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Rub SNP noses in defeat
If the price that we needed to pay for the SNP to be reduced to a handful of MPs was a Labour government with a large majority, it was a price worth paying. I am more optimistic than some people about Labour, but whatever Labour does and however long it rules, it will be temporary. What the SNP was trying to do since 2011 would have been permanent. The UK would have been broken up and that would have been final. That is what we were fighting for all these years. That is the victory that we have just achieved.
When Labour used to win nearly all of the seats in Scotland, it did not gather them together in front of the Forth Railway bridge. Nor did it claim that if it won more than 50% of the votes in Scotland it would give it a mandate for anything. There was an arrogance about the SNP when it was at its peak that deserved the fall that has now taken place, not only a fall in the number of its seats, but a fall that amounts to a trip and lying face down in the sharn [dung].
The task for us is not to be conciliatory as people like me tried to be after victory in 2014, but rather to grind that SNP face into the dung so that it fully tastes it and until it admits the scale of its defeat.
It has been a long fight for those of us who have been there since the beginning. It felt like a long campaign in September 2014, but the result although decisive needed to be by 20-30% rather than 10%. There was still hope for Scottish nationalism and so we had to endure ten years of talking about nothing but Scottish independence, marches in fancy dress and SNP misrule. I have a sense of relief, but also a sense of exhaustion. But it was worth it.
See Also:
SNP’s humiliation in Scotland shows independence is no longer a priority
