The Clegg / Farage example was one that did occur to me in truth.
I do think there are other forces at play here though which the Unionists won't be able to resist over the longer term. Scotland is on its way to independence, albeit not this time round.
It's been a trend now for well over 100 years
At the start of the last century I think there were 98 sovereign countries in the world. By the end of it there were something like 250 dependent on whether you use FIFA or the UN lists
Scotland is a prime candidate (as is London) to become its own separate socio-political-economic unit
I invoked the spirit of she who can not be named earlier, only to be told by he who shouldn't be ackowledged either, that it was too simplistic. Personally I think the poll tax was the watershed moment and you can clearly see how the Scottish vote has performed since. Whatever Clive might like to think, the figures don't really support him
Year....seats..% of vote
1955....36....50.1% (remarkable that 60 years ago the Tories were Scotlands party)
1964....24....40.6% (the vote dips from a very high point, but it's still in line with the national share)
1970....23....38% (she enters parliament but the Tories hold their '60's position)
1979....22....31.4% (the share drops but as yet this hasn't translated into lost seats - vaguaries of FPTP)
1987....10....24% (Thatch has lost them 12 seats but only about 7% of the vote)
1997....0......17.5% (the poll tax was the last straw, albeit this was a highwater mark in line with the Blair landslide)
The critical thing is that unlike some parts of the country where the Tories rebounded, they haven't in Scotland
in 2001, and 2005 they mustered just a single seat, and even in Labour's 2010 wipe out, they still got the one seat on a vote that has fluctuated between 15.6% and 17.5% during this 17 year period. That's more than a direction of travel
This period has coincided however with the rest of Europe and the western world (the UK being no exception) veering ever more towards the right
Icons of 80's neo liberlisam like Thatcher and Reagan would look very different today. Thatcher would be a UKIP supporter and Reagan wouldn't get a republican nomination because of his failure to engage the religious right.
Can you honestly say you see this trend reversing? I can't, albeit common sense suggests there has to reach a point whereby we can't continue going ever further right before we fall off. Put simply Scotland is on an incompatiable trajectory having reinvented itself with a different set of morals (imaginary or real)
Centralised governments have increasingly been losing legitimacy the world over as more autonomous regions start to assert their independence based on a combination of identity and economics. Is it really so radical though? Not really. In the 15th and 16th century the idea of the city state was pretty well established and many of them prospered. Actually with supreme irony one of the original ones (Venice) laid down a marker a few months ago when holding a referendum to break away from Italy
There has been another trend to exacerbate this, and that concerns polarisation and acquisitive capital greed. The world has always been divided amongst haves and have nots, but the gap between rich and poor widens. Justifying greed has always been an intellectual challenge of the right, but sooner or later they won't even try to. They'll simply say we aren't going to support his any more and the uber rich will bring away
In Europe we see it between north and south, but also within countries. Barcelona as a city state or capital of Catalonia is an obvious candidate. Italy as I've already suggested has a tradition as well as all the other tensions running through their economic divide. Verona, Milan, Turin, and Venice were all successful. Even Naples and Rome were.
The splitting in two of Czech Republic and Slovakia has received plenty of coverage, but let's not forget that both the Dutch and Belgains sit on such a fracture line too that is gaining traction. The Bretons in France are another one. How long can the EU continue in its current form? It's lookign increasingly anacronistic
Now all of this is probably second half of the century stuff, but as major cities elect mayors and managed economic development programmes to compete for and attract talent, they'll start to pull away from the provinces ever further. How much longer is London or Paris going to be happy subsidising the rest of the UK and France? As Stephanie Flanders described it a few years ago London is "a world class enterpreneurial city, bolted onto a useless country"
The final nail in this coffin I think concerns the increasing subserviant acquiessence of national government to the role of commentators on the narrative. They aren't conviction politicians with the big ideas any longer, but administrators immersed in the straight jacket of managerialism. The institution of elected democracy is changing. Less and less people vote because they simply don't see the point. Cynicism about our bent and bankrupt political classes is at an all time high in the last 5 years, and I don't see that changing. The jeanie is out the bottle. People don't believe in them anymore. Advances in interrogative technologies give them fewer and fewer places to hide. The notion that corporations own governments used to be sneered at as the deluded mind of the conspiracy theorists. No one thinks that anymore. Our political classes are a festering ember of the age of structure but those structures are fractured. We don't need them, nor the false polemics that sustain their existance within the confines of managed dissention masquerading as choice and freedom. Accepting them is little more than the freedom to conform. They're decadent and degenerate, and although they'll have a few twists in them yet from postal voting, to under 16's and heaven knows a few more gimmicks to entice people to endorse their legitimacy, people will eventually turn to other quasi rulers who will provide for them
Scotland (or its nationalists at least) are trying to swim against an ever rising tide. Another scrap will be thrown from the table with devo max, but all that will do is encourage the snapping dog to yelp for more in the medium term. With devo max the people can return a nationalist government at will now and affect the change as when they feel emboldened to do so, or when they feel that the English rightist lerch has become so entrenched they no longer wish to be part of it
