Slack Water, Après Moi…

There's a feature of tides when the flood has reached its height, a moment, not of actual stillness but of turmoil. Slack water. Then the tide will begin to ebb…

In less than two weeks the flood that brought the referendum to its peak, nearly overflowing into independence, we've seen the same flood increase membership of the YES parties and a huge swell of undiminished commitment to a continuing YES movement.

In Westminster, slack water has been the word. In a chaotic aftermath, we've seen the Vow translated into the English question, hints that any new powers Scotland receives will be balanced by take-aways elsewhere, promises of another five years' of austerity, reductions in rights of protest (fracking), even hints that social media could be switched off to prevent uncontrolled coordination of dissent (Cameron said terrorism and criminality, but what's in a definition?). That came so thick and fast it surprised even me.


Meanwhile, Brown's timetable rumbles on, hardly spoken of. Behind closed doors. Britain goes to war again. Scotland is forgotten, even while the parties squabble between and within about it all.

And you have to wonder, is this the politics-as-usual I predicted a fews weeks ago? Is it politics-as-usual-PLUS? Using the turmoil to advantage, fuelling it, even, to set the agenda for the next step and keep most of it out of sight?

I think so.

I think they are waiting for the ebb to start. The huge political party sign-ups may be disconcerting but the old arrogance predicts it'll happen. They're waiting for it. On it depends the fudge which will be the Brown 'consultation'. Once the proposals for the Scottish settlement emerge (any minute now), the consultation begins. With whom? How? How long has it got? I can't see it being fully public, can you? No, it'll have a gloss of consultation but it will rely on the expected ebbing enthusiasm for concealment.

Image taken from the BBC. Here.

The consultation will be over by November. Go figure.

So the dynamics, post-ref. Why don't we all shut up? Why don't we accept the result? I've said elsewhere (as has Derek Bateman), you don't ask political parties to abandon their politics as a result of a defeat. The Scottish people have made a decision. 1.6 million still believe what they believed and are engaged enough to carry on. And besides, this is about the settlement we voted for collectively. This is about the deal for Scotland, as promised. We all have a stake in that, to see it's the best possible and not a half-baked fudge or a recipe for revenge after our sheer cheek to ask for something different.

So Westminster is waiting for the tide to go out. Hoping. It's true there's a period now where we look at strategies for the way ahead. We look for responses to the avalanche of pronouncements from the South and from our cohort of NO parties as they jockey for position.

I remember, and we all should, if the tide goes back, that's the way of things, and tides rise again. What Westminster needs to recall, is the further it falls, the greater the flood to come. Before the tsunami the shoreline lies bare, before the wave. Before the wave.