Two plus two equals five, Winston, and that is the change Scotland needs

One of the extraordinary things about the general election campaign in Scotland was that Labour got away with the "change" messaging, even though what they were actually doing was demanding that independence supporters should abandon any hopes for change and embrace the dismal status quo.  But if in the Labour leadership's own heads they were genuinely offering some sort of "change", what was the nature of it?

We got a remarkable insight last night when a "Labour insider" briefed the extremist pro-genocide journalist Lee Harpin that "Changed Labour Means Changed Labour" - about as moronic a reworking of "Brexit Means Brexit" as you could ever wish to see.  It was a reference to the draconian suspensions of seven Labour MPs for backing the SNP amendment to the King's Speech calling for the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap, and therefore implied that the "change" Labour stands for is about one of two things: either a) the crushing once and for all of a hated past in which Labour actually cared about child poverty and social justice, or b) the crushing once and for all of a hated past in which members of parliament could think for themselves and cast votes of principle on matters of importance.  

Judging from the coordinated strop that leadership loyalists were instructed to have on social media last night, it appears to be the latter.  We were treated to an extraordinary display of self-styled "centrists" and "moderates" denouncing their suspended colleagues as "virtue signallers" and purveyors of "performative politics" and "vibes politics".  It was like proponents of Ingsoc reminding the population that the true enemies are not Eurasia or Eastasia, but the counter-revolutionaries and thought-criminals in their own midst.  The only people standing in the way of alleviating child poverty are apparently the bastards who vote in favour of alleviating child poverty, just as two plus two equals five. The narrative seemed to be that the country had tolerated the evil of "vibes politics" for far too long but that the patience of decent, hard-working families had finally snapped all at once due to one of the most disgraceful displays of performative virtuing in world history.

Labour voters of Scotland: you may or may not have realised that what you'd had enough of was pluralistic parliamentary politics and that the change you voted for was the destruction of pluralism, but apparently that's what you were doing, so I hope you enjoy the next five years.  As far as Starmer himself is concerned, the assumption seems to be that he can do this stuff with impunity, but I'm not sure that's true.  We've already seen his disciplinary heavy-handedness directly cost Labour specific seats like Islington North and Chingford & Woodford Green. If the Tories get their act together, the luxury of throwing seats away may no longer be afforded to him. He may only have a chance of winning the next general election if he can reassemble the sort of coalition of support that took Jeremy Corbyn to 40% of the vote in 2017 - and that included a lot of people who without Corbyn might well have been voting Green or for other small left-wing parties.

There's also the problem of incongruous messaging.  Some people will have been wide-eyed and naive enough to take Starmer at his word on the day after the election when he said he was putting "country before party", but will now have seen that he's openly demanding a total slavish loyalty to the party machine in a way that has no precedent in British parliamentary politics.  In other words, he's putting party before country more than any Prime Minister in history, and at some point the penny will drop with voters that this is a guy who means the polar opposite of what he says and simply cannot be trusted.

It's also somewhat ironic that the rebels are being accused of "walking into an SNP trap" and "helping the SNP up off the canvass", because it's not the rebellion that handed the SNP a propaganda victory, it was the suspension of the rebels, which needlessly turned the vote on the SNP amendment into a landmark political event with real consequences.  The SNP can't believe their luck today, and they owe it all to Sir Kid Starver.

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Former independence supporter Stuart Campbell effectively admits trying to "kill" indy at the general election - and he wrongly thinks he's succeeded

I just want to make one simple point.  Although it's an important point, there's nothing complicated about it and it can be explained very briefly.  On polling day, Stuart Campbell broke his word to his readers.  He had previously assured them he would never tell them how to vote, but instead he ended up instructing them to vote Labour: "there’s a job that needs doing...grit your teeth and gird your loins and get it done".  Although this would mean they'd be voting for an avowedly anti-independence party, Campbell tried to make out that they'd somehow be playing a game of five-dimensional chess and bringing independence closer.

So having got the election outcome he wanted (I doubt if many people were stupid enough to follow his advice, but he got the outcome anyway), you might have been forgiven for expecting some kind of guidance from him about where the cunning masterplan goes from here and how precisely independence has been brought closer.  But nope.  Instead, he brazenly asked his readers for suggestions about how he should spend the next two years, because he couldn't see any way forward.  And then on Thursday, he announced that: "Independence is dead as a political issue in Scotland for the next few years. This much should not be in any dispute."

And why is independence dead in his view?  Oh, he is in no doubt whatever about the reason: "A Labour government with a crushing majority sits firmly in Westminster with absolutely no intentions of granting a second referendum". That'll be the Labour government he instructed his readers to elect with as crushing a majority as possible.  In other words, he knowingly gave his readers advice intended to "kill" independence - exactly as I and others pointed out he was doing at the time.  Those who said we were wrong owe us an apology.

Independence is of course not dead, whatever the fantasies of the Brit Nat commetariat and Stuart Campbell (essentially one and the same thing).  The era of "muscular unionism" and "now is not the time" under Theresa May started, seemingly, at a moment of maximum weakness for the Brit Nat side - the SNP had 54 of the 59 Scottish seats at Westminster, and were dominant at Holyrood.  It's therefore not at all hard to imagine the pro-indy movement starting a fightback in the current circumstances which are far less unfavourable than anything the Scottish Tories faced in 2016-17.  But it does actually require someone to go out there and make the political weather, rather than just passively accepting the fatalistic nonsense being put about by the likes of Campbell.

I won't give Campbell any advice about how he should spend the next two years, but I'll make a prediction about how he will spend them - he'll campaign for a Labour-led Scottish government under Anas Sarwar, because he thinks independence hasn't been killed quite enough yet.  It would be grand if we could stop pretending this guy is anything other than an anti-independence campaigner at this stage.  If that's what his dwindling band of die-hard fans actually believe in, fine, but if not, they've been brainwashed by a bog-standard cult leader.