Tweeddale Dumb and Tweedle D

They are still saying “Strong and stable”.

This is like Stepford Wives politics. These people are automatons. And clock this, the bar has been lowered further. No longer is the plan to negotiate the most complex deal in history with Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel but the real challenge is to try and fix a deal with Arlene Foster and Sammy Wilson:

These are the Men Who Stare at Goat Paper. Waiting for the ink to dry on ancient vellum, the farce of British decrepit institutions meets desperate Tory opportunism today. Expect a crescendo of denial and deference as an entire generation shakes its head in disbelief.

Both the Queen’s Speech and the Brexit negotiations have been pushed back as the Tory crisis unravels.

Tweeddale Dumb and Tweedle D

Meanwhile Tweedale Dumb and Tweedle D were at Downing Street.

The Scottish Tory leader is being feted for yet another u-turn on Brexit.

To recap: she was at first staunchly against it, then a proud defender of it, now she’s kinda against it again.

Remember Ruth’s famous ‘You deserve the truth” performance:

 

Then she backed Theresa May’s hard Brexit.

This flip-a-flop, we’re told is brilliant and in “the Scottish interest”.

Confused Times pundit Kenny Farquharson tweeted:

The ever-quippy Peat Worrier continues:

Private, modest and working secretly in the public interest, without a thought for personal or political advancement. Yes that’s the way we’ve come to associate closely with Ms Davidson.

It’s not the only thing she’s confused about.

Having backtracked superfast about the idea of setting up an actual autonomous Tory Party (see Panzer Division) its now being reported that: “Ms Davidson said her 13 Scottish Conservative MPs will follow the tradition of being a “separate party” in the House of Commons on important issues like Brexit.”

Davidson said: “I think my 13 MPs are all individuals and each and every one of them will play their full part in the House of Commons. In Scotland we do come from a liberal tradition, we were a separate party at one time, and I would expect them to carry that tradition into the House of Commons and I look forward to their progress.”

You might want to question that great ‘liberal tradition” the Scottish Tories come from. Answers on a  postcard please.

Kenny Farquharson was joined by Sky’s Faisal Islam who here manages to describe the Scottish Tories as ‘technically the 4th biggest Party’:

This is going pure Game of Thrones. The Quine in the North is making a human shield from her new Tory MPs to protect her own political reputation, and to protect “Scotland” from those nasty DUP homophobes.

But it’s not going to end well. Ruth’s (re) positioning on Brexit may be to put pressure on Theresa May, and good luck to her on that, but the Tory party is now caught between the wounded hapless leader and a large Boris-shaped buffoon waiting in the wings. The Conservative realists urging pragmatism, dialogue and negotiation around Brexit are flanked on the other side by Hard Brexiteers and ex-UKIPers slavering in the corner. Somethings got to give.

Ruth is being canonised before our very eyes.

But there are difficulties – despite having some common ground with the DUP (a key demand is thought to be that there should be no referendum on Irish unity) – and despite Ruth tweeting earlier in the week “as a Protestant Unionist” it will be difficult for her to control or spin the fallout from their other demands:

In a 2015 document, the party set out 45 key demands for hung parliament negotiations. These included:

  • Changes to corporation tax
  • Increased health and education spending in Northern Ireland
  • Scrapping the bedroom tax
  • A guaranteed seat at the Cabinet for a Secretary of State for Northern Ireland;
  • Removal of allowances from parties who refuse to attend the House of Commons (Sinn Fein)
  • Protection in law for the official display of the Union Flag and the symbols of our nation
  • Legislation for a new way forward on parading which respects the fundamental rights of assembly

The main thing is that it’s almost impossible to see how the Tories political expedience won’t scupper the Good Friday Agreement and threaten a carefully nurtured and invaluable peace. But importantly too the marching season is soon to be upon us. If the Flegs stuff and the march on Drumcree stuff gets the nod there’s no doubt an emboldened Orange Movement will be banging the drum on the streets of Scotland.

For most of the Cabinet (not a single one of the twelve new Scottish Tory MPs has been appointed to the government), the culture of the DUP is a distant and abstract concept. They’re not big in Surrey Heath.

