Can anyone imagine the "Rearm Britain" brigade sending troops to fight the Americans if Greenland is invaded?

Even twelve long years after I last posted there, I'm desperately sad to see what's happened to my old haunt of Political Betting, affectionately known as "Stormfront Lite" due to the excessive number of borderline-fascist nutjobs in the comments section.  It's now been completely taken over by "TSE", notorious for once inventing a family tragedy to avoid having to settle a private bet - which I suppose those with a sense of irony would say makes him the ideal man to edit the UK's best-known political betting site.  But it's actually not so much his welching that's the problem, it's the dismal standard of his political analysis and his puerile sense of humour, which I know he honestly thinks adds an "inimitability" to the site but is in reality making it too excruciating to read.  The saving grace is that there are often lengthy, thoughtful guest posts at the weekend, and it might almost be better if TSE just ran those and didn't even try to fill in the gaps in between.  His dreadful weekday posts are absolutely wrecking the site.

I believe he's a Tory member in Manchester or somewhere like that, and like so many clueless Tories south of the border he fancies himself as a bit of an expert on Scotland and Scottish politics.  His latest pronouncement is that Donald Trump's second term has killed Scottish independence stone dead - and he's tried to ward off suggestions that he's guilty of wishful thinking by pointing out that other people have in the past been guilty of wishful thinking on the subject.  But no, I'm afraid this is no more than yet another round of wishful thinking on stilts from a bog-standard Greater England imperialist perspective.

If he was actually immersed as most of us are in what is happening in Scotland, he'd realise that the issue of Trump is a red herring because by far the biggest barrier to independence at present is the SNP leadership's own reluctance to press the issue.  That is not an insurmountable barrier in the long run, but would anyone confidently bet on it being overcome during Trump's four-year term?  Most of us would regard it as an immense luxury if we could start thinking in terms of what external factors might get in the way of an SNP leadership that is seriously trying to win independence in the short-term.  (And any chance of a non-SNP route to independence has been completely ended by the insanely destructive behaviour of the Alba Party elite.)

By the time the independence campaign is fully back on track, it's likely that either there'll be a Democratic president and normal service will have been resumed, or JD Vance will be president, in which case independence will be a moot point because we might all want to take up Musk's offer of emigrating to another planet.

But in any case, TSE is making himself look more than faintly ridiculous by suggesting that campaigning for independence while Trump is president is like trying to do it during the Battle of Britain.  If we're supposed to believe that Trump's trade wars and his threats to invade Greenland are an existential threat on a par with 1940, one that puts an end to politics as usual for the foreseeable future, I'd suggest we'd first need to have a British government that recognises the existence of such a threat.  Instead, Starmer is still sycophantically paying homage to Trump as the leader of a Euro-Atlantic alliance and indeed as someone without whom no way forward in Ukraine is even possible.  If anything, all that does is make Scottish independence look more attractive, because the world order that Starmer is offering is plainly bankrupt.

There's now a Canadian Prime Minister who is using extremely belligerent language and talking of "the Americans" as an aggressor that his country needs to be defended from.  If Starmer was bold enough to verbally "stand with Canada" against the US threat, that might start to change perceptions in Scotland and make people feel that we've moved into an emergency situation which crowds out domestic issues like independence.  But I doubt if there's a single person reading this who can imagine Starmer actually having the guts to do that.  

Britain and other European countries are supposedly rearming so that they can act more independently in future, but does anyone seriously think that Starmer would send troops to fight against the US if there was a border incursion in Canada or a full-scale annexation of Greenland?  Of course he wouldn't.  He'd suddenly rediscover the realpolitik that he's thrown to the wind as far as Ukraine is concerned.  He'd say that a military solution was in the realms of fantasy given America's military strength.  He'd say a dispute between two valued allies was a matter of great regret, and he'd urge a diplomatic solution.  He'd argue that escalation must be avoided at all costs, and he'd suggest that until an amicable agreement can be reached, life wouldn't be so bad for those living under occupation.  After all, the Americans aren't a bad sort, and Donald is a great personal friend of his.

Not exactly the sort of Churchillian rhetoric that will inspire solidarity and put the Scottish independence cause on hold.