Holy Wullie

This weekend is the Liberal Democrats' spring conference, in which we can expect to hear lots of 'SNP bad' and 'we don't want no referendum' (isn't there a song about that?).  This is also the time for their leader, Willie Rennie, to expect some coverage of his views.

Yesterday he had a somewhat disastrous interview with Gary Robertson on Good Morning Scotland, in which he was hard pressed to explain the difference between his idea on having another referendum on EU membership once the exit deal has been negotiated to see if people want to accept it and leave or not and simply having another referendum to see if people still want to leave or not,  I imagine the idea sounded great in his own head.  He was also hard pressed to explain why, if he wants a second referendum on leaving the EU, it's not OK for Scotland to have another referendum on independence given that circumstances have changed dramatically since 2014, when Scots were told that voting No was the only way to guarantee continuing EU membership.

Today Mr Rennie is set to make the 'emotional' case for Scotland to remain in the UK in his conference speech.  It kind of suggests that the LibDems can't muster up any other kind of case for remaining in the UK, which doesn't bode well for the forthcoming Better Together 2.0 campaign.  Certainly it's noticeable that, when arguing the case for Scottish independence on news websites, the British Nationalists are still regurgitating more or less verbatim all the lines from Better Together 1.0.  However, it does take a certain amount of hypocrisy to make the 'emotional' case, given that last time round the Better Together campaign, of which Mr Rennie was part, sneeringly dismissed Scottish nationalists as 'Bravehearts', thinking with their hearts rather than their heads.  How times have changed.