A cartoon I saw this week said: “If the EU moves any further to the right, Nigel Farage will want to rejoin it.”
Humour is always a good way to make a point but the joke now is on those who have held up the EU as some shining beacon of human enlightenment.
Citizens of the EU, it transpires, have exactly the same concerns as we do and they’ve just expressed their democratic outrage at being ignored by those politicians who think they know best.
I’ve long regarded labels like far right and far left as irrelevant.
Disagree with anyone on a political issue and there’s always someone ready to throw childish insults like fascist or Tory into the debate.
However, if there is any value in those descriptions, the lurch to the ‘right’ in the European elections will be particularly discombobulating for so-called progressives, and even more so for Scottish nationalists who’ve never stopped whining about the decision to leave the EU.
They now find themselves in the awkward position of wanting to join a European Union which is suddenly worse and more conservative than the UK they so vehemently despise.
‘Game is up’
The SNP claims to be a left of centre party.
So how would they now square attempting to join a grouping, much of which is at serious odds with their political position?
And with Labour set to form the next UK government, Scotland will be part of a mildly left of centre union at home, while a large chunk of the European Union so admired by nationalists embraces right of centre policies.
How will nationalists square the circle of their “refugees welcome here” cry while so many in the EU have voted for parties intent on halting further immigration in its tracks?
And it’s not just migration which these elections have thrown into sharp focus; Net Zero climate change policies have also driven many citizens in the EU to vote in large numbers for parties sceptical of those policies which the SNP/Green coalition have embraced.
Now, in fairness, the EU comes a distant second to the SNP’s main aim of saving their skins at the general election.
Independence in or out of the EU isn’t getting a mention in their election literature.
That’s because even the most ideological among them know the game is up – and independence is way down the list of things most Scots currently find important.
But these EU election results expose the hypocrisy of a party which constantly denigrates our oldest neighbour for being Tories, when countries like Germany and Italy – which have very real and dangerous right-wing histories – have just voted in large numbers for candidates who make the Conservatives look like kittens.
The SNP are out of ideas long since and are now all about posturing.
If they hadn’t allowed the zealots in their own party and in the Greens to side-track them on minority issues like self ID and gender wars, they might have made steady progress towards independence.
And what about their push to destroy our oil and gas industry before actually having anything remotely capable of replacing it in the short to medium term?
‘Electoral gubbing awaits’
Competent governance was required these past few years but instead virtue signalling proved easier.
That’s all ancient history now because an electoral gubbing awaits them on July 4, which will probably result in internecine infighting as those who lose their seats in Westminster scramble for a safe berth in Holyrood.
Those Scottish elections aren’t for another two years, but by then, depending on how well Labour have run things, the SNP could face a similar annihilation to that which will engulf them next month.
The party has gone, in a quick leap, from being a party that understood the mood music of much of the country to one which now consistently reads the room badly.
They’ve failed to realise that from Dundee to Düsseldorf, from Aberdeen to Amsterdam, folk have the same concerns and worries.
Had they been in touch with those concerns and understood them, instead of ignoring them and living in their own bubble, they might have found more sympathy for the very real worries of ordinary folk over the issues which have rocked the EU establishment.
Many folk aren’t convinced that unlimited immigration is a good thing.
Many are unconvinced of the haste to replace fossil fuel with unproven green technology.
People are fed up to the back teeth with the progressive agenda which, in fact, seems to them regressive and authoritarian.
And just as it appears many folk in the EU are fed up with those running the show there, many here it seems are finally fed up of the SNP.
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