Boris Johnson has learned he can get elected no matter what

The United Kingdom has never been so divided. With the DUP losing North and South Belfast, Sinn Fein with seven MPs and the SDLP with two gains, nationalist MPs will outnumber unionist MPs for the first time in Northern Ireland’s history.

The election marks out more starkly than ever how much the political cultures and trajectories of Scotland and the rUK are so very different .

The problem for the Scottish Conservatives concentrating their entire campaign on the constitutional question, relentlessly negative and relentlessly focused on “stopping Nicola”, is, they lost. Having spent the last month arguing: “A vote for the SNP is a vote for indyref2” the Unionist parties now seem to have pivoted to try and argue: “The SNP have no mandate for indyref2.”

This isn’t credible.

If the Scottish Conservatives gambled and lost on a desperately narrow outlook, the Lib Dems are now reduced to a paltry 11 MPs across the whole of the UK. Jo Swinson, who pretended she could become the PM, couldn’t even become an MP.

If her loss to the SNP’s Amy Callaghan was a personal failure for a woeful campaign, it may also prove the limitations of a style of politics that projects relatively inexperienced candidates to effect campaigns of studied superficiality and opportunism. Swinson was criticised for spending little time in her constituency and this rootless, detached approach left her slated.

A renewed mandate

Although the gulf between Scotland and England seems larger than ever, this is not a sudden rupture.

The Tories have now lost 17 General Elections in Scotland in a row and the mandate for independence was created by the SNP 2015 victory at the General Election in Scotland, the 2016 Scottish Parliament election, the 2017 General Election in Scotland, the 2019 EU election and the 48 MPs elected in the 2019 General Election.

On Friday, shortly after Boris Johnson swept out of Buckingham Palace, and before he made any public utterance, Nicola Sturgeon challenged Boris Johnson to give Scotland the powers to hold a second independence referendum.

The First Minister said she had won “a renewed, refreshed and strengthened mandate” to call for a fresh independence vote after winning 47 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats, 11 more than in 2017.

Tellingly she didn’t say she was “requesting” these powers, she said she was demanding them.

Of course Johnson – revitalised and emboldened by victory – will be in no mood to relent. For the Prime Minister, Scotland is a blasted heath, with a paltry handful of low-grade insignificant MPs.

His levels of hubris and entitlement are off the charts, and his contempt for the wider parts of the United Kingdom are transparent. The lesson that Johnson will have learned from this election is that he can campaign with an empty manifesto, avoid media scrutiny and behave like a moral void and still get elected.

Sturgeon’s claim for a Section 30 will be ignored.

Three words

“Get Brexit Done” was the Conservative mantra ­– repeated like “Make America Great Again” – it was a whole world view reduced for the Deliveroo generation.

But if Johnson has bluffed and stammered his way into office, he has hammered a useless Labour campaign supported by a pliant media and a grimly compromised public broadcaster.

The next steps for the democracy movement in Scotland will be crucial. The following questions loom large:

How to respond when the Conservative Government rejects a Section 30 order?

How will the Labour Party reform itself in the face of a historic failure?

What does it mean for the beleaguered Richard Leonard, closely associated with Corbyn’s disastrous campaign?

How does the wider Yes movement act to push a wider and deeper engagement from people disillusioned with a broken Britain and facing a far-right government?

How do we work to repair the complete breakdown of trust and faith in the media that has been a feature of this election far beyond nationalist criticisms?

What is the significance of the Sinn Fein and SDLP victories in Northern Ireland, and how does that interact with Scottish republicanism?

How will Johnson actually “Get Brexit Done”? What is possible and in what time-frame?

How do the Conservative defeats in Scotland affect the Unionist alliance ahead of a future referendum?

How will the Scottish Government cope with the following year of Brexit negotiations and inevitable sidelining that will continue?

How do we show solidarity with the people who will be impacted by an emboldened right-wing Conservative government, in Scotland and beyond?

I can’t answer all these questions but one: “How to respond when the Conservative Government rejects a Section 30 Order?” If Boris Johnson has no need to take notice of the Scottish result, no political need to placate a nation he requires as irrelevant, then we need to change that dynamic.

There is a mounting argument to try and resolve this with a legal challenge, possibly on the back of seeing similar successful cases in the last year. This is a mistake.

As the journalist Ben Wray has written: “The idea of taking the UK Government to court if it doesn’t deliver Section 30 powers is not a good one. It de-politicises the issue, kicks it into the long grass until court case is done, and court decision could easily go the UK Govt’s way, which would be a huge PR coup for the Tories.”

I think we need to build a movement that operates inside and outside of Parliament. The 48 SNP MPs need to reconsider their actions in Westminster, and if a Section 30 order is not conceded they should withdraw in protest. The danger is they give legitimisation to a Parliament and to a process that doesn’t deserve it.

There are two questions the SNP and the wider Yes movement should be asking ourselves? How do we exert pressure on the Conservative Government to concede our demands for a referendum? And how do we build the institutions, the policies and the ideas that mean that referendum is won easily – presenting itself as a credible alternative to the hellscape of 10 years of Tory rule?