Stick that in your pitch-fork and smoke it!

Last week saw a remarkable British by-election where the Liberal Democrats over turned a 23,000 majority and their previous near death experience to win a spectacular victory in Richmond Park.

The dominant issue was Brexit and the continuing fall out from Britain’s EU Referendum and a summer of political trauma.  The Liberal Democrats remain Britain’s most consistently pro EU political party and have campaigned passionately in support of the EU both before and after the referendum.  They are currently campaigning for parliament to scrutinise the Brexit proposition as it emerges and for there to be a second referendum to ratify any deal on the grounds that the terms of what Brexit meant were never specified in the original referendum.

This has been challenged as controversial and potentially undemocratic by leading political inquisitors such as Andrew Neil and the pitchfork wielding Julia Hartley-Brewer.
  
Are the peasants revolting? Is it the alt-right establishment twitching in defence of a tyranny of the majority?  Is it simply that parliament was silent on how Brexit would proceed should we vote to leave, either in terms of process or vision?

I think the issue about a second vote is therefore about having a vote on any future Brexit deal. There are so many moving parts to consider.  This is not just be about single market or not - or even whether we have access to the single market in some form.  How much do we pay in; what control can we exert over immigration; what level of political control do we exercise over our national destiny; what other areas of inter-European co-operation are we to participate in going forward and on what terms?  It is about all these things and more and we are only at the beginning.

My current preference would be to find, after exploring the Brexit options, that being part of the EU on the sort of terms we already had was the best deal and that we therefore exercise the option of staying.  Failing that, I’d like us to establish as close a cooperative and connected relationship with rest of Europe as possible. Whatever we do I’d like to do it with our eyes open.

Whatever we decide, it has to be done democratically since we have had a referendum.  We voted to leave and we are proceeding with that. For there to be any deviation from that or significant qualification after seeing the options, there needs to be a democratic process.

The problem the Leavers have, in my opinion, is that this was always a referendum to deal with an issue that has split the Conservative Party for a generation. It's not really been done with any vision about where we are trying to get to, let alone any detailed proposition behind it. And then the leaders of Leave seemed to step back and run away when they won. Now that’s a bit of a school-boy error from them.

In fact, we are seeing this right now in the Supreme Court.  The legislation around creating the referendum was poor and was silent on too much.

The referendum means we have decided to leave and that has to be delivered now. And this has to be delivered through parliamentary processes with proper scrutiny. Politics does not stop with a referendum and certainly not one where the population is so evenly split.

What Richmond Park does is to remind us is there are significant numbers of Remain minded people and some of their concerns need taken account of as we move forward to our new foreign policy. It is important to avoid a tyranny of the majority.

It also gives voice to a significant liberal - progressive section of our electorate - a section feeling under-represented with the void in the centre and centre-left of British politics.  This is a section of our people that look to politics that is open, tolerant and united.  A section that looks to a very long tradition of British liberalism that we need now more than ever.

Stick that in your pitch-fork and smoke it.

Let's bring down our whole rotten political system

While I'm interested in any Scottish solutions with regards to stopping an EU Brexit I think they are a distraction from the priority.  The Scottish dimension is not really about Europe it is about Independence.  For the Scottish Government see everything - absolutely everything - through the prism of Independence. For me the priority is for Britain to remain within or as close we can to the EU; and to be clear, for me, the EU has always been far more than just a free trade area.

There can't be a Second Referendum on the EU.  That would be undemocratic and we cannot call for one when we rightly call out Scot Nats for demanding Indyref2 barely two years after the first - and a clear decision to boot.

But referenda are not the only way. They are not even particularly good at deciding very technical issues like on the EU. And they are so final if the change option wins. This makes them inflexible and somewhat undemocratic in that sense. As a result of last week's EU referendum we have handed a blank cheque to I'm not entirely sure who, to do I'm not entirely sure what.

When we voted we had no idea what Leave would look like. There was no white paper, no model, no roadmap - nothing. And this is without addressing the apparent fact that two of the central claims of the winning Leave campaign appear to be ones that there was no intention, or knowingly no possibility, of delivering. That is to say paying '£350m a week into NHS' and ending free movement of people. This is also without addressing that some (not all) Leave voters were voting on misconceptions as evidenced by attitude surveys during the campaign.

I want us to stay in the EU or salvage the best we can out of our broken relationship with Europe and vote on it in the traditional way via a general election. That's perfectly democratic. Now this requires real Labour to have the balls to stand up for that. It also requires pro EU Conservatives to stop trying to hold power for power's sake. The pro EU ones are meant to be in the majority in parliament. This may all require pro EU candidates and groups to cooperate in a one-off pro-EU coupon election.

But failing all this I want the Labour Party to be strong again - they need to jettison their foolish People's Popular Front sect of malevolents and romantics. In the Conservatives I want to see the Brexiters and thinly veiled anti-Europeans (such as May) defeated and something constructive regarding Europe emerge. Most of all I feel we need outward looking British liberalism to start doing well across all the parties again.

Crucially, I want to see the Liberal Democrats, who have taken a far heavier electoral toll than they ever deserved, returning to strength.  We desperately need them in our political mix with a loud and vibrant voice.

