London-based Alastair Meeks of Stormfront Lite has followed up yesterday's more measured piece with a barking mad article claiming bewilderment that Nicola Sturgeon hasn't resigned in the wake of last week's general election. Well, let's see - she's by far the SNP's most successful leader of all-time, and she's just won a fourth successive national election victory in the space of less than three years. During the campaign, YouGov showed that she remained the most popular of the Scottish party leaders in absolute terms. On the face of it, these would all appear to be excellent reasons for holding on to her, but I dare say things look different when viewed from the metropolis.
Of the SNP's landslide victory last week, Alastair says : "Nor was this a narrow defeat." The new post-arithmetic politics is getting rather comical.
Alastair also expands on his theory from yesterday that the Tories can safely regard the SNP as "reliable enemies", because both parties will be desperate to avoid an early election. He reckons that this will allow Labour the opportunity to present themselves as a more authentically anti-Tory party than the SNP. All of this is in the realms of utter fantasy. For the avoidance of doubt, if there is a vote on the floor of the House of Commons to bring the government down, then regardless of strategic judgements over whether an early election would be in the SNP's interests, they will walk through the lobbies with Labour to bring that election about. Anyone who thinks otherwise just doesn't 'get' Scottish politics, and certainly doesn't understand the long-term penalty that any centre-left party in Scotland would pay for helping to keep the Tories in power for even a week longer than necessary.
Stormfront Lite is of course heavily dominated by Tory contributors, and it does appear that Alastair is lulling them into a false sense of security. If any smaller parties are going to sustain Tory rule for five years, it'll be the DUP, Lady Hermon, and maybe the Lib Dems after Brexit. But the SNP...you can forget it, I'm afraid. Just not going to happen.
The people coming out with this stuff should be met with merciless mockery and utter derision. It's pure doublethink and fake news and they shouldn't be allowed to get away with it. Part of our grassroots campaign for independence should be to post as often as required BTL and on social media calling this stuff out - no need to get into arguments with the trolls and unionists, just post the facts, contrast with the drivel in the article and continually and persistently undermine their credibility. (Would be great to be able to do the same with print newspapers and the BBC, but that's a lot harder).
ReplyDeleteI certainly think that they will want to wait for a goodly amount of Brown stuff to have hit the fan on the Brexit front - although I am beginning to wonder if Mayhem and the Brexiteers will ever summon up the courage to actually take the flight to Brussels.
ReplyDeleteJames - I agree that SNP won the GE in Scotland last week, but can you really describe it as a landslide? Gaining 37% of the popular vote doesn't sound like a landslide to me...
ReplyDeleteI agree that there is no reason totally to abandon IndyRef 2 - but I think that we need to recognise that this was by far the worst SNP performance in 7 years and, as a consequence, also accept that it makes sense for the party to reconsider all aspects of its strategy. Simply pretending that last week saw "yet another SNP triumph" strikes me as ever so slightly delusional...
"James - I agree that SNP won the GE in Scotland last week, but can you really describe it as a landslide?"
DeleteThe answer to that question is an emphatic "yes", and I set out the reasons here -
http://scotgoespop.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/putting-snps-latest-landslide-victory.html
The SNP's victory is directly comparable to several UK-wide results (such as Thatcher's win in 1987) which are invariably described as "landslides".
Incidentally, you're quite wrong to say that this is the SNP's worst performance in seven years. It's significantly better than their local election results in both 2012 and 2017, when they received 32.3% of the popular vote. It's also much, much better than their European election result in 2014, when they received just 29.0% of the vote.