Where is Scotland going?

It may have escaped your notice, what with an ongoing, world-encircling and panic-inducing pandemic, but the British state has not escaped its many crises. Coronavirus can blot them out, accentuate them sometimes, light them up always: but it has not made them go away.

The most immediate of these is of course Brexit, and the extent to which the United Kingdom should or can pursue a deep and abiding deal with the European Union – not just on trade, but on health, education, travel, security and more. A deal is still quite possible, perhaps even likely, but it’s not on the table yet.

Beyond that, the next and even more daunting mountains – holding the state itself together. Most people have understandably got their attention pointed away from constitutional matters at the moment, but prospects for the cause of Scottish independence are looking brighter and brighter. That will cast a long pall over public affairs for some years to come.

Polling reveals the pro-independence camp to be at an all-time high. Where they were toiling at the end of last year, posting results of between 38 and 46 per cent, they now ride high, hitting 50 per cent in the latest Panelbase poll – a lead of seven per cent over Scotland’s unionists. And there’s more to it than the numbers: the cause of the union looks weaker, less enduring, more threadbare as the months tick by.

It’s not just that the young favour independence, though they do indeed feel like that – in huge numbers that make the world ‘landslide’ look a bit puny. It’s that Scotland’s No campaigners are now leaderless, rudderless, divided and just a bit punchdrunk. Increasingly, they just look like they’ve had all the fight knocked out of them.

The ruling Scottish National Party have colonised most of the civic institutions that used to be Labour’s for the asking. The three unionist parties hate each other almost as much as they do the Nationalists. Without Ruth Davidson, the Conservatives’ energetic leader up until 2019, Scottish Tories look colourless. No-one has so much as seen Scottish Labour’s leader for years.

Most of all, the present context helps the SNP no end. They basically have no opponents. A seemingly endless succession of Conservative governments in London boosts their case that ‘progressive’ Scots ought to want out of the Union. UK Labour’s unpleasant and unending civil war threatened, up until early this year, to make Labour the quintessential nasty party. The Liberal Democrats have just missed another gilt-edged chance to break into the really big time, just as they did in 1974, 1983 and 2010.

Most pressingly, coronavirus itself has boosted the SNP’s fortunes even further. Crass as it is to say this aloud – and the whole deadly mess weighs on all of us – Scotland is perceived by its voters to have done better than ‘England’ in the fight against the virus.

That’s not always fair. Scottish public policy has been all over the place. Care homes were left unguarded. Testing has been chaotic. Schools policy has veered all over the place. Scotland’s per capita deaths are not all that far behind England’s.

But two factors have made the Scottish public’s ‘rally round the flag’ focus on the Saltire in Edinburgh and not the Union Flag in London. One: First Minster Nicola Sturgeon is quite simply a much more plausible figure than Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Agree with her or disagree with her – and this blog does not believe that secession would be in the best interests of Scots – she somehow manages to be both more nimble and more weighty than that bloviating try-hard in No. 10.

Then, point two: Scotland has deliberately emerged out of lockdown just that little bit slower than England. It is not clear that this will make much difference to the prevalence of Covid-19. Frankly, all the ‘facts’ are slewing about journal pre-prints right now. But what it does do is create some bright yellow water between the SNP and the blue team in Downing Street.

As Johnson struggles to hold together a national consensus around reactivating the British economy (and, let’s face it, four national consensuses), his numbers sag back towards normal dislike: Sturgeon’s, and her government’s, soar. It’s not particularly fair, but hey. Nothing is, in the end.

And so the SNP will likely win an overall majority again when we get to next year’s Scottish Parliamentary elections, just as they did in 2011 (but failed to in 2016). That’s not certain – nothing is, in the age of the pandemic – but it looks pretty likely right now. That will set off yet another existential crisis for British politics. Stop us if you’ve heard all this before.

Holyrood will call for another referendum on independence. It will not even have been seven years since the last one. Like buses, referendums all seem to come bunched up together. But who can really say that the mandate won by David Cameron in 2014 has not run out, after everything that’s happened? The prospectus for the Union now seems fundamentally altered, not least because now it does not involve staying in the European Union.