If violence spills out from this in our cities, as is often the case, you wonder if the public veneration of Davidson will be so palatable, even for gullible journalists?

Comments (15)

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  1. bringiton says:

    Still waiting for someone to tell us what a “soft” Brexit is and how they think that can be achieved.
    As far as the EU are concerned,especially now that the Euxiteers have been seen off in Holland and France and will be in Germany,Brexit means Brexit.
    That means no compromise on the fundamentals under which the EU market operates.
    No freedom of movement of people,no free access to the market….simples.
    The only way out for the Tories is either another referendum (political suicide) or WTO terms with respect to the EU market.
    Isn’t that a price worth paying for no more Johnny Foreigner interfering in England’s affairs?
    I don’t think No voting Scots appreciate that they are regarded as Johnny Foreigner by many in England as well (including the establishment).
    I think we will shortly find out what that price is going to be.

    1. Yes the pup we’re being sold is that these people can negotiate some “soft Brexit” that won’t wreck the economy, alienate EU nationals and foreign workers / visitors and cause widespread disruption. This is far-fetched.

  2. Katrina says:

    Awe bless…tRuthless thinks she has some power in a government at long last. Tory Whip will no doubt enlightened her wee band of brigands soon enough, an May though probably grateful for Scottish tory support will give very little in return other than retaining returned EU powers in Westminster that should be devolved. She’s a very small fish in a big dirty political pond in London.

    1. Jo says:

      Yes Katrina, I had a chuckle watching her bounce out of Number 10 yesterday acting like she was now a member of the Cabinet.

  3. Mrs Hurtle says:

    ‘For most of the Cabinet … the culture of the DUP is a distant and abstract concept. They’re not big in Surrey Heath.’
    The Orange Order is not big in the East of Scotland or the Borders either. I think most of Ruth’s recruits (and her voters) will be in totally unknown territory.

    1. True Mrs Hurtle – but you’d at least have passing knowledge of Loyalist Scotland even if you didn’t have them marching down your street?

  4. w.b.robertson says:

    not big in the west of Scotland either!

  5. Craig P says:

    “In Scotland we do come from a liberal tradition”

    …and their descendants vote SNP, Labour.

    She is surely not talking about the deeply sectarian Scottish Unionist Party of the 1950s who took the Conservative whip…?

    1. Charles L. Gallagher says:

      Yes Craig, you might have mentioned the ‘The Unionist’ Party you were referring to was not the 1707 Union but the 1800 Union with Ireland – an occupation, folllowed by a land-grab

  6. barakabe says:

    ‘If violence spills out from this in our cities, as is often the case, you wonder if the public veneration of Davidson will be so palatable, even for gullible journalists?’- well the Scottish Unionist media suppressed the news of dodgy parcels and anthrax spores to SNP offices in Kirkintilloch and Forfar, irrespective of potential dangers to the public, in order to conceal any negative association with the Conservatives in Scotland; hence my own scepticism in terms of the myopic self-interest of the parochial commentariat in Jockistan. There is a hardcore Unionist mindset, the self-defeating cycles of the death spiral, a kind of cultural fixity attached to failure and self-doubt as reassuring familiarities to limits that have defined our cultural identity a fixed mindset that our ability is innate then a failure can be unsettling because it makes us doubt how good we are. It is this closed culture of the Unionist mindset that overly concerns me: it feels like parts of Scotland are experiencing a cultural regression, a sort of political recidivism- maybe this is a defensive symptom of a fixed mindset that resists change as crisis?- where we are accelerating backwards into the 1980s…rapidly to 1950s…1690…where will it end? The palaeolithic age?
    This agents of action Tory realpolitik spiel of ‘moving forward’ sloganism that defines cargo cult Unionism reveals it as a hollow sect equipped by a carapace of hardened advertising jingles…’strong and stable’, ‘more debt higher taxes’, ‘low tax money in pocket’ ‘Coalition of chaos’ ‘I got us into this I’ll get us out’, ‘Strengthen our great country’…well we could go on and on; and this shorthand for dunces has reduced politics to alienating soundbites that has damaged many voters perceptions of democracy. The political class have deliberately engineered this sloganized reductionism as a means of narrowing the frame of the political debate, thereby disenfranchising a whole generation…and this is why Jeremy Corbyn has been such a breath of fresh air, in terms of projecting an open campaign of hopeful possibility that by-passed vacuous soundbites with its sincerity and honesty. And yet this rigid system of focus group soundbites and sloganeering will continue as it has shown to work with many of the electorate, particularly the older generation, the comfortable and those who merely want to reinforce their worldview. UKIP’s single issue message was devastatingly effective in realigning politics in the UK, now they are defunct, virtually obsolete overnight, and so it’s with Davidson’s Scottish Tory simple message of ‘No Referendum!’ that has beguiled such a demographic. Can it last? She may be riding on the back of a reactionary wave of a a rising no-surrender Unionist culture in Scotland- a culture well hidden in the East Coast and not as nakedly bellicose or as overtly strident as in the West of the country-but like all single issue party politics it cannot be sustained nor can it out manoeuvre circumstances indefinitely (how long can she dupe an a swathe of her voters who have recently voted SNP), so at some point Ruth and her party will have to offer the electorate more than just anti-SNP rhetoric if they are to survive the long-game.

