When will indyref2 happen?

[Baxter Parp]

1 hour ago, DA Baracus said:

You're an exceptionally stupid person with a very ugly soul.

Be fair just a "spongeheid" saying what's on his mind.

[git-intae-thum]

9 hours ago, Ad Lib said:

Whether you like it or not, there are at least some Unionists who think any mixture of the following:

(a) that 2016 wasn’t a mandate because the SNP didn’t win a majority

(b) that 2016 wasn’t a mandate because it was too soon after 2014

(c) that 2016 wasn’t a mandate because the conditions set by the SNP and Greens were hypothetical/not the same/not clear enough

(d) that the fall in the SNP’s seats share and votes in 2017 in some sense politically “overrode” any suggestion 2016 was a mandate because they were losing momentum

(e) that 2019 was really a Brexit election so you can’t treat it as a fresh mandate for an indyref

(f) that any mandate sought less than (say) 5 years after the first referendum sullies the idea that the first referendum was being respected

(g) that even if politically the SNP had a mandate for indyref2 for pragmatic reasons it was wrong to pursue it while Brexit was in limbo and the new settlement unclear

(h) that you shouldn’t make a referendum the public political priority during a pandemic.

Unionists are not a monolith. Not all of them (just the loudest ones) are “NO SURRENDER”. A Holyrood single party majority on an unambiguous pledge to hold a second referendum, secured almost 7 years after indyref1, will change the balance of sentiment.

Even if the UK Government’s response is to be NO SURRENDER it will be a more extremist position within its own umbrella and will probably be the wedge that splits them from moderate Unionists.

The underlying public support for a wildcat referendum just objectively will be higher if you keep the powder dry for now than if you reveal your hand. And, paradoxically, that’s more likely to get you a negotiated referendum.

Some of them might. Your task is to persuade the roughly half of Unionists who don’t vote Scottish Tory that that’s just not a democratic position. Give Starmer’s Labour the breathing space to switch on this and see how viable and legitimate the Tory Government looks after that.

The European Courts would never have had any interest in the legal question of whether the Scottish Parliament has the legislative competence to enable an independence referendum. It doesn’t engage and never has engaged any questions of EU law.

We are not “occupied” or “subjugated”. We are constrained by a set of constitutional arrangements to which, in their infinite wisdom, the Scottish people reaffirmed their explicit consent in 2014: warts, risks, flexibilities and all.

It is better to exhaust the avenues of less bad options first in such a climate. That’s what impatient Salmond-ite yer da’s haven’t yet grasped.

Libby's back right enough.

50 sentences when one might suffice:

"Sturgeon will attempt to push for a referendum that is legitimised by the  recognition of the UK government."

The only interesting part of all the overly wordy opinionated guff is:

9 hours ago, Ad Lib said:

A Holyrood single single party majority on an unambiguous pledge to hold a second referendum, secured almost 7 years after indyref1, will change the balance of sentiment.

Even if the UK Government’s response is to be NO SURRENDER it will be a more extremist position within its own umbrella and will probably be the wedge that splits them from moderate Unionists.

We will see where we stand a year from now with that prediction.

Hope you are right by the way.

Edited January 18, 2021 by git-intae-thum

[Carnoustie Young Guvnor]

4 hours ago, git-intae-thum said:

Libby's back right enough.

50 sentences when one might suffice:

"Sturgeon will attempt to push for a referendum that is legitimised by the  recognition of the UK government."

The only interesting part of all the overly wordy opinionated guff is:

We will see where we stand a year from now with that prediction.

Hope you are right by the way.

Its delusional pish and means nothing.  How could a s30 refusal 'split the UK govt from moderate unionists'?  That doesn't mean anything.  What moderate unionists is the UK govt currently united with that it wouldn't be after a third s30 refusal, and how would that cause them to have to fold on the issue?

Academic guy but as dumb as the rest. Its sad we have to rely on delusional nonsense like this, its a view parroted by the likes of Pete Wishart when all experience and any objective analysis of the position of the UK govt tells us its nonsense.

[Double Jack D]

16 hours ago, Ad Lib said:

Whether you like it or not, there are at least some Unionists who think any mixture of the following:

(a) that 2016 wasn’t a mandate because the SNP didn’t win a majority

(b) that 2016 wasn’t a mandate because it was too soon after 2014

(c) that 2016 wasn’t a mandate because the conditions set by the SNP and Greens were hypothetical/not the same/not clear enough

(d) that the fall in the SNP’s seats share and votes in 2017 in some sense politically “overrode” any suggestion 2016 was a mandate because they were losing momentum

(e) that 2019 was really a Brexit election so you can’t treat it as a fresh mandate for an indyref

(f) that any mandate sought less than (say) 5 years after the first referendum sullies the idea that the first referendum was being respected

(g) that even if politically the SNP had a mandate for indyref2 for pragmatic reasons it was wrong to pursue it while Brexit was in limbo and the new settlement unclear

(h) that you shouldn’t make a referendum the public political priority during a pandemic.

