When will indyref2 happen?

[Gordon EF]

6 minutes ago, MixuFruit said:

Is the anti-trident bit of the SNP, as in those for who it is a foundational issue, older than your average member? Who was the one who left the party over favouring NATO membership a while ago? I feel like it has it's roots in a cold war experience that is hard for those under 40 to relate to. 

Just a gut feeling but I'd guess it's a stronger issue for people more in my parents generation who're ex-Labour, ex-CND types.

[Guest Jedi]

The campaign will certainly have to be upfront and honest about these sorts of questions....we already have the Growth Commission estimating that it could take a decade to start making different choices from the UK govt which would help to grow the Scottish economy, during which there could have to be cuts to public services, and tax increases in the short term.

The Covid recovery period, and the potential of a no deal or thin Brexit, which will still impact Scotland in the shorter term prior to Independence or rejoining the EU, or negotiating some form of Norway type arrangement, now adds to the mix of cutting costs.

Basically asking people to pay more for a good few years for Independence, for benefit in the long term.

 

[Lordofthewing]

Is the anti-trident bit of the SNP, as in those for who it is a foundational issue, older than your average member? Who was the one who left the party over favouring NATO membership a while ago? I feel like it has it's roots in a cold war experience that is hard for those under 40 to relate to. 

Do you mean John Finnie?

I think he left to join the Greens due to this.

[NotThePars]

2 hours ago, ThatBoyRonaldo said:

I suppose that is a fair point - the pressure would be significantly higher. I do think there's a slight undercurrent of unwillingness to engage with reality in the shape of material/international forces in the SNP - the notion that there are no difficult decisions to be made post independence. You have to hope they are ready for the conversation when the day after the referendum, Joe Biden phones up to congratulate them and before the FM is even done saying thank you he's saying "now those nukes aren't going anywhere right Mac?". Maybe it's harsh but I'm not sure I've seen too much evidence of people engaging with these questions in anything beyond a superficial way. In the final analysis though - do I think there are people in the party willing to accept the consequences of incurring the wrath of the State department if it means they get to be FM? Probably tbh. 

If the nukes staying at Faslane is necessary for a smooth transition to independence then they'll stay. I don't think that's a controversial take or mistaken reading of how the SNP have approached indy since 2014.

 

1 hour ago, MixuFruit said:

Is the anti-trident bit of the SNP, as in those for who it is a foundational issue, older than your average member? Who was the one who left the party over favouring NATO membership a while ago? I feel like it has it's roots in a cold war experience that is hard for those under 40 to relate to. 

Yup. Actual membership of NATO isn't going to impact people's lives in a noticeable way. Much, much less so than membership of the EU. 

[Snobot]

2 hours ago, MixuFruit said:

No it was a woman, can't remember her name.

Jean Urquhart 

[welshbairn]

19 minutes ago, Snobot said:

Jean Urquhart 

Had to google her but turns out I've probably met her, she manages the Ceilidh Place in Ullapool. She turned down an OBE and handed back an MBE she got earlier. Woman of principle. 

[Dunning1874]

Yeah, Finnie and Urquhart both resigned from the SNP over NATO in 2012. They both sat as independents initially then Finnie joined the Greens after the referendum, although he continued to officially sit as an independent until he was re-elected standing as a Green candidate in 2016. Urquhart joined RISE in 2015 and so was obviously not re-elected.

Finnie's 63 and Urquhart's 71, so there maybe is something in the theory that it's a generational thing - Urquhart had been a CND member since the seventies.

[NotThePars]

I posted a response the other day to Perry Anderson's piece on the decline of the British state without realising that it was actually free to read here - https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii125/articles/perry-anderson-ukania-perpetua

Think the excerpt below on Scotland is pretty good on exploring the shift away from Labour to SNP, how that shift has influenced the SNP's approach from 2007, and what the issues are in 2020.

