Lockdown – not Brexit – is pushing Scotland towards independence

“I welcome the PM to Scotland today”, Nicola Sturgeon said on Twitter last week.

If her remark sounded as though it was written for the ambassador of a foreign power, the rest of her “welcome” could have been scripted to greet an imperial commissioner. Sturgeon lamented Scotland having its “future decided by politicians we didn’t vote for, taking us down a path we haven’t chosen”. Boris Johnson’s presence in Scotland highlighted that, she claimed.

Support for the SNP and independence is higher than it has ever been according to recent polling (at 54% for Yes) and the First Minister has been applauded by some Scots – literally – for her leadership during the pandemic. Her sentiments last week, echoed by her party members, is a reminder that Sturgeon can now talk like a sovereign because, for the purposes of the pandemic, she has become one.

A quirk of the UK-wide decision to put the country into lockdown it that it has handed more power to the devolved administrations than was ever supposed to be possible. For the past four months the administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have been able to dictate when and where their citizens can leave their homes, how often they can exercise and visit the shops, and how many people they can meet with in public parks. At times this has caused confusion, especially as the “route maps” out of lockdown have diverged.

This confusion only became apparent because borders between the four nations – meaningful until now only in a limited, administrative sense – have become effective physical borders. Never in modern times did the passage between England and either Wales or Scotland become so meaningful for how one must behave, and what one must wear, until the policy on masks and free movement went into lockstep and then, in the past month, into outright incoherence. The only sure thing is that devolved governments have gained a sovereignty, apparent to the public, over territory they have never had before.

Sturgeon’s tweet last week reflects a shift in nationalist rhetoric that has long been in development. Over twenty years since devolution began, it is clear that the project’s intention to “ward of the bigger threat of secession” has failed spectacularly. Those were the words of Tony Blair in an interview last year for “Has Devolution Worked?”, a paper published by the Institute for Government.

Blair argued then that Brexit, and the geopolitical chasm it revealed between Scotland and the south, particularly exacerbated the problem as seen by the pro-Union thinkers behind the devolution project. Any supporter of independence can now point to a constituency map of the UK, highlight the large chunk of yellow at the top, and dare anyone to argue that Scotland is not being “dragged out of Europe.” Brexit exposed the greatest democratic deficit Scotland had yet faced in the post-1999 era.

But the pandemic may have done more for shifting the terms of debate in Sturgeon’s favour even than Brexit. The relative performance of Scotland and England was always going to be a card worth playing, regardless of Sturgeon’s expressed wish not to make the pandemic “political”. It is much too late for that. The “meaningful” border has been sensationalised by hyper-nationalists demonstrating on the border, whose presence, though condemned by the SNP, speaks to a more profound change in perceptions offered by the lockdown.

The media regularly “compares” the performance of both countries as if Sturgeon and Johnson were independent authorities in each, a framework which underestimates the UK government’s role in managing the impact of the virus in Scotland, most obviously through the economic bailout.

Sturgeon’s apparently united cabinet is also compared with Johnson’s chaotic operation. Sturgeon herself is viewed by voters as the astute steward of Scotland’s recovery. The SNP line that Johnson not only appears to have lost control, but is now playing catch-up with Scottish policies, resonates. As Downing Street and Bute House, the residence of the First Minister, have become rival powerbases in the mission to control the disease and secure the recovery. The pandemic has also provided a platform for rival visions of the political future.

This pandemic, like many crises in history, has permanently upset established patterns of governance by requiring the introduction of temporary measures. That power will be impossible to take back. Not only have devolved governments demonstrated, in the eyes of the public, a calmer and more managerial approach. The crisis has allowed the public to cross the imaginative threshold of “secession” more easily. In historical perspective this is hardly surprising. When, in the late 19th century, the Habsburg Empire granted Slavic “language groups” institutions for local representation, these soon became platforms for the rise of nationalist movements. Crises like the 1848 Revolution sped up this process.

This highlights the irony that the roots of the Union’s problems lie firmly in that misguided effort to maintain it back in 1999. But in fairness to the architects of devolution, they could not have predicted a crisis of governance this profound, nor the political outcome of lockdown.

But it has happened: a project to cede power back into the localities has permitted those localities to reform their understanding of their relationship with the UK.

It is a headache for students of the British constitution and a nightmare for those committed to the Union. In hindsight, the pandemic may be seen as the moment that permitted the SNP and their supporters to persuade sufficient voters to imagine a separate sovereign state.