Swinney, Starmer and the abject denial of democracy |
Keir Starmer – never the most politically savvy operator – must be kicking himself that he dismissed John Swinney’s demands for a second independence referendum quite so quickly. Had he waited a mere 24 hours to watch the self-immolation of the SNP that has come with Peter Murrell’s guilty plea, he would – or at least should have – considered that granting permission could have killed the question stone dead for a couple of decades at the very least.
Having said that, I doubt Swinney realises just how much of a favour Starmer has done him. His party’s current travails would make delivering on the cause he has dedicated most of his political life to – right now – next to impossible. As it is, the SNP still has the time and opportunity to recover the remnants of any credibility and not derail its dream. Whether it does so is another matter altogether.
But Swinney and Starmer are cut from the same cloth. Neither is particularly good at reading the room, let alone the wider political landscape. At their core they are both fundamentally decent men afflicted with terrible communication skills and a wildly inflated sense of the regard in which they are personally held. Awful performers under spontaneous questioning – even worse when it’s in front of the press – they produce incoherent sentences which they doubtless hope pass muster as old-fashioned political spin. And despite the positions they occupy, both possess astonishingly thin skin.
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