Spoiler

5. Scotland

Scottish nationalism gained its first toe-hold in British politics in the late sixties, when a by-election victory of the snp moved Wilson to set up a Commission on devolution to see how its possible danger to Labour in Scotland was best handled. Recommending an elected Scottish body with limited powers, it appeared under Heath in 1973. Lifted by this prospect, and the discovery of North Sea oil in Scottish waters, in the election of February 1974 the snp won 22 per cent of the vote in Scotland, and in the October sequel jumped to 30 per cent, giving it 11 seats at Westminster under a Labour government with an overall majority of just 3, soon whittled away. When an Act under Callaghan granting Scotland a devolved assembly, that would be approved by a majority in a referendum, was torpedoed by a Labour unionist amendment requiring a threshold that wasn’t met, the snp brought down the government. Far from benefiting the party, it then slumped throughout the succeeding 18 years of Tory rule, when its average poll fell to 16.5 per cent, and 3 seats in Parliament.

When New Labour came to power in 1997, it passed a Scotland Act, creating a local ‘Executive’ in Edinburgh along much the same lines as the original commission, confident that its uk-wide electoral strength—it had just won three-quarters of all the Scottish seats at Westminster—meant it could dominate this body, and kill off independence with its measure of kindness.footnote⁸² For the better part of a decade, its calculation appeared to hold good. Having taken the precaution, as it thought, of introducing proportional representation for elections to the Scottish assembly as a safeguard against the snp ever scooping the pool with a bit more than a third of the vote, as it would itself come to do in Britain, Labour ruled Scotland in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats until 2007. But in that year the snp got one more seat than Labour in the third election to Holyrood and formed a minority government. This proved so popular that in 2011, the snp won an absolute majority in the (now renamed by it) Scottish Parliament. By 2016, it had over double the Labour vote in Scotland, and has now been in power in Edinburgh for as long as New Labour was in London.

What is the character of the party that has risen to such a height? Founded in the thirties, it was originally a bourgeois nationalist party pure and simple, whose sole objective, disavowing any connection with right or left, was Scottish independence. Much later, in the sixties, it started to position itself on the centre-left, and by the time of its breakthrough in 1974 was describing itself as social-democratic. At the turn of the eighties, a more radical group within the party sought to press it in a socialist direction, but was promptly expelled. Though its members were later readmitted, there was little to distinguish the snp from Labour in social or economic stance until it approved popular refusal to pay Thatcher’s poll tax in 1988, a movement which Labour characteristically declined to support. What did set it apart, from the sixties onwards, were two foreign policy goals: ejection of Polaris—later Trident—nuclear submarines from Scotland, and exit from nato. Under New Labour, the party’s leader Alex Salmond denounced Blair’s militarism not only in Iraq but Kosovo.

So long as the Tories were in power, Labour had held its working-class strongholds in Scotland without much difficulty. But once it became the government in London, the contemptuous treatment of its proletarian base and corruption in its rotten boroughs, which would undo the party in the North of England, had the same consequences much earlier in Scotland, because there a political alternative to the left of it emerged, which could not be smashed with the sledgehammer of first-past-the-post. In the space created by the Blair–Brown regime, the snp could win widespread support in attacking not only its imperial record in Iraq, but its neo-liberal record at home—the green-lighting of de-industrialization, contracting out of public services and introduction of student fees. As the extension of a dilute form of proportional representation to local elections—a concession to the Liberal Democrats to keep the coalition with them going—broke the padlocks on Labour’s municipal fastnesses, increasing numbers of workers went over to the snp, bringing it to power at Holyrood after a decade of local Blairism.footnote⁸³

