An invitation to Nicola Sturgeon: Will the SNP take part in building a federal UK?

Nicola Sturgeon feels she has the initiative. The SNP returned its second best result in last month’s general election, so Scotland’s First Minister feels able to ditch her pledge that the 2014 referendum would settle the question of Scottish independence for a generation.

A number of distinguished statesmen and commentators from Sir John Major and Tony Blair to Allan Massie of this parish have accepted that Brexit would constitute a convenient and respectable excuse for Mrs. Sturgeon to bury that pledge: for did Scotland not vote overwhelmingly to remain? It fitted in so well with their own reasons for wishing to remain. Not only would Brexit be an economic disaster, but it would break up the United Kingdom to boot. To resist Brexit was therefore not only the way to avoid economic disaster; it was also for any British Unionist an inescapable duty. It was the only way to preserve the Union.

On purely practical grounds, this argument is difficult to follow. 

The obvious argument is one the SNP would dismiss. They want an independent Scotland to be a member of the EU. If the French manage to persuade the Germans that the EU should take more powers from the member states, the Scots would be swapping the tutelage of Westminster for the tutelage of Brussels. The SNP’s visceral objections to Westminster and Whitehall clearly make marriage to Ursula more attractive than marriage to Boris. That nationalist choice is understandable, given the romantic adventures of Scottish history from William Wallace to the Highland Clearances where the English and their Campbell friends are always the villains, but it does not constitute sovereign independence.

If, on the other hand, the EU remains suspended between full statehood and a customs union defensively trying to survive in an increasingly competitive and dangerous world, Scotland’s position could be even worse after independence. It would be rejoining an EU stuck in limbo: the supranational equivalent of Winston Churchill’s description of Alfred Bossom M.P., neither one thing nor the other.

What is more difficult to understand is the practical as opposed to the romantic attraction of an independent Scotland, whether inside or outside the EU. 

Outside the EU, Scotland would certainly struggle economically as a high taxation centralised socialist state of the kind that Sturgeon instinctively embraces. Eventually the Scots would probably make it as a Singapore on Forth, just as many a small country made it in the 20th century, but it would take time, much hardship and a dramatic change in her government’s ideology: all vanishingly difficult.

Equally, an independent Scotland would face difficulties both in becoming a member of the EU and thereafter.

 Most EU members would welcome Scottish membership in principle and would therefore be happy, also in principle, to fast track Scotland’s application. In practice Scotland’s application might not be received with unfettered joy, both by the member nations and the Commission.

The nation most likely to oppose Scotland’s application would be Spain, all too conscious of how it might set a precedent for Catalonia. Although France might quietly entertain similar reservations because of Brittany, the Basque Country and Corsica, as might Italy, because of Alto Adige, schadenfreude at the UK’s difficulties over Scotland would no doubt encourage both of them to suppress such thoughts. Anyway, the independence movements in those regions seem for the moment quite containable.

From the Brussels point of view, a Europe of the regions may once have been attractive to some Eurocrats, but such a vision is today politically much more difficult, leading as it would to the break up of nation states which, unlike the EU, are possessed of a demos, the sense of belonging to a polity. The Scots would have no difficulty in establishing a Scottish demos, but they would be helping the balkanisation of Europe, something that the Balkans themselves show does not have a happy history.

There is also the question of money. As one senior Eurocrat was recently heard to observe: “At a time when we have lost our second biggest contributor, do we really want another (expletive deleted) little country begging for more subsidies?”

The other recipients of German, Dutch and French financed largesse in the EU might say amen to that.

 From the Scots own point of view, it is clear that they would have to apply to join the EU after independence: they would have left the Union with the rest of the UK on the 31st January. It is also clear that they would need to qualify in a number of ways in order to rejoin: for instance by agreeing to join the Euro, by reducing their deficit from between 7% and 8% of GDP to under 3% and by erecting whatever barriers at Gretna Green and Carter Bar the UK’s final deal with the EU required.

England willingly subsidises a high spending Scotland at the moment and is Scotland’s biggest trading partner by far in a single currency free trade area and customs union. Are Mrs. Sturgeon and the 45% of the Scottish electorate who voted for the SNP on 12th December willing to pay a cripplingly high price to satisfy their visceral dislike of the English and a realisation of the Jacobite dream of nominal independence financed by France?

These difficulties would have existed, but in less acute form, had Scotland voted for independence while the United Kingdom was still a member of the EU. Now we are about to leave, and Scotland with us, it looks as though, contrary to what a lot of Remainers contended, it will be much more difficult for Scotland to survive and prosper as an independent nation, either inside or outside the EU.

Not only would Scotland have to take some difficult and expensive decisions, but she would break up what has been a successful, if increasingly flawed, 300 year old economic and political union. Sturgeon has said she would try and ensure that the divorce was as velvet in character as the Czecho-Slovak divorce and plan for harmonious relations between Scotland and the United Kingdom. But the scope for disputes is infinite and they would be disputes involving far greater complexities than the divorce of Czechoslovak nations that had only been united since 1919. Such matters lead to friction and ill-will, particularly when a third party such as the EU is involved, as inevitably it would be.