    1. Alf Baird says:

      Excellent comment. However, census data (and voting intention surveys) appear to confirm that cultural No voters are being constantly replenished across Scotland through substantial sustained inflows of people from south of the border. What ‘Ruth and her party’ does matters little, as this group’s pro-union and No voting cultural incentive prevails regardless. It is, culturally, at base, an anti-Scotland, pro-Britain vote, with culture seemingly being the dominant factor.

  7. florian albert says:

    With sectarianism in Scotland on its death bed, as Tom Devine described it a few weeks ago, it is very unlikely that any Tory/DUP deal would lead to ‘violence… in our cities.’
    Similarly, it is unlikely that the Good Friday Agreement will be under threat. It guarantees that the six counties will stay in the UK for the foreseeable future.
    The DUP has managed to live with it and exploit it to their advantage.
    Henry McDonald in today’s Guardian said that DUP demands would be socio-economic not sectarian. It is possible that the DUP will do what the SNP failed to do, make the Tories row back on their present ‘austerity agenda.’

    I do agree that Ruth Davidson is hugely over-rated.
    Her inadequacies will become clear sooner rather than later.

    1. Willie says:

      I’m glad you have such unreserved confidence that everything in Northern Ireland will be sweetness and light.

      A suspended Stormont, a disputed political agenda, a shredded Good Friday Agreement with one of the political parties in Government in the U.K. And all is alright.

      Ah well we live in eternal hope in the benevolence of the Tory / DUP alliance.

      1. florian albert says:

        You missed out the continuing period of relative peace after thirty years in which over 3,500 people died in political violence.
        The Good Friday Agreement has not been ‘shredded.’
        The strong likelihood is that Sinn Fein will decide to rejoin the power-sharing executive.
        They have nowhere else to go.

  8. IJM says:

    The Tories down south choose “Johnny Foreigner” ( EU) , backed up by the sh**e printed by
    their Brexit loving mates ,the MSM. In Scotland , they decided to encourage a particularly
    Scottish theme (Sectarianism) backed up by ,you guessed it !!!

    All for what ??? A stronger UK. I THINK NOT. A stronger negotiating position in their
    dealings with the EU. DONT MAKE ME LAUGH. A happier public. ?????

    All they have done is sow more division ,in an already divided population. Where is it
    going to end. The damage done is enormous. Racism, hatred of others based on religious
    persuasion or social standing ( unemployed = scroungers) has been legitimised.

    Davidson, May, Corbyn et al… have no power. Brexit is a social experiment run by a few
    behind the scenes, who will benefit, and can walk away when they choose. Brexit is the
    big game changer and it won,t end well.

    Independence for Scotland is the only way out of this nightmare scenario.

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