The Scottish Government will, even so, now run into a problem. That’s because they can’t legally hold a referendum – not without a so-called Section 30 Order under the devolution legislation gaining permission for such a plebiscite from the UK’s central government. It will be at this stage that the long-running and chronic nature of this likely crisis may become apparent.

It will not be in Johnson’s interests to give way at this point. As the economy drags itself out of the coronavirus slump – if we’re lucky – and as his own government reaches mid-term after eleven years of Tory power, he is hardly likely to risk it all on a completely reckless gamble ‘north of the border’ (as he no doubt thinks of it).

If he lost, he would have to resign. And there is nothing, nothing in this world more important to Boris Johnson than Boris Johnson. Not his dog. Not his cardboard buses. Not his many indiscretions. Being Boris Johnson, Prime Minister, is all there is to the whole puppet show.

Nor will his small cadre of Vote Leave ideologues willingly give up the levers of power in Whitehall and Westminster for what they must regard as a sideshow and a bore. Their mission is, firstly, to rewire the British state to conduct single-shot missions of scientific and industrial renewal, and secondly to push back against the long hegemony of left-liberal ideas in the cultural and intellectual sphere. Who cares about Scotland when you’ve got those pieces on the table?

So Johnson will just say ‘no’ – and keep on saying no, all the way up to and including a General Election. What’s that, we hear you cry? That would be a democratic outrage? Well, let us introduce you to: the Prorogation of the last Parliament; voter ID laws; attempts to diddle shielding Members of Parliament out of their voting rights: and so on.

There’s a second reason why you’d let the SNP keep calling for a new referendum on independence. And that’s the way it gives you a wedge issue in England. You can warn against a Labour government reliant on the ‘foreign’ SNP; you can turn English voters against the ‘feather-bedded’ Scots. Although the evidence that the tactic worked in the 2015 General Election is sketchy and limited, it certainly didn’t hurt.

The Fixed-Term Parliaments Act mandates the next General Election be held in May 2024, but the legislation is likely soon to be repealed, and it may be that the Tories will go to the country as soon as 2023. That will make pressure from Edinburgh even easier to resist, in the run-up to the next election.

What better cry in England could there be than keeping the whole country together? What better toughness can be displayed than just saying ‘no’, ‘no’ and ‘no’ again to the SNP? There is of course the risk to both the Union and the Conservatives’ Scottish seats, but firstly no-one in the midst of those radicals now running the country cares much about the Union, and secondly the Tories only have six Scottish seats, two of which look highly vulnerable whatever happens.

So the gamble is all one way: the risk clusters very thickly around granting a Section 30 Order. It can’t be ruled out. Johnson may see the ball suddenly break out of the scrum, and decide to run for it, pell-mell towards another messy brawl. But it’s less than likely.

For these reasons, after coronavirus the British state will face the arduous task of putting back together its place in the world – and of staying together at all. A long-running battle will emerge, absorbing and exhausting, over whether to draw a new and hard border near Carlisle and Berwick. The Tories will keep shaking their heads. Scottish public opinion could get angrier and angrier.

Because of the frustrations and delays of what could well become a deliberate stalling strategy, the case for the Union may well then be lost. Johnson will deliberately be leaving the unexploded ordnance of a second independence referendum to a future Labour minority administration. The Tories will thus seek to hobble, and ultimately blow up, any left-wing government from the start. They may well succeed.

These strategies are not attractive. But they are rational. And they could well work – setting the scene for another set of ructions in Northern Ireland and Wales. Institutions seek to defend and replicate themselves: the continuity of government is all. But the continuity of British governance is now deeply in doubt.

PLEASE NOTE: This blog will be coming to an end in October. The very first entry was published on 25 October 2010, and exactly ten years later seems like the right time to bring down the curtain. There is so much to do, and some other people are very kindly asking me to write for them. The blog will therefore cease, although it will stay up as a reference point - for its hyperlinks, if nothing else. So, given the traditional August break, there are only three more monthly blogs to come. Hopefully they will be good ones...