As The National newspaper has reported this morning (but which you will hardly find mentioned in the English press):
All three devolved parliaments in the UK have rejected the UK Government's EU Withdrawal Bill.
The Welsh Assembly last night joined Holyrood and Stormont in knocking back the proposal.
They added:
Nicola Sturgeon warned that if Boris Johnson's Government ignored the decisions from the three parliaments, he would simply be highlighting “how broken the Westminster system is”.
I think Sturgeon understates the case. what we have is a disunited kingdom. The four countries of the UK are utterly divided on their futures. This si the reality.
Of course I accept that the politicians in Stormont, Cardiff and Holyrood may be out of touch with their electorates. I also doubt that. A majority - in England - are treating that majority as the basis fo their entitlement to ride roughshod over the opinion of others. This is not the basis for any form of unity, as I have already argued this morning.
That the Union looks in peril seems to be beyond doubt now.
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You’d think a man with a history of failed personal relationships would recognise the symptoms of relationship breakdown.
Some people are not good at understanding analogy.
Not him Andy,
Boris and co. are lost in an Empire nostalgia la la land. Opinions outside of England don’t count.
Andy, that would be assuming that he’s actually reflected and learnt something from those failed relationships. I suspect rather, he just assumes it’s someone else’s fault and ploughs on regardless.
“A majority – in England”
Of MPs maybe, not people. UK vote share – Conservative 43.6%, The Brexit Party 2.0%
Turnout 67.3%
https://www.bbc.com/news/election/2019/results
So ‘rUK’ will be just England?
Probably
Sometime
But not just yet
The Establishment will have their small Hell to reign in, which is largely the point of all this.
I’m sure Johnson regards the assemblies as paper tigers. What he won’t be able to ignore is realities like Britain’s two major export recipients the EU 45% and the USA 13.5% dictating the standards and regulations the UK will have to abide by. Likewise given NHS staffing is made up of nearly 25% economic migrants his immigration policy will be “soft” close to what it currently is.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jan/18/savid-javid-warns-there-will-be-no-alignment-on-eu-regulations-after-brexit
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-deal-uk-eu-boris-johnson-trade-sajid-javid-single-market-access-a9297111.html
My view is that it’s a simple case of cause and effect: the Disunited Kingdom has come about as a direct result of the Westminster System (WS) being broken. The WS has signally failed because it hasn’t kept pace with events — like the rapid advance of technology combined with the adherence to age-old traditions (manual voting typically takes 20-30 minutes, while electronic voting, as used at Holyrood would do it in as many seconds), the undermining of democracy resulting from the ludicrous distortions produced by FPTP (maintaining the hegemony of Conservative & Labour Parties and effectively disenfranchising huge numbers of voters for the other parties), the resultant elective dictatorship that enables majority governments to rue by diktat, the lack of a written Constitution to define the limits of politicians’ powers, the resultant dependence on precedent (which itself may be hundreds of years old) rather than law, the failure to devolve sufficient power to nations and regions to stimulate innovation and investment etc.
It wasn’t always thus. Just before WW1, Home Rule Bills for Scotland and Ireland were being processed through the Commons and would likely have become law had war not broken out. The Irish took their painful path and succeeded, but Scotland has been stuck in a political limbo ever since. It shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone at Westminster that the natives in Scotland, Wales and N Ireland are restless, but they’ve developed a colonial mentality by keeping the natives in political limbo for a century and appear to believe this gives them the right to prevent substantive steps towards self-determination.
Whether Scotland proceeds to independence or remains in the UK requires a plebiscite to determine the people’s will, but the Scotland Act reserves the power to grant a binding plebiscite to the Crown and Johnson has denied the necessary transfer of powers. Scotland could organise an advisory referendum, but that might be subject to Unionist boycotting and, in any event, can easily be ignored by the UK Gov. Thus political limbo continues. At least the Good Friday Agreement has given the people of N Ireland a clear exit path to reunification if the numbers support it, but Scotland and Wales have been denied a similar possibility.
The colonial mindset is also still at work in the Divide and Rule tactics which served the empire so well. In England it’s the triumphalism of the Leavers over the Remainers, in N Ireland it’s the Catholic Nationalist/Protestant Unionist divide. To an extent Scotland has the same sectarian divide, but also has a constitutional divide since the 2014 Indyref. Wales is on a similar journey but has started it later, however it’s a certainty that Johnson’s Gov will exploit these divides to maintain the status quo.
Clearly the constitutional stalemate can’t continue much longer; something will have to give and I suspect that the demise of the Union is inevitable — it’s now a matter of time. In Scotland’s case, it has a strong and diverse enough economy to succeed on its own and it’s simply not imaginable that we could make a bigger mess of our governance than Westminster has done over the years and we also get the bonus of the removal of WMD from our land.
Indeed, but, as we’ve observed before, Scotland is administrated by civil servants loyal to Westminster, presumably bussed up there specifically to obstruct just this. An attempt to leave the Union appears to have been anticipated and already obstructed.