Beyond The Fringe

Although the DUP remains unimpressed, the Government has offered extravagant powers to the Northern Ireland Assembly in relation to EU law as it would continue to apply in Northern Ireland under the terms of the backstop. The DUP wants even more for the Assembly that in any case never sits. Well, of course it does. It is the DUP.

Meanwhile, as soon as Alex Salmond started to appear on RT, where he has proved himself able to attract some very impressive interviewees, the likes of the 77th Brigade and the Integrity Initiative swung into action. It is obvious that they have taken over the SNP and the Scottish Government, even if they did get a good kicking in court yesterday. The Deep State routinely manufactures false allegations of sexual misconduct.

Welcome to the world of our lords and masters. Most people in Wales, and almost everyone in England, believe themselves to be living in a polity in which two evenly matched parties, parties that these days are once again easy to tell apart, contest highly competitive General Elections that either of them might win on each occasion, although when  you average it out over 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, and so on, then each of them wins about half the time.

Most people in Wales, and almost everyone in England, would at least be content to live in that polity, and anywhere between a quarter and a third of the total electorate across those two countries would actively prefer it. But that is not at all the polity in which they live.

At each General Election, the performance of Sinn Féin determines how many functioning members of the House of Commons there will be at all. I am emphasising that, because the point is almost never made in so many words. How many seats it will take to deliver a majority Government depends on how many Sinn Féin candidates are returned. Fully 238,915 strong in 2017, the Sinn Féin vote in the Six Counties, one of the four strangest political subcultures of any importance anywhere in Western Europe, is as powerful as that in the affairs of the United Kingdom.

Attention then moves to the other three of the four strangest political subcultures of any importance anywhere in Western Europe, namely the ones that express themselves by voting for the DUP, by voting for the SNP, and, perhaps the oddest of all, by voting for the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party. A Government is formed, so that most people in Wales, and almost everyone in England, can go back to the imaginary polity that they had inhabited before. But that polity remains imaginary.

The SNP and the Scottish Conservatives disagree only as to means, including constitutional arrangements. Their ends are the same, and those ends are decidedly Rightish, while also very liberal socially these days, although that is a recent trend on the part of either of them. They have the fringes of any right-wing party, but those fringes are far more important within them than they are within, say, the Conservative Party in England. Both Orangemen and woad-clad Jacobite fantasists are at or near the very heart of things. In fact, between the DUP and the Scottish Conservatives, it would be worth investigating just how much influence the Orange Order had over the present Government.

Theresa May did not need to offer the DUP anything. She should have just told them to go on television and explain to the folks back home why they had made John McDonnell Chancellor of the Exchequer. Likewise, no Labour Leader needs to offer the SNP anything. He just needs to tell them to go on television and explain to the folks back home why they had put their own main opponents into office. But therein lies the point. The Rightish-to-Loony-Right SNP and the Rightish-to-Loony-Right Scottish Conservatives are the two main parties in Scotland.

The latter's prominence is not new. Mostly on sectarian grounds, Scotland was universally regarded as "a Tory heartland" until the 1960s, that party controlled Glasgow City Council into the 1970s, it delivered Margaret Thatcher's overall majority precisely in 1979 (whereas no Labour Government has ever depended on Scotland for its overall majority), and as recently as 1992 Scotland was the only place to record a net gain in Conservative seats.

I remain as opposed as ever to Scottish independence. Every anti-separatist argument that the Left has advanced since the devolution debates of the 1970s still obtains. But I am not, nor will I ever be, a strategist for the Labour Party. And the fact is that a majority Labour Government would now be vastly more likely in a state that did not include Scotland than it has become in the state that does.

Nor is this a question for only one party. A state with neither Scotland nor Northern Ireland in it would now return each of a majority Labour Government and a majority Conservative Government as near as made no difference to 50 per cent of the time.

As it is, though, another hung Parliament is coming. As ever, its very size will be determined by the electoral performance of Sinn Féin. But we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.