Nicola Sturgeon - All Fur Coat and No Knickers
When Angus Brendan MacNeil - of all people! - is blurting out inconvenient truths you know the good ship SNP is in real difficulty. https://t.co/4CCfC2SAtv
— alexmassie (@alexmassie) July 12, 2023
Must be annoying for Nicola Sturgeon to have a fellow SNP member publicly pointing out a few home truths, but Angus MacNeil seems to have decided there's no going back now - the genie's well and truly out of the bottle.
Nicola Sturgeon’s decision to refer her own government’s referendum bill to the Supreme Court was presented as a canny wheeze but it was, like so many other SNP manoeuvres, all fur coat and no knickers.
Sturgeon was left in a hole entirely of her own creation when the court confirmed that the law was precisely what every person with a reading age of more than eight thought it was and that the Scottish parliament did not enjoy the right to unilaterally legislate for the dismemberment of Britain.
That was a blow, but an entirely self-inflicted one. Sturgeon then proceeded to make matters much worse than they needed to be. Having shot herself in one foot, she took aim at the other.
The SNP would, she said, treat the next general election as a “de facto referendum” on independence. If pro-independence parties won more than 50 per cent of the vote then, bingo, Scotland should become an independent state.
This was a folly wrapped in a nonsense inside an absurdity. Neither a Labour government nor a Conservative one would be in any way obliged to accept the SNP’s demands but each would be wholly within their rights to note that if the SNP failed to reach its own benchmark for victory the nationalists would have had their referendum — and lost it. At which point, you know, game over.
Alex Massie - The Times