Unionists are not a monolith. Not all of them (just the loudest ones) are “NO SURRENDER”. A Holyrood single party majority on an unambiguous pledge to hold a second referendum, secured almost 7 years after indyref1, will change the balance of sentiment.

Even if the UK Government’s response is to be NO SURRENDER it will be a more extremist position within its own umbrella and will probably be the wedge that splits them from moderate Unionists.

The underlying public support for a wildcat referendum just objectively will be higher if you keep the powder dry for now than if you reveal your hand. And, paradoxically, that’s more likely to get you a negotiated referendum.

Some of them might. Your task is to persuade the roughly half of Unionists who don’t vote Scottish Tory that that’s just not a democratic position. Give Starmer’s Labour the breathing space to switch on this and see how viable and legitimate the Tory Government looks after that.

The European Courts would never have had any interest in the legal question of whether the Scottish Parliament has the legislative competence to enable an independence referendum. It doesn’t engage and never has engaged any questions of EU law.

We are not “occupied” or “subjugated”. We are constrained by a set of constitutional arrangements to which, in their infinite wisdom, the Scottish people reaffirmed their explicit consent in 2014: warts, risks, flexibilities and all.

It is better to exhaust the avenues of less bad options first in such a climate. That’s what impatient Salmond-ite yer da’s haven’t yet grasped.

I think this is my favourite line ever on this subject. Whether you read it in a literal sense as a unionist or in an ironic sense as a nationalist it's equally true.

The Scottish people decided in 2014 that the legal sovereignty over it's constitutional future ultimately lies at Westminster. There is no second referendum happening until there is a significant shift in the membership of the House of Commons, regardless of polling up here.

Our best hope of independence just now would be the English voting for theirs.

[Baxter Parp]

3 hours ago, Carnoustie Young Guvnor said:

Its delusional pish and means nothing.  How could a s30 refusal 'split the UK govt from moderate unionists'?  That doesn't mean anything.  What moderate unionists is the UK govt currently united with that it wouldn't be after a third s30 refusal, and how would that cause them to have to fold on the issue?

Academic guy but as dumb as the rest. Its sad we have to rely on delusional nonsense like this, its a view parroted by the likes of Pete Wishart when all experience and any objective analysis of the position of the UK govt tells us its nonsense.

Ad Lib is the single most believable but also the most  fucking wrong poster in The Politics Forum. There are times, I'm sure, that he has important and pertinent information to impart but unfortunately he mixes it with the most egregious fucking nonsense that not a word can be trusted.

[Carnoustie Young Guvnor]

36 minutes ago, Baxter Parp said:

Ad Lib is the single most believable but also the most  fucking wrong poster in The Politics Forum. There are times, I'm sure, that he has important and pertinent information to impart but unfortunately he mixes it with the most egregious fucking nonsense that not a word can be trusted.

Aye I mean that was a pile of contrarian word salad that defies all experience of events over the last few years and assigns good natured intentions to people who clearly and demonstrably do not have them.

[Ned Nederlander]

Can anyone give me an idiot's guide to what Rev Stu/Wings is these days?

I followed the old Wings account before it was punted but didn't bother following any new incarnations (if any)

He'd already started ranting about trans folk - what's his gripe with them?

And I believe he's still pro-Indy but anti-SNP - what's his gripe with them?

[GordonS]

11 hours ago, git-intae-thum said:

Yep....being a condescending twat and labelling views held by a large proportion of the SNP membership as stupid and "yes das" etc is really going to help heal any developing rift.

I'm not one of the people who cares about that and I'm not trying to win friends or persuade anyone. The SNP isn't going to fall apart because of something I post on a football message board and I've given up hoping that people will form opinions based on objective reality.

[topcat(The most tip top)]

2 minutes ago, GordonS said:

I'm not one of the people who cares about that and I'm not trying to win friends or persuade anyone. The SNP isn't going to fall apart because of something I post on a football message board and I've given up hoping that people will form opinions based on objective reality.

Have you seen the state of objective reality lately

 

Its shit

[Benjamin_Nevis]

Trans people are bad because sex offenders can change their gender and go into the girls toilets and do sex crimes. The only way to prevent this is to do all the things that make trans people kill themselves a vastly higher rate than the general population, but more. He got into this during a quiet period on the independence front and it's melted the brains of his sympathisers.
He's anti-SNP because of a perceived anti-Salmond agenda, favouring as he does the bombast and chauvinism of that kind of independence campaigning. Also because the normal people in the SNP, horrified at the anti-trans stuff, have been more vocal in disowning him. Also he was made a complete fool of over the Dugdale defamation thing and thinks because she's in a relationship with Jenny Gilruth, the SNP tacitly supported Dugdale over him.
 

