Originally a comment by The Whimster Gap on A clause.
Part of me wonders what the Scottish Government – and, in particular, the SNP-Green majority – is playing at; and part of me thinks that it is simultaneously a clever and stupid political strategy.
Here’s the thought. The SNP now has several years’ experience trying to pass TRA-inspired hooooman rights legislation. Irrespective of the merits or demerits of these instruments, cooler heads within the Party must know that its attempts are doomed to founder on the rocks of the wider constitutional arrangements of the UK. So what gives?
Well, there’ll be a good chunk of the SNP vote that is simply wedded to the idea of Scotland leaving the Union, and they’ll vote SNP irrespective of its other policies. Another chunk will be protest voters: they don’t particularly like Labour or the Tories, and are looking for an alternative. That explains why there’s a nontrivial group of Reform voters, too – it’s just a matter of whether your protest vote is left-facing or right-facing. Neither of these constituencies is necessarily be-gendered. But by embracing genderwang, the SNP has mopped up that constituency, too.
Why, though? Why are the cooler heads in the party willing (with just a couple of exceptions) to go along with that?
And the answer is that it’s precisely because it runs into, and is incompatible with, the law not just in the rest of the UK, but of the rest of the UK.
Let’s say you’re a Holyrood government that wants to leave the Union. One part of doing that is to erode the legitimacy of UK institutions. But you can’t really complain that they’re undemocratic – not straightforwardly, granted that the Scots have twice as many elected representatives as the English – and so the national liberation stuff won’t wash. What you can do, though, is to get your devolved parliament to pass laws that you know will be unacceptable to the Scotland Office, or will be challenged in the UK Supreme Court. And you’ll lose.
But in losing, you win something else. Now you’ve got an arrow to shoot: here’re institutions based in Westminster, or UK-wide, that are undermining the policies of, and laws passed by, the elected Scottish government. And that’s going to breed resentment, and to strengthen the calls for more devolution and for leaving the Union entirely. You could even throw in a few claims about colonialism if you wanted. They’d be bollocks, but that doesn’t really matter.
It’s not quite a matter of engineering a constitutional crisis, but it is a matter of scraping away layers of legitimacy.
And if that is the strategy, it’s quite clever. It’s also quite stupid, because imagine your manifesto for a new nation-state being tethered to such a daft idea. But that’d be a problem for another day.
By the way: the Bill is intended to include CEDAW, so I’m really interested to know how they’re going to square that with the TRA stuff.
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