20 20 vision ?

STV's story that Dr Tobias Lock, of Edinburgh University, and Dr Kirsty Hughes, a senior fellow at Friends of Europe in Brussels, have reported that we could be "fast tracked" backmp into EU membership, is a very nat biased story. Their report is a best case ideal scenario of what could happen if everyone had the right goodwill. We already know everyone has not got the right goodwill, and they just ignore that. Same as nats in the 2014 campaign used to, they cherrypick words from Spanish politicians to claim tenuously as refuting that there will be a Spanish veto, when they don't even know what Spanish government there will be at the time of us trying to rejoin the EU.

What is noticeable is that even their scenario sees us being out of the EU for 5 years. Without us being part of the British deal, that would have to mean out of the single market too.

Imagining a Yes vote in 2018 they don't picture immediate statehood but the same year and a half transition as was imagined last time. Yet we leave the EU during that transition, on the March 2019 target for Brexit. Formally applying to rejoin immediately at the moment of indy in 2020, then their 20/20 vision sees the accession process taking until 2024. Even on the fantasy that won't happen, of wholesale goodwill and smoothed way.

Continuous or inherited membership, all the nats' spin has claimed would happen, THIS IS NOT.

We are getting welfare devolved

In Tory conference week, the Scotsman has learned from UK civil service that yes we will get welfare powers devolved. To introduce new measures and to top up UK benefits, including disability.

It's from 2018, so there is the frustration of the foot dragging process of these things coming into effect, waiting through 3 years more of Tory measures (unless their tiny majority government falls before then). But the SNP have been insisting that we were not going to get this. Though such a detail as this was never in the vow, they have been using it to claim the vow is not being delivered. You can see it is being delivered. This is in the spirit of the Smith Commission.

The announcement's timing is to get around any economically diehard Tories wishing to be difficult about it. That shows their leaders wanting to get around them and secure the Union.

Spoiler

2018 they say today is when Cameron would hold a British EU referendum.

Is that 5 years of relief or of intolerable uncertainty for our European friends here?

It is a total spoiler for the Scottish referendum, where to make an informed vote we need to know the EU vote's result first. Having them the wrong way round makes the Scottish voter a gamble, voting either way. With voting Yes the gamble is how much trouble Spain can make for us in the EU, it is with voting No that the gamble is worse: which way will Britain then go? Perhaps expecting that a No vote is more popular at present, it will manipulate us, to blunder into ending up going with a British nasty tabloid racist vote to leave the EU, instead of having the chance not to make that choice.