These are turbulent times in British politics and all this may not be possible.  The stable of contenders for the Conservative leadership does not fill me with hope. Our continuing creaking democracy based on an 18th century system never designed for party politics let alone the multiple and changing choices we have today continues to depress me.  Not least when it begins to threaten our stability with embedded tribal loyalties and exaggerated regional differences with their ludicrous over representations.  This is an unresponsive democracy whose senses to real opinion are dulled, especially when they deliver absolute majorities on not much more than a third of the vote and on tiny shifts in support.

But there is many a twist and turn in the road ahead before we are done with these turbulent times.  Whatever happens I do not want to see a return to our political system as we have known it.  The realignment of the 1980s did not quite come off.  This time the fault lines of opinion have truly shifted.

This time I want to see real realignment and with it an end to our whole rotten political system.

Why an EU Ref makes a Yes Indyref vote even less likely

I love polls.  And I love the study of psephology - try saying that just after you have had your wisdom teeth out!  Most of all I love the detail revealed in the full tables of data behind the polls - the trends, the regional variations and the balance across age groups.

It is with this interest that I read the latest Panelbase Poll on Scotland and Scottish Independence.  It shows the following:

44% No, 36% Yes, 20% Don't know. (sample 1004, survey May 10-16)

Interestingly IPSOS Mori showed:

59 % No, 31% Yes, 10% Don't know (sample 1001, survey April 29- May 5)

The first showed a small drop in the No vote, the second showed a drop in the Yes vote.

Hmmmm - a little contradictory in terms of how big the No vote is and how many undecideds there are.  We shall see how other polls measure this and how the trends go.

My own view is this; the Yes camp has been stuck on around a third for a while and this matches pretty much the level of support Independence has had in Scotland since the 1970s give or take a couple of blips around devolution being introduced, Alex Salmond winning a majority in Holyrood and the introduction of the poll tax over 20 years ago.

Yes seem to be losing.  The Heather has failed to catch light.  And while millions moved in the streets of Barcelona, the Catalan capital, for their national movement, Scotland's just about filled the Ross Bandstand in Princes Street Gardens.

Yes seem increasingly on the backfoot under close scrutiny on the currency and several aspects of the consequences for pensions - both public sector and private.  Fissures have been appearing between the SNP on one hand who want to keep the Pound, the Queen and the Bank of England as well as shared financial regulation (funny independence that - may as well keep some political union if that's the game!); and on the other hand, the hard left who support a more recognisable independence complete with Scotland's own currency, a republic and withdrawal from NATO.

Other aspects of the movement's vision appeared to be wearing thin.  Strike out for freedom and let 1,000 flowers to bloom.  We could be a Nordic paradise free from Westminster austerity and injustice.

Is this from the SNP whose tax cutting agenda (Community Charge freeze, Corporation Tax, Air Passenger Duty and VAT) promises to deliver a social justice nirvana at the same time?  Or is it with a hard left agenda that presumably will bring with it high unemployment, accelerating economic decline and nothing but social justice disappointments?

It doesn't really add up does it?

But one thing could change the direction of this debate - Europe.

As the Conservatives set about trying to destroy themselves once more over Europe, an In/Out referendum for Britain in Europe looms large and exiting the EU a real possibility.  Note what today's Panelbase poll says:

If the UK is going to leave he EU the vote on Scottish Independence becomes:

44% No, 44% Yes, 12% undecided.  A dead heat!

The EU shenanigans may be about to open the field up again for the Scottish Independence Referendum.

I have just one set of thoughts I wanted to put down about this today.  That this is the electorate's gut reaction of the last few days as this issue has exploded onto the scene once more.  It is not yet a considered view in the light of analysis and discussion of the pros and cons of the various options.  Simplistically I believe the various options line up like this for a would be independent Scotland:

Scotland in EU, Rest of UK in EU
As you were, the Independence debate is framed as it was.

Scotland in EU, Rest of UK out of EU
Nightmare.  This is a nightmare for the single market that we hitherto shared with England.  The currency, financial regulation, and the operation of all sorts of cross border institutions become an even bigger problem. And what of Schengen and border controls in this sceanario. Nightmare.

Scotland out of EU, Rest of UK out of EU
Even bigger nightmare.  Not in the UK, not in the EU, small and on the fringes of Europe, and dealing with tariffs and a regulatory environment from the outside.

It actually strikes me that if the rest of the UK leaves Europe, which I think it would be mad to do, Scotland may well be better remaining part of that UK.

Another alternative may be to share a regulatory and monetary environment with the rest of the UK - both outside the EU, but that is not really independence is it.  Again, we might as well have a democratic political say in such a union if that is to be the case.

(And yes I know you could have Scotland out of Europe and the rest of the UK in but I think that is unlikely and if it were to come to pass I don't see that scenario as being too clever either).

Which all goes to show that as we consider what all this means, I think uncertainty over Europe actually makes a Yes vote for Scottish Independence even more unlikely!!

These are my initial thoughts.  I await developments and further analysis with interest.  And more polling too!