The party that formed a government in 2007 was not untouched by the model it replaced. Competing with New Labour, the snp reproduced traits resembling it: stardom of the leader, sound-bite culture, on-message directives. Numerically, it was still a small organization of 15,000 members, in which discipline from above could be enforced. Nor were the effects of this imprint just organizational. In power, they set limitations of policy too. The record of the snp in office has not been a replica of New Labour; but there has been no clean break with it either.footnote⁸⁴ On the positive side came complete abolition of student fees. Later scrapping of prescription charges, introduction of free bus passes and provision of personal care; eventually, income tax was lowered a little for the least well-off and increased a little for the best-off. On the other side of the ledger, spending on higher education was cut, the number of school teachers reduced. Above all, the enormities of Scottish real estate were left unaltered—the most unequal distribution of land in Europe: less than a thousand individuals controlling 60 per cent of it; a quarter of all estates over a thousand acres in the same hereditary hands for four hundred years or more; average urban rents over 80 per cent of the minimum wage of 18 to 20 year-olds.footnote⁸⁵ As to financial regulation, Salmond—formerly an economist on the Royal Bank of Scotland payroll, who in office applauded its infamous boss Goodwin and his calamitous operations—could reproach Brown for too heavy a hand on banking. The commitment to expulsion of Trident remains, but departure from nato has been dropped, and the party now upholds the monarchy.

Royalism is not the result of any deep conversion of snp membership to the throne, most of the party’s historic nucleus no doubt remaining republican. It is tactical, designed to avoid affronting voters whom it seeks to win to the cause of independence. Electorally, the snp’s position appears virtually impregnable, since with even just a core support of some 36 per cent, well below its current levels, it would require an alliance between Conservatives and Labour to dislodge it from power; its opponents are at present too divided to pose much of a threat.footnote⁸⁶ But mere continuity in office cannot suffice for a party whose raison d’être has historically been independence. In the eighties, it turned away from the ethno-cultural nationalism of its origins, towards a socio-civic one. Not as far as its most significant theorist of the time, Stephen Maxwell, wanted,footnote⁸⁷ but nonetheless stressing the more equal and just society that independence could bring. Ambiguity, however, has remained: is the prospect of independence the means to such a society, or is the prospect of such a society the means to independence?

In 2014, the referendum on independence the snp had long sought was held. With Tories, Labour and Liberal Democrats shoulder to shoulder in warning that its economic consequences would be dire, and calling for its rejection, the No camp won handsomely, with 55.3 per cent of those who voted supporting it. On a higher turnout, the losing 44.7 per cent was actually a fraction lower than the snp’s score of 45.4 per cent in its victory at Holyrood three years earlier. It looked as if voters had resolved the party’s ambivalence for it: what they were after was not national sovereignty, but a better brand of social democracy. That, at least, was the reading of those who saw in the energy and self-organization of the Yes campaign the impetus of a social rather than a national movement.footnote⁸⁸ For others, it was independence which electrified the newly engaged. On either view, the snp was certainly no loser. The result of the referendum, far from deflating its support in society, unleashed a torrent of new members into the party, whose membership leapt from 25,000 before the vote to 80,000 a month later. Today it stands at 125,000, making it proportionately far the largest mass party in Britain, with a ratio of members to population ten times higher than the Conservatives (180,000) and nearly four times higher than Labour (580,000). In the election of 2015 that followed the referendum, the snp hit a full 50 per cent of the vote in Scotland, something no party has achieved in Britain since the war.footnote⁸⁹

In a historical perspective, how do the prospects of the party and its society stand today? The significant comparison is close by, in the other kingdom ruled from London in the composite British monarchy, whose religion determined its contrasting fate. Ireland was a colony, whose Catholic peasantry was for the better part of three centuries ruthlessly dispossessed and exploited, then decimated, while Scotland—its Highlands cleared in similar fashion—became a partner in the global empire of which Ireland was the first victim. Co-beneficiary of the industrial revolution, acting as a military reservation for overseas expansion—‘the Punjab of the North’—by the early 20th century Scotland enjoyed a per capita income well over double that of Ireland, as the Easter Rising set the stage for the Irish War of Independence. Today, the Republic of Ireland has a per capita income some 50 per cent higher than Scotland. More strikingly still, half-way through the 20th century, the Republic—shorn of six counties in the north—had a population of 2.96 million, Scotland 5.09 million. Today, the Republic has 4.86 million, Scotland, 5.44. In other words, where the human proportions of an independent Ireland grew by 65 per cent, a dependent Scotland stagnated at 6.7 per cent. Higher Catholic than Calvinist birth-rates played their part in this, but critical too was greater Irish prosperity attracting immigration,footnote⁹⁰ where emigration was draining energy and ambition from Scotland to England, whose population grew 45 per cent in the same period; even that of Wales at three times the level of Scotland. Could a harsher climate be a factor? Hardly. Further north, Norway grew 62 per cent, Sweden 46 per cent, Finland 36 per cent. Contextually, Scotland is a stark outlier. Economically and demographically, ceteris paribus sovereignty matters.

