The Union looks done for
Opinion polls show consistent and increasing support for Scottish Independence; a poll this week puts it at 58%. The perception that Nicola Sturgeon has responded to the Covid crisis more convincingly than Boris Johnson goes some way to account for this, whether that perception is well-founded or not. Those who believe she has handled it well pay no heed to the fact that financial measures to alleviate the hardships resulting from the pandemic and the economic damage it has done have been the responsibility of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Treasury, not the Scottish Government which has been able to choose its own path without having to pay for it.
Undoubtedly, however, another fact has been, or is, more responsible for any shift in opinion. The difference in measures and regulations relating to the pandemic either side of the Anglo-Scottish Border makes it look as if there are already separate states, Scotland and UK.
For Unionists there are hard times, puzzling ones too. Neither the well-documented failures of the Scottish government nor the grubby scandal concerning the former First Minister, Alex Salmond, and the Scottish government’s handling of his case, seems to make a blind bit of difference. In a poll this week Scots gave Nicola Sturgeon an approval rating of 71%, Boris Johnson one of 19%.He doesn’t look like the man to save the Union; quite the contrary.
Perhaps it can’t be done. I’ve been thinking, as I often do, of my old friend Tam Dalyell. As a long-serving Labour MP he argued resolutely against his own party’s espousal of devolution and its plan to create a Scottish Parliament. On the one hand, he thought that what Scotland – and indeed England – needed was better and more powerful local government. On the other he told us that devolution would put Scotland on a motorway to Independence – a motorway with no exits.
Meanwhile, Donald Dewar, Secretary of State for Scotland and architect of the Act which established the Scottish Parliament, assured us that devolution “would make for the better governance of Scotland and the United Kingdom.”
Believing this, he nevertheless campaigned alongside Alex Salmond in the 1997 referendum, even though Salmond was telling his disciples that devolution was a step on the road to Independence. I remarked, in countless newspaper articles, “they can’t both be right.”
Well, which now looks to have judged right: Dewar or Salmond?
In the debates leading up to the 1707 Treaty of Union, some in the old Scottish Parliament argued for a federal Union, others for an “incorporating” one. The second argument prevailed, but the incorporation was never complete. Scotland retained its own national and distinctive institutions, notably the Presbyterian Kirk and its legal system. Scots Law was not only different from English Law, but independent of it. Later when the modernised administrative state developed, Scotland remained different. Schools and Universities were managed by the Education department of the Scottish Office, not by the Ministry of Education in London.
Likewise, when the 1945 Labour Government created the National Health Service, the NHS in Scotland was the responsibility not of the Ministry of Health in London but of a department of the Scottish Office. The Union was therefore always imperfect, a balancing act, and the balance was not upset as long as Scots were comfortable in a dual identity, Scottish and British, with now one uppermost, now the other.
Political devolution with the creation of a parliament and executive (now government) in Edinburgh brought us to where we are today. It has done so contrary to Donald Dewar’s expectation, and in the last twenty years Scotland has become semi-detached and politically less British, while the UK parties, Conservative and Labour alike have yielded ground to the SNP. Accordingly a move to complete detachment, that is to say, political independence, looks to be on the cards.
Some still hope to avert it by further devolution or the creation of a federal UK. There may have been a time when federalism appeared feasible, but I fear that time has passed. Further devolution seems like prescribing whisky as a cure for alcoholism.
We are caught in a net of paradoxes. On the one hand political Scotland is more Scottish, less British. On the other hand, social Scotland is less distinctively Scottish and much more like England. There is no distinctive Scottish economy and there are few large indigenous companies. Even famous brands of whisky are owned by multinationals. What is left of high streets either side of the Border looks much the same.
Scottish nationalism today is rooted less in a sense of difference than in a wish to proclaim a difference that in most respects does not exist. We are caught up in Identity politics because for hundreds of thousands of Scors proclamation of a distinct identity is all that is left. The Union must be broken not because we are different but so that we can feel different. This aspiration is the driving force of the independence movement.
Of course, there are still obstacles on the road to independence, and some of them are, or should be, daunting. There is the fiscal imbalance which cannot be wished away and which only the most starry-eyed of nationalists can deny. However you juggle the figures public spending is higher in Scotland than the public revenue raised in Scotland. Of course this might in time be reversed, but equally it might take a long time for this to happen.
Today, independence isn’t inevitable, but it looks likely. The prevailing wind of identity politics is blowing strongly and blowing us towards separatism. Denying the SNP a majority in next May’s Scottish parliamentary election might represent a stay of execution; but for how long? We are already many miles along the motorway Tam Dalyell warned us against.
Elderly Unionists are dying , as Angus Robertson, the former SNP leader in the Commons, recently crowed, while young nationalists come on to the electoral roll. Quite so. The Union is not dead, perhaps not even on a life-support machine, but it’s looking bloody sick.