Scotland's unionist parties can’t see how close independence actually is |
Do you remember Blockbuster? I used to enjoy an occasional trip to Blockbuster in my youth, to pick a DVD for a quiet night in. Imagine that. Imagine having to leave the house to pick up a physical asset from a limited range in order to watch a movie in the house! If I told my children about it, they’d think I was lying.
Blockbuster didn’t see what was coming when Netflix launched, and in fact they doubled down on their established technology in the belief that the world would go backwards. But the world never goes backwards.
The unionist political parties in the Scottish Parliament are a bit like Blockbuster. Blockbuster had some executives who saw the tide coming in and shouted warnings, the powers-that-be were deep in the bunker. And, just the same, some MSPs in Scotland’s unionist political parties can see the tide coming in, but the leaders either can’t, or don’t want to.
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Allow me to caveat that, actually, because there are distinctions. The Labour party, having just been obliterated in the Holyrood elections as a direct and entire result of the Labour government at Westminster, has finally started to ask itself the right question: if we can’t beat the SNP now, with a weak approval rating and a poor record in government for most of the last decade, then can we ever? We should give them some time to reach the obvious answer (which looks a lot like........