That such figures offer obvious material evidence of the advantages Scotland has foregone by its inability to break with a Union from which it once benefited does not mean that at this point in time independence is either bound to come, or would automatically gain what has been lost. In the consumer capitalist societies of the post-war world, the fire of nineteenth and early twentieth century nationalism has gone. To date, though there have been substantial movements demanding it, no secession has come to pass. There the relevant comparison is not with Ireland under the rule of Dublin Castle, but Quebec and Catalonia in the post-colonial, neo-liberal epoch, two societies which half-way through the 20th century were both smaller in numbers than Scotland, and now larger, and each double the weight of Scotland in the economy of their respective states—Quebec accounting for a fifth of Canada’s gdp, Catalonia a fifth of Spain’s, Scotland less than a tenth of the uk’s. Each possesses a language distinct from that of the rest of the country, Scotland for the most part only a variant of it. Against these potential advantages, both Quebec and Catalonia have large immigrant populations whose native language is not French or Catalan, and which have resisted assimilation. In each case, in good measure for this reason, movements for independence have fallen short of a majority—in the referendums in Quebec, 40 per cent in 1980 and 49 per cent in 1995; in the recent elections in Catalonia, 47 per cent.footnote⁹¹ In neither case does the central state accept that any secession could be legal. In that respect, Scotland—unlike these, with centuries of prior existence as an independent kingdom—was better placed, London conceding the right to secede. But so far, the same invisible barrier has held at the threshold of a majority, consumer preference trumping national allegiance.

Decisive in the rejection of independence for Scotland in 2014 was the economic argument that its costs to the pocket would be too high, on which London and its parties played relentlessly. For the snp, Europe offered the answer: joining the eu as another member state would give it the same access to a continental market and the same rights within it as Britain enjoyed: why should it lose, rather than gain from the change? Six years later, Britain now out of the eu, after a referendum in which Scotland voted to remain within it by the largest majority of any part of the uk, where has Brexit left the party? In political terms, in a stronger position to argue that the overwhelming will of the Scottish people has been ignored, and—as widespread commentary in London fears—the only way for it to be respected is a second, successful referendum on independence. In economic terms, in a weaker position, since secession from the uk would no longer guarantee access to the rest of it, on which 60 per cent of Scottish exports depend, as it would have done if both countries belonged to the eu, to which only 15 per of Scottish exports now go. In that sense, the logic of Brexit is to close the escape-hatch of Europe, leaving Scotland trapped in the Union bought with English gold in 1707, now far more at the mercy of London than London is to Brussels. Project Fear, which Cameron and Osborne were sure would give them victory once again in the referendum on Europe, did not deter the English from putting considerations of sovereignty before calculations of prosperity. The risks would be much higher for the Scots. Would the same be true of them?

 

 

Edited November 26, 2020 by NotThePars

[Guest Jedi]

NS now talking about a 2nd Ref 'early on' in the next parliament, which could mean 2022, rather than 2021. Realistically, it would take at least a year, post May, to negotiate and organise anyway, assuming Westminster doesn't try to keep holding out.

2021 could be a bumpy year for the SNP economically though, with the strain of rising unemployment, post Covid, and what economic choices can be made to try and revive activity, possibly tax rises of some kind, but certainly cuts to services in some sectors, due to less tax revenue,and also costs of covering benefits etc.

