Sturgeon stuck: she can’t get a referendum on leaving the UK

Scotland’s First Minister has announced yet another plan to take Scotland independent. On Tuesday she put on her most stern face and told a press conference she would hold a referendum on Scotland leaving the UK.

This declaration is reported, south of the border and beyond, as though it is holy writ, for ostensibly understandable reasons. Sturgeon makes it sound like a real prospect and in the current context breaking up one of the main countries in the Western alliance, the nuclear armed UK, would be a big deal. So, it gets a lot of attention.

But this latest announcement is really just more tomfoolery from Sturgeon that isn’t going to happen, or not any time soon. The polling is clear: Scots don’t favour holding a referendum now or in the near future.

There was a referendum in 2014 because there was a broad consensus that the question should be put. The Westminster government signed the order allowing it to happen.

And that’s the key. The power to sanction a referendum is reserved to Westminster. Boris Johnson has said he won’t allow it and none of his Tory successors would either. Not when the SNP said that 2014 was a once in a generation event and that was only eight years ago.

While attacking the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, the Tories claim the opposition would offer the SNP a referendum in a hung parliament situation after the next election. Starmer and his senior colleagues are clear they wouldn’t do this, because it is not in their interests to create any impression they would facilitate the break up of Britain. Part of Starmer’s task in rehabilitating his party is to stress his British patriotism. Being bossed around by the Nats before or after the general election doesn’t help communicate the right message.

Sturgeon’s claims become ever less coherent. She explained on Tuesday that a Scotland outside the UK might be better off, a message undermined by her decision to announce this in coalition with the crazed Scottish Greens who say they don’t believe in growth, or economic prosperity.

Scotland would also be leaving the British Army, Royal Navy and RAF. An interesting choice given what’s happening with Russia right now and for the next few decades.

This is Sturgeon stuck, with history slipping away and her time in power passing.

None of this means Unionists should be complacent. The mess the British government has made of tax and spend,  central bank policy, passports, transport, and so on, combined with the Prime Minister’s shortcomings, may yet create an overwehlming clamour among Scots to get away from Westminster. For now, don’t hold your breath.

It’s the stupid economy

To Stockholm last week and back yesterday, having been stung in the north (of Sweden) by mosquitos the size of sparrows. I’m writing this from my sick bed in an allergic haze.

Leaving Sweden, the airport was snarled up. Police closed the motorway to prevent  passengers getting there for fear they would add to the overcrowding. It was bedlam. Kudos to the sharply dressed Swedish business person in our queue who intervened when two tracksuit wearing hoodlums attempted to jump in when we had all waited hours. The airport atmosphere was horrible, most un-Swedish, and what a contrast with the rest of a stay that was as delightful as ever, and all the better because it involved getting away from the Tory infighting at Westminster over the fate of Boris Johnson.

Incidentally, that airport chaos in Sweden can only really be about one thing. It must be down to Brexit. Everything wrong is down to Brexit, according to some people, if you think about it long enough, or even if you don’t, even chaos at foreign airports.

Landing back in Britain, it appears the economy is now officially up the spout. For the second month in a row there is negative growth. There is talk of a Sterling crisis, though bond yields have spiked for several other European countries. It looks like one of those summers, and autumns, coming up. One of those dramatic spells that shakes governments, and rocks the foundations of our system in the West.

In this context much of the discussion in the Conservative party, or among Boris Johnson’s supporters and critics alike, strikes me as being far too narrow when there’s a storm like that coming.

As I’ve pointed out innumerable times, so often it is boring, the Prime Minister has zero interest (really) in economics. It’s never been his bag in even the smallest way. The economy is something that just happens while he makes boosterish noises and drives around on a forklift truck being photographed in factories.

If, and that’s if, inflation combines with a recession or close to it, shortages, food poverty and widespread industrial action, it may become apparent quite quickly that there has been a casting mistake in Number 10.

The scale of the reset required is enormous. It will tax the world’s best economic brains, and even they might not be able to sort it quickly.

Central banks misjudged inflation, overdoing the money printing, and governments such as the Biden administration injected too much unnecessary stimulus. Fixing the economy and affordable energy supply will soon be everything. The public are likely to get even angrier with those in power, or in power for now. Being a leader whose main economic policy is being photographed driving a forklift truck won’t cut it.

Anti-social media

On the day before I departed for Sweden last week I wrote a column for The Times. It was published as we were travelling up into the  wilds, into the woods. The column argument was a pretty simple plea for nuance and compromise over Brexit. I’m glad the UK left. I like the increased geopolitical autonomy and think it proved itself worthwhile having on vaccines and Ukraine, when Britain moved quicker. That’s subjective, and I know Remainers tend to disagree, but politics and national positioning is often about establishing a frame of mind.

There’s quite a bit about Brexit that’s not working, however. That’s mainly on trade, where export businesses are struggling to make it work. The priority should be trying to fix that and get a compromise with the EU, I wrote. That would be nice, responded senior figures in the UK government later via WhatsApp, but the EU just won’t budge properly on the Northern Ireland Protocol. 

As we sped by assorted patches of open water, tributaries and picture perfect Scandinavian villages I clocked that the column was attracting quite a few comments below the line. I replied there and on Twitter a few times, before tuning out, and unusually not looking at my phone much for three days or so, other than fleetingly.

When I did tune back in properly it was obvious that the piece had attracted attention on political Twitter, a very small corner of anti-social media. There were lots of “threads” and “quote tweets” of people apparently “owning” me and quite a bit of shouting, some of it based on a fourth hand misreading of what I had said. One notorious twit described the column as a mea culpa, when it was a call for good faith compromise. I saw some nice comments from Remainer friends who were prepared to meet half way. But there was so much of the shouting and fury that it was impossible to get anything more than a vague impression of the contours of a chaotic row, like arriving right at the end of a raucous party in Glasgow when everyone is smashed and it’s flinging oot time.

This raises the question of whether if you are at the centre of a mini-storm on social media and not really aware of it at the time, did it really happen?

What I’m reading

Isabel Colegate, again, and I just finished Statues in a Garden, again. It’s a short novel set on the verge of the outbreak of the First World War in a grand Liberal family enjoying the idyllic last summer before the slaughter begins. Colegate is now in her 90s, and lives in Somerset, it is said. Her masterwork is the Orlando Trilogy, Orlando King, a three parter about a strange boy raised in rural France who is landed on an English family from where he blazes a trail in politics, then crashes after a scandal.

The only problem with Statues in a Garden (1964) in the new edition is the obligatory heavy-handed intro by a contemporary author, Lucy Scholes. Statues in a Garden, the reader is told, is about class dynamics and lives of “privilege and plenty”. You need only to look at the British Parliament today to see how – “tragically” – little has changed since the Edwardian era, she says. This is hokum. In 1914 Britain was the premier global financial superpower. The War changed that and handed the lead to the US. The Labour party was revving up and would replace the Liberals as the prime anti-Tory force.

Think little has changed in parliament? Today, look at the back stories of the Chancellor, the Home Secretary and the Health Secretary and many more MPs. There has been an extraordinary amount of change, much of it for the better. And if it is woven in with elements of continuity then isn’t that more desirable than scorched earth revolution? Yep.

Perhaps publishers feel they have to tack this on, it’s like a necessary catechism or a progressive mantra – privilege and plenty, privilege and plenty, how terrible. Statues in a Garden doesn’t need the overt signalling. It stands perfectly well on its own as a novel about human frailty, cruelty, City of London shenanigans, foolishness on the eve of war, and nice English gardens.

Iain Martin,
Editor and Publisher,
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