Earlier today, the SKWAWKBOX reported on the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) 24-hour-plus failure to deny reports that Theresa May offered SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon a deal when the two met on Monday: abstentions by SNP MPs in the vote on the UK’s final Brexit deal with the EU, in return for ‘IndyRef2’ – a second referendum on Scottish independence.
The SNP has finally issued a denial – of sorts – and bizarrely pointed the finger of blame at former Labour MP George Galloway:
This is utterly rubbish which is no surprise from George Galloway. The SNP has a mandate to call another referendum and it is democratically unsustainable for the Tories to stand in the way.
However, the statement is worded ambiguously enough to not quite directly deny that the Tories had put another referendum on the table.
George Galloway responded dismissively to the almost-denial, telling the SKWAWKBOX:
The entire SNP group of 11 MPs marched into the lobby behind Margaret Thatcher in 1979 to usher in a dark decade for Scotland, Britain and beyond. Nobody would be in the least surprised if they did the same again by backing Theresa May.
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On George Galloway’s point – if the SNP did save the Tories from facing the no confidence vote I’m guessing would follow BrexFail – wouldn’t Scotland turn sharp Left the same day?
More likely the fiscal reality for iScotland would be a hand brake turn to the right….read the SGC report, the SNP barely deny this now.
I was referring to the voters turning left, not the SNP – and to a 2018/19 no confidence vote, not 1979.
Definitely could have phrased it better though 🙁
The Callaghan Government brought about the vote of no confidence in ’79, not the SNP. Galloway isn’t a reliable source.
1. It was the Cons who instigated the no confidence vote not the Callaghan government
2. https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/16374941.snp-mp-criticised-for-defending-partys-role-in-bringing-thatcher-to-power/?ref=twtrec
Labour lost by *one* vote. I’m sure you don’t need me to ‘do the math’ for you?
And don’t forget that it was Murdoch putting his weight behind Scratcher which helped win that General Election for the Cons
No. You have to uderstand the psyche of the SNP and their supporters on the constituencies.
I don’t claim to understand people’s psyches so maybe you’re right.
Although given that the same Scotland that now votes SNP was once a Labour fortress I wouldn’t discount the possibility quite so easily.
If it’s ‘vote SNP, get Tory no-deal Brexit’ with no guarantee of an independence referendum and no guarantee of EU membership independent of England… who knows?
The UK’s contribution to the EU will be gone so the burden on France & Germany will already be greater.
They’ll want to weigh carefully whether Scotland on its own will be a net contributor or recipient – and will they trust Scotland not to leave if England prospers and Scotland doesn’t?
Scotland’s block grant from UK parliament will be gone too, their social security bill is rising, they’ll need to build a defence structure and oil’s not what it was.
A Scotland/EU border with England would presumably be necessary too.
“They’ll need to build a defence structure”
Why? Even Boris would not be insane enough to attack Scotland. We hope.
The ‘big fish twins’ (Sturgeon & Salmon) have always seen themselves as persons of history; bigger fish in their smaller pond via independence for the ‘white heather club. The big question for us is why the Labour Party disappeared, almost over night & ‘Socialism’ no longer part of the political agenda.
Don’t go down the ‘fails to deny’ cul-de-sac please Skwawk. Not ever. It is the death of journalism. If you can prove it, print it, if you can’t, don’t.
That enables every party or politician to avoid awkward revelations by simply ignoring requests for comment. 24hrs and no response to a straightforward question becomes news, people are free to make up their mind about what it means or doesn’t
Sturgeon is Thatcher reincarnated and the SNP once famously got into bed with the Conservatives which is why people took Galloway’s comment at face value
At the last General Election the English edition of the Sun had 10 reasons on its front page we shouldn’t vote Corbyn. The Scottish edition of the Sun had Sturgeon and cohorts in StarTrek gear with “To Boldly Go” as the headline. The Monday edition of the Scottish Sun had a photo of Sturgeon beaming holding the election day Scottish Sun clasped to her front. As the Americans say, Go figure.
SNP have some good MP’s notably Mhairi Black who would have made a great leader for Scottish Labou and a natural Corbyn ally.Instead we got Kezia Dugdale, presently living with a prominent SNP msp and tefloncoated for criticism. Dugdale was a list msp, ie she did not win an election. The only election she has won in recent memory was that voting her out of the Celebrity Jungle in I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here – into which she had without irony stated she would bring “Labour values”. Now you might begin to understand just some of the scale of the problem Richard Leonard has had on his hands. The SNP have been making a lot of hay while the Blairite Henry Jackson sun shone on Scottish Labour. Corbyn has dimmed that though Dugdale et al are still doing their damndest to make sure it isn’t exstinguished.