[John Lambies Doos]

NS now talking about a 2nd Ref 'early on' in the next parliament, which could mean 2022, rather than 2021. Realistically, it would take at least a year, post May, to negotiate and organise anyway, assuming Westminster doesn't try to keep holding out.
2021 could be a bumpy year for the SNP economically though, with the strain of rising unemployment, post Covid, and what economic choices can be made to try and revive activity, possibly tax rises of some kind, but certainly cuts to services in some sectors, due to less tax revenue,and also costs of covering benefits etc.

Just needs to be done when cunto on downing st is in charge

[topcat(The most tip top)]

 How does Jockoland fare in the Gin production stakes?   

Tanqueray was originally made in London but is now made near Methil.

Wikipedia says

“According to one report, Tanqueray became the highest selling gin in the world for the first time in 2016, with nearly three million nine-liter cases sold.”

Wikipedia makes no mention of what proportion of those cases are sold in Buckinghamshire so you’re free to speculate

[sophia]

34 minutes ago, Jedi said:

NS now talking about a 2nd Ref 'early on' in the next parliament, which could mean 2022, rather than 2021. Realistically, it would take at least a year, post May, to negotiate and organise anyway, assuming Westminster doesn't try to keep holding out.

2021 could be a bumpy year for the SNP economically though, with the strain of rising unemployment, post Covid, and what economic choices can be made to try and revive activity, possibly tax rises of some kind, but certainly cuts to services in some sectors, due to less tax revenue,and also costs of covering benefits etc.

I feel so relieved that the snp will be unique in feeling any covid induced economic chill.

I actually think that starting from what might be perceived to be a common reset would be a great advantage.

[The_Kincardine]

3 hours ago, sophia said:

I actually think that starting from what might be perceived to be a common reset would be a great advantage.

Based on a GERS figure of a £4,000 per taxpayer deficit I have no doubt that this is a reset you Natter fantasists will revel in.

[The_Kincardine]

4 hours ago, Jedi said:

NS now talking about a 2nd Ref 'early on' in the next parliament, which could mean 2022, rather than 2021. Realistically, it would take at least a year, post May, to negotiate and organise anyway, assuming Westminster doesn't try to keep holding out.

2021 could be a bumpy year for the SNP economically though, with the strain of rising unemployment, post Covid, and what economic choices can be made to try and revive activity, possibly tax rises of some kind, but certainly cuts to services in some sectors, due to less tax revenue,and also costs of covering benefits etc.

Decent post but you're assuming that you're talking to sane posters.

Nippy's "IndyRef in 2021" was aimed at the Natter simpletons to keep them onside and to ensure that NatGov's record remains unscrutinised.

The worst type of LCD politics but terrific if your constituency is a shower of xenophobic fandans.

[The_Kincardine]

Here's Nippy coming across as EveryNatter:  Awkward and thick as pigshit. This is Scotland's FM but I guess  they get what they deserve.  For we Brits it is a right red neck:

 

[Aufc]

Here's Nippy coming across as EveryNatter:  Awkward and thick as pigshit. This is Scotland's FM but I guess  they get what they deserve.  For we Brits it is a right red neck:
 

What the f**k are you havering

[Stellaboz]

What the f**k are you havering

Just ignore the daft idiot.

[The_Kincardine]

7 minutes ago, Aufc said:

 

What the f**k are you havering

 

Nippy is an embarrassment but that she gets so much approval in the DPRS is not one bit surprising.  You are rapidly becoming a  joke. 

[Aufc]

Nippy is an embarrassment but that she gets so much approval in the DPRS is not one bit surprising.  You are rapidly becoming a  joke. 

Nope. Still lost me

[D Angelo Barksdale]

On 08/10/2020 at 00:17, The_Kincardine said:

£10 to the charity of your choice if St Nikla is FM on Jan 1st 2021.  Deal?

Is this the reason you're being increasingly silly on this thread ?