TL;DR version - he's a fucking lunatic.

[GordonS]

 

5 minutes ago, topcat(The most tip top) said:

Have you seen the state of objective reality lately

 

Its shit

Why I can't sleep at night.

[oneteaminglasgow]

3 minutes ago, MixuFruit said:

Trans people are bad because sex offenders can change their gender and go into the girls toilets and do sex crimes. The only way to prevent this is to do all the things that make trans people kill themselves a vastly higher rate than the general population, but more. He got into this during a quiet period on the independence front and it's melted the brains of his sympathisers.

He's anti-SNP because of a perceived anti-Salmond agenda, favouring as he does the bombast and chauvinism of that kind of independence campaigning. Also because the normal people in the SNP, horrified at the anti-trans stuff, have been more vocal in disowning him. Also he was made a complete fool of over the Dugdale defamation thing and thinks because she's in a relationship with Jenny Gilruth, the SNP tacitly supported Dugdale over him.

 

You forgot his “legitimate concerns about the erosion of women’s sex based rights” which are definitely real and in no way a cover for outright bigotry.

[Ned Nederlander]

Thanks for the replies folks - I was slow to Indy and thought I was possibly being slow to something else. (I certainly couldn't work out his stance)

 

[NotThePars]

You forgot his “legitimate concerns about the erosion of women’s sex based rights” which are definitely real and in no way a cover for outright bigotry.

This comes off the back of articles from years ago moaning about feminists and losing his shit at things like gender balancing the cabinet and all-women shortlists.

[Carnoustie Young Guvnor]

14 hours ago, GordonS said:

If you want there to be an independent Scotland with a Scottish Government recognised by other countries and by our own courts, then that's exactly the situation. It's tough but it's the real world. Catalonia voted for independence; are they independent?

This also raises two crucial issues though.

First of all Catalonia is in an entirely different situation. The Spanish constitution states that the kingdom of Spain is indivisible. No such clause exists in the UK.

Also, Catalonia voted to hold an independence referendum 18 separate times. So those saying all we have to do in Scotland is vote for it and its bound to happen are naive.

Scottish independence will not be achieved without some sort of confrontation with the British state. They will not grant it under any circumstances. They have said so. So we will have to take them on head on at some point, politically or in the courts. 

Relying on their respect for our democratic wishes is for the fairies, they couldn't give the slightest f**k what we want.

[Ned Nederlander]

10 minutes ago, MixuFruit said:

He's just a daftie best ignored tbh.

Fair dos but he did genuinely and regularly rattle Unionists with valid, fully referenced, points - shame he's lumbered into a position where he's quoted and retweeted by them.

Daftie indeed.

[Ad Lib]

16 hours ago, Carnoustie Young Guvnor said:

You don't know their minds and don't speak for any of them. We can judge them by their actions, which are wholly undemocratic and saw them refuse to accept not one but two votes in our parliament did not constitute a mandate. So we can dismiss points a to h. Plus you are failing to see how undemocratic all of this is, in a democracy the losers don't get to decide what happens. We have elections to decide who is in charge, and they lost roundly, so their views a to h are entirely irrelevant. 

I never claimed to speak for them, but I can at least say that I speak to a lot of Unionists (I encounter a lot of them in my day job and I know many others socially). They aren't all NAW SURRENDER either in action or deed and if you want to persuade them, you have to take points a to h seriously.

Your conception of democracy is a depressingly narrow one. There is always a role for building losers' consent and buy-in in democracy. If and when Scotland becomes independent the Unionists will still matter and should be listened to. We will be building a society not an elective dictatorship. It was precisely the failure to build losers' consent in successive general elections (among parts of the English working class) and then after the EU referendum that created such bitter and divided politics in the UK in the last few years.

16 hours ago, Carnoustie Young Guvnor said:

As far as Scotland goes unionists are a monolith, that's why Labour field paper candidates in some seats now and the actual leader of the 'Scottish' Labour party told people to vote Tory live on TV. They have Ulsterised our politics now and everything is viewed through the prism of the constitution.

All you've really done here is seek to make excuses for people who want to deny democracy cause they know they can't win.

Our task is simply to win elections in order to attain the mandate to implement the government's manifesto, its an absurd position to be arguing presumably with a straight face our task is to persuade the losers in an election to accept defeat. That's incredibly Trumpist.

