Sorry about this, it's a long 'un. Has to be done though.
Commiserations about the SNP's heavy losses. I'd be interested to hear why you think that happened. I haven't been following Scottish politics at all closely since the referendum.
I sometimes think the SNP haven't been following it very closely either.
While that article from the Express has more than a grain of truth to it (a rarity for the Express, that), it still provides no excuse for the weak and wasted campaign they ran. I realize it was a surprise GE and everyone's war chests and energies are depleted right now - Theresa was relying on that fact - but the Nats were using cheapo low-effort re-cuts of old PPBs and leaflets that looked like they'd been designed and printed on an Amiga. The optics weren't good, as arseholes say nowadays.
Perhaps they were trying to save their funds for Indyref 2? lol
On that subject... Although I feel like the SNP did all they could to accomodate the UK Gov on Brexit and find some compromise with them (they spent months submitting perfectly reasonable suggestions to Downing Street while being dismissed and derided in equal measure for their pains, all after being promised a seat at the negotiating table by David Davies), the country sees it differently.
The country isn't necessarily wrong. It
IS too soon for indyref2. Many more years of stagnation and suffering are required first.
On Brexit, the SNP took the Laodicean route, and the electorate answered them in the voice of Christ:
“I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot; I wish that thou were cold or hot. So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will expel thee, I will spew thee out of my mouth.”
In the space of a year the SNP went from championing full continuing EU membership to wanting a Norway-style EEA deal, to wanting some kind of undefined single market membership with unknown extra elements (probably Freedom of Movement, customs union membership, regulatory compliance on the
standards of goods, etc.)
No matter which one of these options you might favour, it still looks weak and indecisive for a party to cycle down through a long list of all of them.
They also seem to have forgotten that although the Remain vote won convincingly in Scotland, there were still just over a million people here who voted to Leave the EU. It was silly to ignore them and pretend like they don't exist - just as silly as it was for the unionist parties to ignore the existence of independence supporters in 2015, which led to them being routed almost to a man. We should've learned from our own success in that battle, but didn't.
We were never going to replicate the electoral rampage of 2015, unfortunately. It was a bit of a fluke, a unique confluence of events and mindsets, unlikely to ever be repeated. But there's no need for weeping and rending of garments just yet. In 2010 we held only 6 Westminster seats and still got a referendum, in 2015 we won
56 of them, and now it's down to 35. We've had worse nights.
It was stupid to assume all those ex-Labour, ex-Lib, and even ex-Tory voters would
stay SNP-Loyal-4-Lyfe after 2015. They gave us their votes, not their bonded oaths. Of the near 500,000 votes the SNP lost the other night, 60% went to Labour, 30% to the Tories, and the rest to the Libs.
lol, check that "We."
It's 100% true that the unionist parties have been colluding with each other electorally, running paper candidates in certain target seats to give their nominal rivals a better chance of unseating the SNP incumbents:
Unionist parties 'working against SNP in key seatsUnionist parties are working together by fielding "paper candidates" in some key SNP constituencies they are looking to win at the general election, STV News has learned.
The move is aimed at ensuring the anti-SNP vote is not split in marginal seats, which could see the Nationalist candidate win in those areas.
Scottish Labour, the Scottish Conservatives and the Scottish Liberal Democrats are fielding contenders in all 59 seats but some will be "paper candidates" - they will appear on the ballot paper but will not be actively campaigning...
A senior Conservative source said it was "not a formal arrangement" between the parties but the "reality of the situation" on the ground was they were, in effect, helping each other in certain seats.
The Conservatives are aiming to topple SNP Westminster leader Angus Robertson in Moray, where there is a lack of active campaigning by the Lib Dems and Labour.
https://stv.tv/news/politics/1390070-un ... key-seats/
This included Scottish Labour candidates giving a leg-up to Tories. You see
why I couldn't vote for them?
... but we've known about that kind of collaborative effort since 2011 when Auld Jim Murphy was running the unionist cross-party anti-democratic front. It was revealed in the Wikileaks diplomatic cables:
4. (SBU/NF) Throughout 2009, UK Secretary of State for Scotland Jim Murphy played a leadership role in organizing the opposition parties, hoping to move Scotland toward implementation of the Calman recommendations as an alternative to an independence referendum
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/10LONDON126_a.html
The SNP should know about this stuff and be prepared for it, but they don't seem to have the gumption.
Now to the real problem... the North East (of Scotland). These people, through the oil and gas industry, have contributed £222 billion more in taxation to the UK Treasury over the last 40 years than if they'd simply matched the per capita tax contributions of people in the rest of the UK. In return, they have received
fuck all from the UK Government.
So, having been ripped off (mostly by the Tories) for a generation, on a truly staggering scale, and then abandoned at the first sign of trouble as soon as they stopped bringing in a profit (more than 70,000 jobs lost in the region since the oil price crashed), they decided to vote... for the Tories.
The fishermen were even dumber. Betrayed by the Tories under Heath in 1970 in order to smooth the UK's entry to the EEC, then betrayed again by Thatcher in
1983 when it came time for her to renegotiate the Common Fisheries Policy, they decided to take a belated revenge by voting... for the Tories.
The Conservatives will sell them down the river so quick in the Brexit negotiations that their heads will spin. The dozy gits didn't realize that the looming threat of an independence referendum was the only thing stopping the Tories from handing all Scotland's goods to the EU in return for a better deal for England,
Long ago on the independence thread I said of the fishermen:
it stopped them from voting Tory, though, which a lot of them used to do (seeing their boats as private enterprises, and themselves as rugged individualist entrepreneurs). They won't be making that mistake again.
I was wrong. Sigh.
John Harris has a good wee video on what happened up in the North East if you're interested, made before the vote and showing the direction of travel towards self-destructive industrial suicide, but I've mumbled on enough here already. Cheerio.
"The universe is 40 billion light years across and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. That is the position of the universe with regard to human life."
)