Well done Nicola Sturgeon!
By making everyone concentrate on the attempts to hold a referendum on Scottish Independence, she has in a stroke taken away any examination of her failing SNP administration at Holyrood and sent the Tory maladministration at Westminster into apoplexy.
Sturgeon’s announcement earlier this week was not about an Independence Referendum, she knows that current UK Law means that this power is reserved to the Westminster Government and the current Government shows no sign of allowing it. What it is mostly about is to create the illusion that Westminster is the enemy of Scotland and the duplicitous English who control the UK Government want to keep Scotland in the Union against their wishes. It is all about creating an enemy who can be blamed for all that goes wrong in Scotland, very much as Boris Johnson has tried to do with the EU for the UK as a whole.
As such it is a political game done to deceive the Scottish people, not advance Independence for them, and the Tories (& to be fair, other parties) fell into her trap and by immediately opposing such a referendum, allowing Westminster to be set up as the enemy against which Sturgeon can lead her party. Anything and everything that goes wrong under the SNP Administration can then be blamed on Westminster, not on the SNP in Holyrood.
I need to make one point clear, while I think Scotland leaving the United Kingdom is a bad idea, for many of the same reasons I think that the UK leaving the European Union was, is and always will be a terrible idea, it is a decision for the Scottish people to make, not me. That a country of 5½ million could successfully govern itself is not the question (there are many such countries in Europe & further afield) but is that the best choice for them?
I have a great deal of sympathy for Scotland, dragged out of the EU against their will (they voted nearly 2 to 1 to remain) even though continual EU membership was one of the reason put in 2014 during the previous Independence Referendum as reason to remain in the UK. Scotland has also suffered unfairly under the current Tory Maladministration (although, truth be told, so has everywhere else in the UK) and leaving the UK may be one way to rid themselves of a centralising authoritarian Government. However, the SNP run just as much a centralising authoritarian Government, concentrating power into Holyrood rather than Westminster so I am not sure most Scottish people will see a great deal of difference under a SNP designed devolution.
As a Liberal, I certainly want to see more power devolved to Scotland to run their own affairs, but that power should not just move from to Holyrood but flow down throughout Scotland. I would also want to see more power devolved from Westminster to the English Regions & Local Government and to the Welsh Government & councils. I would like to see the UK become a more Federal nation of equal parts so that no one party (not even the Liberal Democrats) can dominate political live they way the Conservatives & Labour have done for most of the last 100 years.
I want a proper debate on how we can restructure the UK to the benefit of all parts of it, including Scotland. I want to see a more democratic government in the UK where a party with less than 45% of the vote can’t ride roughshod over any opposition to impose its vision (or, in the case of the current Tory Maladministration, lack of vision) on the rest of the country. Most of all I want to see a system of Government at all levels that allow real powers to be exercised at the most appropriate level and is responsive to the needs of all the people in the UK.
So, I hope the Scottish people resist the SNP’s manoeuvring to force an Independence on the terms they want.
Mantonite - A Worksop Liberal 