Exactly. The ruling class understand the divisive power of nationalism which is why Murdoch cynically exploited Scottish nationalism to prevent Labour winning a general election.
I find Scottish, and other nationalism depressing because it sets the class struggle back decades.
A poor unemployed Scot will have more in common with a poor unemployed English and Welsh person than they do with a multimillionaire Scot who owns castles and businesses which pay exploitation wages.
Poor unemployed Scot have more in common with poor unemployed English and Welsh people than they do with multimillionaire Scots….true. But they also have more in common with poor people in Nairobi, Islamabad or Georgetown. Does that mean that they too should be content to run by a Tory government in London that they don’t want and didn’t vote for?
The SNP didn’t give us Thatcher. Scottish voters haven’t voted Tory since 1955. The voters of England voted for her in 1979 and we got her for the next decade and more because Labour is a unionist party and Scotland gets what the union tells us we get. If George Galloway is looking to blame anyone for Thatcher, or Major, Cameron and May for that matter, he should look much closer to home.
“The entire SNP group of 11 MPs marched into the lobby behind Margaret Thatcher in 1979 to usher in a dark decade for Scotland, Britain and beyond. Nobody would be in the least surprised if they did the same again by backing Theresa May.”
This is somewhat unfair because 6 Labour MPs did not vote. In addition, the Labour government’s policy of torture in Northern Ireland was enough to persuade Gerry Fitt to abstain.
The government was defeated by just one vote, 311-310, out of a House of Commons of 635 MPs. 13 MPs did not vote and there was one vacancy (Liverpool, Edge Hill where a by election was pending).
The SNP was certainly a factor in Labour’s defeat but the government could still have survived the confidence vote if it had tried harder.
I hope this helps.
“Poor unemployed Scot have more in common with poor unemployed English and Welsh people than they do with multimillionaire Scots”.
Is that why the poor unemployed Scot shouldn’t vote for independence to improve his/her lot?
I would truly LOVE for Scotland to become independent from both England and Brussels.
After independence, what would happen, is that the Scottish working class would soon realise that nothing had really changed. The bosses would still be exploiting them like they always have done.
There would still be the rich and the poor and the middle classes in between, all worried about rising or falling.
The working class would NOT be invited to live in the numerous laird’s castles and to share their lives with them. There would be no automatic equality. It would not become an instant utopia. Someone would still have to clean the toilets and it wouldn’t be the Lairds or the billionaire foreign business owners.
All the class problems that existed before independence would still exist after independence – except the working class in Scotland would not have the working class in England, Ireland and Wales to look to for support.
They’d be on their own.
My Scottish neighbour, living in England couldn’t care less about Scottish independence but I truly wish Scotland would go independent. Let the English vote to annex Scotland so it can be on its own.
Secede. Not ‘annex’.
Mr Skwawkbox, since there’s no edit function please could you delete this comment.
I meant to use the word ‘exile’ at the end of my comment, not ‘annex’.
I don’t want my stupidity frozen in Internet amber for eternity. Thanks.
Ella, why do you believe that Scots are incapable of running their country in a better, more progressive and more enlightened way than the Westminster Tories are doing now? Do you perhaps believed that we are “not genetically programmed” to control our own affairs as a former Labour leader once told us?
Your sneering, anti-socialist comments are a disgrace and reflect an irrational disdain of those who wish to live, work and bring up their children in Scotland.
Annex, secede or exile? You really do not have a clue, do you?
Because they are prepared to give control to the EU – Idiots .
You Stew have nay clue – Tory Sturgeon = rich man’s .
Salmond was sold a pup by Trump !!!
Ella’s OK
I’d hope Scotland would set the bar a lot higher than just “better than the Westminster Tories” – a class of ten-year-olds could run a country better than that ffs.
My parents were both weegies so can I claim citizenship? 🙂
I think if your parents were from Glasgow you might have to report to the Scottish State Immigration Board for a corpuscle and beliefs count. All very “civic nationalism” from the SNP/Scottish Civil Cervice/ “Scottish Government” just now in the repeatedly promised jam-ten-years-after-tomorrow-days; but divorced from anti-colonialism, nationalism has a way of emanating from some smelly origins. And none come much smellier than the co-founder of the SNP and its leader during the war, who thought the Scots in Ulster had preserved their Aryan racial purity by not marrying the Catholic Irish natives. It was Catholic Irish immigration had been Scotland’s curse, without which Scotland would have been the most crime-free nation in Europe. So spake the leader of the SNP for four years and a future Professor of Law at Glasgow University.