There is an alternative the SNP, or at least their non-Taliban wing, might like to consider.

About five years ago a number of former officials and current and retired politicians from Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland formed the Constitution Reform Group. The Group’s steering committee counts among its number members of the Conservative, Labour, Liberal and Ulster Unionist Parties. It includes a former Clerk of the House of Commons and former first ministers of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. The Group has been advised by a number of experts, particularly in the financial field, and continues to consult widely among academics, lawyers, bankers, former civil servants and members of the judiciary, constitutional specialists from abroad and, most important of all, the general public. Among the specialists and members of the public the Group has consulted have been an encouraging number of Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish.

The Group has produced a Bill, drafted by a former senior Parliamentary Counsel, which Lord Lisvane, the former Clerk of the House of Commons, introduced into the House of Lords in the last Parliament; an updated version of the Bill, reflecting the Group’s further work, will be introduced early in the new Parliament.

The members of the Constitution Reform Group disagree profoundly about many things. For instance, many, perhaps even most of them, are strong Remainers and would strongly disagree with the arguments I, their Chairman, have deployed in this article about Brexit’s effect on Scotland’s prospects for independence. Their view is that Brexit has made Scottish independence more rather than less likely. What we do all agree on, however, is that the four nations of the present United Kingdom are stronger and better able to serve their peoples as one polity rather than as independent states.

The Group also agrees that the Kingdom’s present constitutional arrangements have been cobbled together hurriedly and have left a number of loose ends. Until now our constitutional arrangements have adapted themselves to fit our requirements like an old shoe to a calloused foot. It is becoming increasingly difficult to make the old shoe fit. This difficulty reinforces the centrifugal forces within the kingdom and encourages disputes to be resolved, faute de mieux, by the courts, risking the politicisation of the judges. The resultant need for reform was apparent to members of the Group before Brexit, but Brexit has further underlined that need.

The Bill we have produced proposes some radical changes which effectively would transform the United Kingdom into a fully federal state. Each of the four nations of the Kingdom would agree with Westminster and Whitehall what the institutions of the United Kingdom would continue to do and what powers would be exercised in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Before the new Act came into force, it would have to be approved by a substantial majority of each of the four nations in a referendum.

The Bill only addresses the relations between the four constituent nations, but does not address the elephant in the room, which is England’s internal governance. With 85% of the Kingdom’s population and the most centralised administration, how England is governed influences the other three nations heavily. There is much work being undertaken on the question of England, for instance by the former Labour Cabinet Minister John Denham, by the distinguished historian Sir David Cannadine and by the former Labour MP Gisela Stewart. The CRG sees their work as complementary to its own.

The sponsor of the Bill in the House of Lords, Lord Lisvane, describes the approach the CRG has adopted as “avoiding Imperial Condescension”. He feels that Scots and Welsh in particular have been viewed by Whitehall in discussing their constitutional futures with just such an air. 

If he is right, and he often is, the CRG’s approach is the very opposite of that. It sees its Bill as work in progress which it encourages any interested party to improve. It hopes its initiative will begin to build a consensus that the United Kingdom needs a new constitutional settlement if it is to realise its potential for its peoples and that such a settlement would be a more attractive option for the four nations of the Kingdom than its breakup.

So, the CRG have a challenge for the SNP. The UK has endured three and a half years of negotiations with Brussels, led, to Nicola Sturgeon’s intense dissatisfaction, by Whitehall. There are some more difficult negotiations to come over our future relationship with the EU. The SNP propose to add at least four further layers to those: a fight to secure an Indy2 referendum, the referendum campaign itself, negotiations over an independent Scotland’s relationship with what remains of the UK, including defence and foreign policy, and some renewed negotiations with the EU over Scotland’s application to rejoin.

Can the Scottish people stand God knows how many more years of uncertainty, particularly as they will lose their UK subsidies without knowing for sure how much they will get from the EU whose own finances are a bit rocky? 

Would it not be less of a risk to join the other three nations of the Kingdom and try to see how we can work better together, including on the crucial question of England? It would perhaps even be less of a risk than another independence referendum, given that on the 12th December there did not yet seem to be a majority in Scotland for it.

The Scots led much of the Industrial Revolution. They were the sinews of empire and of the years of dominance of British trade. They, with the ANZACS and the Canadians won the First World War. Glasgow was the second city. The peoples of the four nations have a new job to do in a new age, but a dangerous one. Demographically and economically continental Europe is in relative decline. The United Kingdom is not. There is much to do if we are to prosper and we need a new constitutional settlement to enable us to do it.

If the SNP were to consider taking part in a conversation about the CRG’s Bill, it would be worth finding out if the government were game to discuss the idea: no commitments on either side, but just an initial contact. The SNP has the initiative. There is more than one way they can use it. This is one of them.

Lord Salisbury is chairman of Reaction.