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Reviving the SNP corpse
Scottish nationalism was decisively defeated in July 2024 when only 30% of Scottish voters chose to support the SNP and it won nine seats. Alba won 11,000 votes. But there are those who wish to revive the corpse with a form a necromancy called setting the goal posts for a second referendum and turning Scotland into Northern Ireland.
The truth however is that Scotland has already had its second referendum. The SNP announced on numerous occasions that the General Election was a de facto referendum. The terms of victory were various. Sometimes the SNP had to win a majority of seats, at other times it just had to be the largest party, at others it had to win more than 50% of the vote. There is little doubt that if it had won any of these it would have demanded a referendum on independence. But it lost whatever variant of the de facto referendum it might have chosen. So, it is reasonable for the rest of us to point out that you have now lost two referendums so it is now the settled will of Scottish voters that Scotland remain part of the UK.
But now we are beginning to hear certain voices suggesting that the government set out what would need to happen in order for there to be some sort of legal right to a second referendum and that Scotland should be in a similar situation to Northern Ireland where the Belfast Agreement says that if the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland believes that a majority of Northern Irish voters wished to leave the UK and join Ireland they ought to have a referendum on this issue and if a similar referendum in Ireland were successful the merger should take place.
But Scotland is not like Northern Ireland. There is one reason and one reason only why there is a Belfast Agreement. The IRA engaged in a three-decade long campaign of terror with the goal of forcing Northern Ireland to leave the UK. The IRA knew that it could not win militarily so it settled for being able to achieve its goal by means of the ballot box rather than the Armalite.
I was thinking of Effie when I posted the Braveheart song in my sidebar today. This is for her and Valerie who is a distant relative living in Scotland whom I have a great deal of time for. All the best to both of you.