Timidity has failed – time for more active Unionism and intervention to level-up Scotland
“Nothing has changed”. Well, not a lot anyway. Surprises were thin on the ground. It was a very conservative election. In England, Scotland and Wales the party that has, on the whole successfully, managed the Covid epidemic could claim victory. No doubt the efficient roll-out of the vaccination programme contributed. Boris Johnson, Nicola Sturgeon and Mark Drakeford have all been rewarded. Likewise in England approval has been given to incumbent mayors, and those who are perceived to be doing a good job – Andy Burnham in Manchester, Ben Houchen in the Tees Valley – have seen their majorities soar.
What of Scotland? Here the only surprise was the turnout, higher than in any of the five previous Holyrood elections. But the higher turnout, pleasing though it may be, has altered nothing. The country remains evenly divided. As before, the SNP, benefitted from the Unionist vote being split in three. Though there was some evidence of tactical voting, this wasn’t on a big enough scale to prevent the SNP from winning 62 out of the 73 constituencies on just under 48 per cent of the vote. To put it another way, the level of the SNP’s popularity in Scotland is almost exactly identical with that of the Conservatives in England. Both parties meet with the approval of almost half the electorate. In Scotland the List (proportional representation by the Additional Member system) goes some way to correcting the bias of first-past-the-post, so that in the final reckoning the SNP has 64 seats, the Conservatives 31, Labour 20 and the Liberal Democrats four. Oddly the Lib Dems’ four MSPs all won their constituency. There are also eight Green MSPs, all elected on the List. In fact the Greens stood in only a few constituencies, getting a total of 34,990 votes there, as against 220,324 List ones. It’s probable that a fair number of SNP supporters voted Green on the List, rightly reckoning that with the SNP gobbling up constituencies, a SNP vote on the List was a vote wasted. (Nevertheless the SNP still got 40 per cent of List votes.)
Two things are certain. At some point in this Parliament the SNP, with the help of its Green allies, will pass a measure setting out proposals for an Independence referendum. However, according to the terms of the Scotland Act of 1997 which provided for the Scottish Parliament and the transfer of powers from Westminster to Holyrood, constitutional questions are reserved to the UK Parliament. To be lawful a referendum requires its assent. There is no legal way of getting round this and Nicola Sturgeon is too canny, and indeed sensible, a politician to seek one.
In any case the second certain point is that, as the psephologist Sir John Curtice says, Scotland is split evenly down the middle on the question of independence. That split would probably widen in the course of an actual Referendum campaign, but widen which way? Nobody can be sure. Sturgeon must however know that none of the difficult questions raised in the 2014 Referendum has been persuasively answered, while the consequences of Brexit complicate the argument, especially with regard to the possibility of Scottish membership of the European Union.
Sturgeon will continue to talk up a referendum, partly in order to keep her troops happy. But the case for delay is strong and made stronger by the security of her own position after this election. The strident Nationalists, some of whose criticism of Sturgeon has been vitriolic, have surely been seen off. Alex Salmond‘s attempt to return to politics has flopped ignominiously. His claim that his Alba Party “has established itself as a force to be reckoned with” is risible, and Kenny MacAskill and Neale Hanvey, the two SNP MPs who defected to it, look very silly.
What now? There is no evident enthusiasm for constitutional tinkering, though citizens of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee might look enviously at the opportunities being seized by mayors in England to invigorate their cities. For Nationalists, the devolution of more powers is no substitute for independence. Middle-aged Unionists remember Scottish Labour’s vain belief that devolution would bury the SNP, and smile ruefully or sardonically.
The Scottish Conservatives and Scottish Labour are, it seems, at their wits’ end. They have tried to hold the SNP to account, dwelling on the party’s evident failures in government, to no, or very little, effect. The Scottish Tory leader, Douglas Ross, was criticised for campaigning almost entirely on a no-to-a-referendum platform. Labour’s new leader Anas Sarwar was judged to have had a good election, talking more positively about issues, notably education and the NHS. It made no difference what either said.
Unionism has been timid, even apologetic, for more than twenty years now. Half a century ago Unionists confidently affirmed “Scotland is British”. That slogan had a subtext; Britain is Scottish too. Can this Scottish self-confidence be reanimated in what sometimes feels like the eleventh hour of the United Kingdom, even if it is not yet the twelfth?
An opportunity was missed during the Blair years. In 1997 the New Labour Government was stuffed to the gills with Scots: Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, Derry Irvine, John Reid, George Robertson, Donald Dewar, Alastair Darling, Gavin Strang. Irvine, as Lord Chancellor, was in the Lords; all the others were not only Scots but represented Scottish seats. No government has ever been better placed to embody these two ideas: Scotland is British and Britain is Scottish.
But Labour had already committed itself to devolution and when the Scottish Parliament came into being in 1999 Donald Dewar, previously Secretary of State for Scotland, left Westminster to be First Minister in Edinburgh. Scotland was put on the road to becoming a semi-detached part of the United Kingdom, and very soon Scottish Labour entered its long decline, a decline so steep that it now holds only two constituency seats in the Scottish Parliament, and only one, Edinburgh South, in the House of Commons.
Since 1999 Scotland has been left largely to its own devices. Unionist parties may still attract half the vote (53.1 per cent in the 2019 General Election), but being for good reasons divided on almost all subjects except the Union, cannot make any inroads on the SNP’s complacent supremacy.
Successive British governments since 1999 have, no matter who was in office in Westminster, pursued a policy of non-intervention in Scotland and Scottish affairs. They have respected devolution and gained nothing from their self-denial.
This has suited the SNP; it has served the Union badly. Of course it is right, and indeed necessary, to accept that those areas of government which, by the provisions of the Scotland Act, are devolved to Holyrood, are the responsibility of the Scottish government. It would, for instance, be wrong for the UK government to interfere with schools in Scotland, no matter how badly they are functioning.
Nevertheless it is surely now clear that in practice authority, as well as specific powers, has been ceded to the Scottish government, and that this has served the Union badly, to the profit of the SNP. So, for example, we have arrived at a point when the achievements of the British government are barely recognised by Scots: the Treasury’s financing of furlough which has softened the consequences of the pandemic for millions of Scots is ascribed by many of them to the Scottish government, as is the quick action which has made it possible for vaccinations to proceed must faster in the United Kingdom than in most member states of the European Union.
More active and well advertised intervention by the UK government is necessary if Scotland is not to lag behind the rest of the UK in the recovery from Covid-19. The UK government should be as ready to promote economic development and revival in Scotland as it plans to do in the Red Belt towns and cities of the English North and Midlands, equally ready to advertise its involvement.
The simple truth is that, from the Unionist point of view, the hands-off policies practised by every British government since 1999 have served only to benefit the SNP. Active Unionism is now necessary if the Union is not to wither away to such an extent that Scottish Independence comes to seem both natural and inevitable.