What if Boris Johnson throws a General Election spanner in the indyref2 works?

Although Westminster went into a 3-day recess at close of business on Tuesday, media coverage of recent events there continues to be frenzied. Don’t be fooled by the feeding of Sir Geoffrey Cox to the lions - he’s been Boris Johnson’s scapegoat before, during the prorogation crisis. And I’m sure readers of the National saw the drunk & disorderly smear against two of my SNP colleagues for what it was. 

The real scandal here is not MPs who have outside interests or second jobs away from parliament but MPs who are being paid by corporate interests to use their influence as MPs to try to change government policy to the benefit of those corporations. It’s called corruption. And it’s rife on the Tory benches. 

Readers of the National will be aware that a number of SNP MPs have remunerated outside interests. I recently resumed my legal practice on a limited basis to defend a feminist against alleged hate crimes with some success. But there is no suggestion that any SNP MP has participated in the sort of corruption that some Tories are engaged in. But Johnson is desperate. Desperate to throw anyone and anything under the bus to distract from the real story which is his continuing willingness to rip up the rule book and ride roughshod over the law when it gets in his way. 

This time he’s doing it to protect his corrupt cronies and to smear and undermine the thoroughly decent Standards Commissioner Kathryn Stone before she rules on any of his dodgy activities, including the renovation of the Downing Street Flat, and repeated freebie luxury holidays from his mates. 

He did it with the unlawful prorogation of parliament. He did it with the Internal Market Bill. He’s done it with COVID, both with the Barnard Castle fiasco and, more importantly, with the ongoing scandal of the lucrative contracts handed to companies run by cronies and mates many of whom were totally lacking in the expertise to deliver. 

His pathetic side kick, Dominic Raab, is planning to rip up the Human Rights Act. And their attacks on the devolved settlement are so frequent now they are almost unremarked. It took the Law Society of Scotland to point out that the UK Government should be seeking the legislative consent of the Scottish Parliament to meddle with judicial review in Scotland. So great is the onslaught it’s like playing whack-a-mole for the Scottish Government and the dispiriting knowledge that the UK Supreme Court will always uphold Westminster’s supremacy in the devolution deal doesn’t help. 

Meanwhile the House of Lords is packed with cronies who have forked out big time for the privilege and a millionaire donor to the Tory party gets a peerage as a prelude to shoehorning him into the Scotland Office as a minister. And still the leader of the opposition cannot bring himself to call for the abolition of the Lords. When Keir Starmer was asked whether abolition of the House of lords is an urgent matter for the Labour party he said Gordon Brown is looking into it. In Scotland we know what that means. Brown will get an unjustifiable and inexplicable amount of air time to talk about his grand plan, he won’t be subject to any in-depth questioning about it and absolutely nothing will happen. Words not deeds. 

Modern Labour aren’t serious, they certainly aren’t serious about Scotland and they aren’t serious about making change in the UK or taking the fight to this appalling UK Government. If Keir Starmer was serious, he wouldn’t be farming out policy creation to some future Brown report when this is a live issue right now, he’d be immediately refusing to nominate Labour Peers and threatening to gum up business in the House of Lords and forcing a change in the system.  

All of this just goes to illustrate how utterly broken Westminster is and why Scotland must have a fully worked out plan to exit this corrupt mess. Westminster has shown that is not capable of reforming itself. Years of bumping gums about the Lords with zero action is but one illustration of that. Yes, there are many good and decent English voters who long for a better politics, but the reality is that, even in the aftermath of the unlawful prorogation, Johnson secured a landslide south of the border. Labour don’t look any more like a government in waiting under Starmer than they did under Corbyn, and they are missing an open goal right now. My fear is that Johnson or indeed a successor such as Sunak will engineer another General Election at a time of his choosing to do the same again and stymie the chances of holding a second indyref in 2023.  Contingency plans are required.