Encouraging the losers in an election to accept defeat is literally the opposite of Trumpist.

The focus of the SNP should be on winning an unequivocal single party mandate at a Holyrood Election for a second independence referendum that as few people as possibly can plausibly dispute. Talk of wildcat referendums right now is a distraction from that.

16 hours ago, Carnoustie Young Guvnor said:

"A Holyrood single party majority on an unambiguous pledge to hold a second referendum, secured almost 7 years after indyref1, will change the balance of sentiment."

This is naive and simply incorrect, and I will remind you of it later in the year when it is proven to be so, again.

If the SNP wins an overall majority in the next Holyrood Elections I predict that Kier Starmer's position will not be to oppose a second independence referendum in the lifetime of that Scottish Parliament. He might disagree with them over the timing (in the pandemic context) and there might be some disagreement about how the rules of the referendum are set, but they will no longer have a blanket opposition to a referendum. Bookmark it.

[Ad Lib]

4 hours ago, Double Jack D said:

I think this is my favourite line ever on this subject. Whether you read it in a literal sense as a unionist or in an ironic sense as a nationalist it's equally true.

The Scottish people decided in 2014 that the legal sovereignty over it's constitutional future ultimately lies at Westminster. There is no second referendum happening until there is a significant shift in the membership of the House of Commons, regardless of polling up here.

Our best hope of independence just now would be the English voting for theirs.

For the avoidance of doubt, the phrase "infinite wisdom" was sarcastic!

[Jacksgranda]

3 hours ago, Ned Nederlander said:

Can anyone give me an idiot's guide to what Rev Stu/Wings is these days?

I followed the old Wings account before it was punted but didn't bother following any new incarnations (if any)

He'd already started ranting about trans folk - what's his gripe with them?

And I believe he's still pro-Indy but anti-SNP - what's his gripe with them?

He thinks they don't have c*****

He thinks they are c*****

[Carnoustie Young Guvnor]

40 minutes ago, Ad Lib said:

I never claimed to speak for them, but I can at least say that I speak to a lot of Unionists (I encounter a lot of them in my day job and I know many others socially). They aren't all NAW SURRENDER either in action or deed and if you want to persuade them, you have to take points a to h seriously.

Your conception of democracy is a depressingly narrow one. There is always a role for building losers' consent and buy-in in democracy. If and when Scotland becomes independent the Unionists will still matter and should be listened to. We will be building a society not an elective dictatorship. It was precisely the failure to build losers' consent in successive general elections (among parts of the English working class) and then after the EU referendum that created such bitter and divided politics in the UK in the last few years.

Encouraging the losers in an election to accept defeat is literally the opposite of Trumpist.

The focus of the SNP should be on winning an unequivocal single party mandate at a Holyrood Election for a second independence referendum that as few people as possibly can plausibly dispute. Talk of wildcat referendums right now is a distraction from that.

If the SNP wins an overall majority in the next Holyrood Elections I predict that Kier Starmer's position will not be to oppose a second independence referendum in the lifetime of that Scottish Parliament. He might disagree with them over the timing (in the pandemic context) and there might be some disagreement about how the rules of the referendum are set, but they will no longer have a blanket opposition to a referendum. Bookmark it.

No, you don't get to speak for or defend them. I'm afraid we all live in the same world and we all have eyes. We judge them by their actions and deeds, and by those actions and deeds every single one of them with two notable exceptions are exactly that. You can't just claim they aren't no surrender Britnats in deed when every single one of them has been exactly that all along.  You need to provide evidence if you want your claims to be taken seriously, but we all know there is none that's why you didn't.

No, my conception of democracy is that whoever wins elections gets to govern. That's actually the human race's concept of democracy as it happens.  Its you who is being Trumpist by putting an extra burden on those that win elections that they need to then convince the losers in an election to accept that they've lost. The issue is with them not accepting that, not with Scotgov not managing to convince them.

All democracies are elective dictatorships by definition. That's what a democracy is, the tyranny of the majority, and if losers don't like it let them win an election.

Your word salad about bitterness and loser's consent I will ignore as its patronising nonsense.

Your Starmer prediction is both cute and naive at the same time, given Starmer himself has literally said this will not be the case. Again, I judge him by his words and actions not yours.

Of course, Starmer isn't in a position to grant anything anyway given he is the leader of the opposition not the Prime Minister. 

I notice you completely avoided addressing what the position of the actual government will be, as we all know what that is and it doesn't fit your narrative. What Starmer's position will be doesn't matter in the slightest (though we know what it will be given his words and actions) when the Tories have an 80 seat majority.

PS - love how you begin by stating you aren't trying to speak for them then doing exactly that.  

Edited January 18, 2021 by Carnoustie Young Guvnor