Why a new electoral pact is needed to defeat the SNP and save the Union

The latest opinion poll suggests that 57% of Scottish voters would vote to leave the United Kingdom. That is 3% up from an earlier poll. It now looks, therefore, as if Nichola Sturgeon is heading for a landslide in next year’s Scottish elections. She would undoubtedly take such a victory as a mandate for holding another referendum. Boris Johnson would find such a demand hard to resist.

Scots who want to remain part of the UK should now be bending every sinew to make sure that those Unionist candidates who are most likely to succeed get a free run against SNP opposition in next year’s elections. So, although the Scottish Labour Party needs a new leader who can revive the old Labour vote in the Central Belt, the Liberal Democrats and the Tories should also be giving Labour candidates a clear run there. Equally, they should conclude a Lib-Con electoral pact of their own for the rest of Scotland.

The rational case the Unionist election candidates will have is a powerful one. Just take one part of that case: breaking up a successful integrated currency and trading block whose power is today providing  vast sums to help shield Scotland during the Covid crisis would be near suicide without a convincing alternative. The SNP will argue that the EU is that alternative.

They should be careful what they wish for.

The much-trumpeted 750 billion-euro scheme which eventually emerged last month is not a done deal and may well be unfit for purpose: it has yet to pass the European Parliament, its terms and conditions are far from clear and its size inadequate. It may also be available too late to deal with Italy’s problems and too divisive to form an enduring basis for the new regime of full fiscal transfers the Euro needs to ensure its own survival. Even if it succeeds, Scotland may not get much of the cake.

Besides, it might take years of negotiation for an independent Scotland to rejoin the EU and we cannot know what will be demanded of her during those negotiations in terms of deficit reduction, what would qualify her for financial support or what the EU would impose on her as conditions for joining the Euro. Add to that the tricky negotiations that will be necessary to agree Scotland’s future relationship with the rest of the United Kingdom and Scottish independence begins to look a very courageous leap into the unknown. And this would be happening at a time when the world is becoming an increasingly unfriendly place for small socialistically inclined countries whose principal physical asset, oil, is a pariah which is in any case in peril of running out.

Condemning the Scots to years more of the uncertainty they and the rest of us have endured since the Brexit Referendum, therefore, seems particularly self-indulgent of Mrs Sturgeon.

The difficulty for Unionists is that rational argument doesn’t seem to cut much ice with the Scots at the moment. Blaming the English for everything is easy and fun, particularly when you as a Scotsman are taking London’s money. That means you can always complain that the English are not giving you enough of it.

You as a Scotsman can also use the same tactic over things other than money. So, for instance, you can happily resent the prospect of being regulated from Whitehall after Brexit, even though you had been happy to be regulated from Brussels, and even though Whitehall will allow you to regulate more from Edinburgh than ever Brussels did. Sir Humphrey is a colonialist Englishman, while M. Michel, as a Belgian, is not English and that is apparently enough to qualify him to tell the descendants of William Wallace what to do.

You can see from the above paragraph how easily the break up of the United Kingdom can descend into wrangling and insults. Divorce after centuries of close integration and mutual endeavour can only lead to bitterness. I am not alone in being an Englishman of mixed Welsh and Irish descent, married to a Scot from a Jacobite family which has nevertheless for the last few centuries proudly served the United Kingdom. People like me bitterly resent the SNP’s plans to expose not only the Scots to great danger in an increasingly dangerous world, but the rest of the United Kingdom as well. And the bitterness can only get worse as the Taliban faction of the SNP set English against Scot and, worse, Scot against Scot. And for what? For a fantasy whose closest parallel is the Darien Scheme. That bankrupted Scotland, too.

There is a better way.

The United Kingdom flourished on projects in which that supremely talented and awkward nation, the Scots, played a disproportionate part: the Industrial Revolution, the Empire (whatever you think of it), two world wars. Even after the end of empire, the Scots continued to play a disproportionate part in the endeavours of the U.K. I remember in my short and undistinguished time in government the Cabinet Office was dominated by a number of outstandingly able people, most of whom seemed to speak with impenetrable Scottish accents. As my late-lamented Welsh-speaking friend Tristan Garel-Jones was wont to say, “The really stupid thing the Scot Nats have done is to let the cat out of the bag. Until now we Celts had been running the English without their realising it. Now the English know. Just think of the hash they will make of it without us.”

Look at what is happening in the world and imagine some of the things that are needed to bring prosperity and stability to a troubled planet.

The old world order is falling apart. The USA is for the moment no longer a reliable ally, the EU is expending its energies in trying to hold itself together, the planet’s centre of gravity is moving east of Suez and the emerging superpower is the Chinese police state. Now is not the time for the U.K. to fall apart, particularly when there are so many projects in which it could play a leading role and in which it would find it much more difficult to engage without the Scots and which, without the U.K., the Scots would probably not be able to engage in at all.

The list is a long one and everyone will have their own ideas. However, there are a number of obvious candidates.

The UK, for instance, is in a good position to take a lead in rebuilding international institutions and in reestablishing an international rules-based order. We can use our expertise in space to enter into partnership with countries like Japan, Canada and Australia. We can use such partnerships as a basis for engaging with China without that increasingly aggressive power picking us off one by one. We can enter into commercial  partnerships with African and Middle Eastern  countries to build up their economies and capacity to conserve water so that their most talented people stay at home.

All these things, and more, a revitalised United Kingdom could and should engage in, greatly strengthened by Scottish participation. However, it is difficult to see our country being able to participate effectively unless the governance and constitutional arrangements for the Kingdom are settled and generally accepted. Otherwise internal wrangling will continue to distract us from engaging in anything else.

At the moment, even most Unionists are unhappy with our present constitutional arrangements. It is true that there is a view that, whatever they are, we have already had enough change and we have no option but to try and make what we have now work: any further reform would be paying danegeld to the SNP and make Scottish independence more likely. However, it is not a view widely shared and with good reason. No one, except for Vernon Bogdanor perhaps, knows what our constitution is. Before Maastricht and devolution everyone did. Politically, by sticking to an imprecise status quo, we have handed momentum and the initiative to the SNP, the two things that matter in politics. Scottish independence does not seem to have become less likely as a result.

So, to wrest that initiative back and to prepare the UK for the role we Unionists feel it is qualified to play in the world, we need a new settlement. It cannot be imposed by Westminster, but must be arrived at by negotiation with the four nations of the Kingdom which will agree what the centre should do and what England, Scotland Wales and Northern Ireland should do for themselves. As a result we can avoid any hint of what Robert Lisvane has called “imperial condescension.”

The Constitution Reform Group has developed some proposals In an attempt to set out what such a future relationship might look like. It has drafted a bill embodying those proposals and Lord Lisvane introduced the bill in the House of Lords in the last Parliament. We hope to produce a new version for introduction in the next session. Meanwhile, the existing text  is available on our website.

If we Unionists are to recapture the political momentum and initiative, we have to reformulate what the Union is for. In order to do so they must appeal to the heads, but also to the hearts, not only of the Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish, but to the English as well, who are increasingly fed up with being insulted by the Scots and are inclined to say “good riddance”. The Unionist offer has to be an outward-looking vision for the future based on a new equitable constitutional settlement. The stakes are extraordinarily high. The prosperity of these islands and, even more important, their equanimity is at stake.”

The author is chairman of Reaction and chairman of The Constitution Reform Group.