Unionists in Scotland are getting nervous. Nichola Sturgeon has been judged (thus far) to have had a "good" Covid crisis in personal terms, notwithstanding the dreadful missteps of her Health and Education Secretaries and the embarrassment surrounding the resignation of Scotland's Chief Medical Officer in a classic case of "Do as I Say, not Do as I Do". The First Minister's turns at the lectern have been authoritative, if a shade authoritarian considering she is (as she tells us) a member of a team. But they have been favourably compared to the rather less slick performances of Boris's colleagues in London. Presentation, as they say, is everything. Unionists and some of those who have habitually been viscerally opposed to her every utterance, admit they have been quite impressed and even disarmed. The bizarre message that Covid- infected Scotland is in the same boat as Covid infected England but is somehow in a better place, has gone down well. Over half the voting population would now approve Scottish independence, according to polls.
There is a strong strain of unionist belief in Scotland that, when push-comes-to-shove, the juices of William Wallace will ultimately always be diluted by an overwhelming sense of individual self-interest. In other words, the passion for independence will defer to material well-being in the privacy of the voting booth. Certainly, the economic case for independence has been ruthlessly unpicked by reality and by changes in the SNP's own agenda. For instance, the ballast that was supposed to be provided by Scotland's oil and gas reserves has been dumped over the side, the price of Nichola's conversion to going "Green".
Further, the SNP vote has been more volatile than the political dominance of Salmond or Sturgeon would seem to suggest. Even in the "Let's give two fingers to the Tories and their Union" atmosphere of the 2015 General Election, the SNP was unable to improve its vote share beyond 50%, the highest ever. Two years later it fell to 37% and only managed a recovery to 45% in 2019, bolstered by the majority Scottish vote to remain as a member of the EU, the collapse of the Labour base and the advent of the anti-Knox, Boris Johnson. These more recent numbers still easily convert into Westminster seats, but they do not meet the threshold for success in a referendum.
If the 2019 General Election was, in Scotland, a further referendum on a UK government that was proposing to take Scotland out of the EU against its will, its overall result challenged the Union in a more subtle way. Although Boris is a metropolitan libertarian who adroitly surfed the wave of forces grouped under the Brexit banner, the parliamentary party that he now leads more closely resembles that of Stanley Baldwin. The Conservatives won 43 more seats north of the banks of the Severn and the Trent in England & Wales to add to the 6 they picked off in 2017. They took a further five seats in the West Midlands. Many of these constituencies had never before elected a Tory member. Some such as Mansfield, are now as "safe" for the Conservatives as were the Home Counties seats of old. But many are not and Boris was smart enough to admit that former Labour votes had been lent to him "to get the Brexit done" and to see off Corbyn. Most of these new MP's can be added to the already large number of English Conservative members who are incurious about the "Union". And they certainly don't have an incentive to care much about Scotland.
Ancient reflexes are now giving way to more immediate concerns. Newly won constituencies in England such as Blyth Valley in the north-east have been disproportionately affected by Covid infection, while some in the valley of the Trent have suffered the double-whammy of both the pandemic and earlier flooding. Other Tory gains (such as Burnley, Hyndburn, and Penistone & Stockbridge) are amongst the most deprived areas in the UK. In a world of scarce resources post-Covid, Boris knows that the maintenance of his majority in 2024 will be determined in places like Bolsover and Bassetlaw, not Aberdeen South.
The cultural case for Scottish independence has coincided with a much diminished sense of "Britishness". The institutions that gave a common identity, purpose and cultural affiliation north and south of the Tweed have evaporated. The major industries (such as steel, mining, engineering and textiles) that shared a Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish and English heritage have either gone or are massively diminished. The Protestant Church is not the unifying force it once was. The individual Scottish regiments are no longer a backstay of the British Army. The trades unions have split more visibly into their Scottish and English variants. But this affects English sensibility just as much as it does in Scotland.
The Covid crisis has made practical devolution a highly visible but not terribly impressive reality, shown daily on our television screens and in other media. Ulster, Wales and Scotland have loudly pursued footling variations of the approaches taken by London but the notion that there is some sort of devolved version of the virus is absurd and cuts no ice with English MPs who feel their constituents are paying through the nose for the existing constitutional set- up, the irresolution of the "West Lothian Question" and devolved dawdling now. The first bow shots have been fired - caps will be applied to the availability of loans to English students who want to take up Scottish University places and the £1bn fund to help pupils transition to the new school year by way of summer "camps" and tutorial help only applies to England.
Boris Johnson has trenchantly asserted his resistance to another Scottish referendum, at least while he remains premier. But can it be inferred that he must therefore be a unionist? The loss of seats in Scotland has been much tougher for the Labour Party than it has been for the Conservatives and Johnson can continue to toy with the SNP, which is beginning to show signs of driving itself mad with the differing approaches to securing independence and the defenestration of its charismatic but flawed former leader. With Ireland, Johnson was able to ensure a degree of assent from Dublin to his vision of a deal with the EU with a veiled threat to make Ulster an Irish problem (rather than an English one) by the simple expedient of Westminster acting upon its long stated disinterest in unification. Johnson wants neither Scotland nor Ulster as a constitutional ball-and-chain. The best that can be said is that, unlike the more sincere unionists Cameron and May, he is a fair weather unionist only.
It remains to be seen if Boris's gangly coalition of Brexiteers, Red Tories, Blue Rinses and free marketers will last the distance. But one thing it will not be thinking about is how all this plays in Scotland. Unionism has got a fight on its hands, and not just with the Nats.
No comments:
Post a Comment