or brought down by this Tory Government.’ There he goes again. Scotland will not stand for it.

Solution

Mr Blackford concludes, as if the logic were irrefutable but the English are too stupid to have twigged to it, that the only solution is to extend Article 50 and hold another referendum, this time asking the people of the UK whether they want Theresa May’s deal or to remain in the EU.

If you were unlucky enough to catch the clip of this miserable contribution to Commons wisdom online, you may have seen the SNP-sponsored version of it, which, to underline their man’s point, concludes with the motto ‘Standing up for Scotland’.

There is, then, nothing accidental about Mr Blackford’s conflation of Scotland’s voice and the SNP’s voice. It is a deliberate and cynical policy, repeated daily in political discourse with flagrant disregard for every dissenting Scottish voice.

The party is as unapologetic for its appropriation of Scotland’s voice as it is for the theft of our flag, now thoroughly contaminated for the rest of our lifetimes with Nationalist connotations.

The result is that, with almost every utterance in Westminster, Mr Blackford and his fellow Nationalist MPs alienate many thousands, even millions, of the very people they are in London to represent.

It is unedifying enough that so many of the Scottish voices we hear in Westminster espouse views with which vast numbers of Scots strongly disagree, but it really is beyond the pale to have these wretched views fraudulently portrayed as those of the people of Scotland and, therefore, our own.

Mr Blackford and his chums emphatically do not represent me or my views and nor do his most recent utterances bear the slightest relation to any discussion I have heard in Scotland about the question which should be asked in a second referendum.

Quite apart from the fact it is far from clear a majority of Scots support the ludicrously named ‘People’s Vote’ on Brexit, it would require a more select brand of contempt for democracy altogether to insist on a binary choice between Remain on one hand and Mrs May’s deal on the other.

Indeed, in this, Mr Blackford not only fails to represent all of Scotland, he fails to represent all of the SNP.

Perhaps the former banker is not a numbers man, but it is worth remembering that 30 per cent of his own party members voted to leave the EU.

These included former deputy leader Jim Sillars, MSP Alex Neil and, according to Mr Neil, several of his Nationalist MSP colleagues who preferred not to admit to the public (or, indeed, their party leadership) how they were voting.

What, I wonder, do they make of their party’s attempt to re-run the vote? Not, I should imagine, that we all think alike up here and that our man in Westminster, Ian Blackford, does our talking for us.

‘I have long despaired at the lack of intellectual rigour in the policymaking of the SNP,’ admitted Mr Sillars in a letter to the Mail this week, and his friend Mr Blackford’s support for a ‘crooked choice’ for a second referendum question was, he said, ‘a classic example of what I mean’.

Not being a friend of Mr Blackford’s or a member of the SNP, perhaps I can speak more bluntly.

It is not only that intellectual rigour is lacking in the party’s policymaking, it is also that mendacity is all too present.

Dishonest

It is fundamentally dishonest for a political party to represent its policies as the voice of a divided nation, and that lie, chillingly Soviet-esque in its ubiquity, is affecting the way in which our neighbours in the Union see us.

We do not stand four square behind Mr Blackford as he and the gang stood with cringe-inducing docility behind Nicola Sturgeon in the Commons lobby this week.

And, lest anyone doubt that, remind yourselves of the result of a referendum held two years before the Brexit one.

It does not do to speak for a Scotland which voted ‘overwhelmingly’ to stay in Europe – 62 per cent of us did – while forgetting all about the 55.3 per cent of us who voted to remain in the UK.

Rather than posturing in front of the ‘English’ parties, Mr Blackford and his SNP group should steer their ship by these figures. They do not lie.

We in Scotland were a mere 6.7 per cent more enthusiastic about being in the EU than being in the UK – and yet the first result is glorified as copper bottomed and the second derided as a mistake which must urgently be corrected.

By all means speak for yourself or, at worst, your party in parliament. But please, Mr Blackford, abandon this tedious pretence that you are speaking for me.