Sorry, the Union is doomed

I’ve written political columns for more than forty years, many  – more indeed than I care to think –  about Scottish devolution and independence. I argued against devolution in the Eighties and Nineties, and voted “no” in the 1997 referendum. Since then I’ve argued against independence, and voted “no” in the 2014 referendum. Now I wonder if it was all a waste of time and energy.

Actually I began to wonder a long time ago. I must have done so, for I remember telling Bruce Anderson when he came to visit me in the Borders that, no matter what arguments we produced, Scotland was heading for Independence. That was sometime in the Nineties. He told me I was talking nonsense. Meeting him by chance in London after the SNP had formed a minority Government at Holyrood in 2007, he said that what had seemed nonsense then now appeared all too likely.

How has this come about?

One has to go back to the debate about devolution and to pre-devolution politics.

There had long been administrative devolution. Scottish affairs were the responsibility of the Secretary of State for Scotland and the Scottish Office in London and Edinburgh. Things might be, and often were, done differently in Scotland. For instance, though we commonly talk of the NHS as a British institution, the NHS in Scotland was managed by the Scottish Office, not by the Department of Health in London. The Secretary of State for Scotland enjoyed both power and considerable autonomy. A strong Secretary of State like Willie Ross in the Wilson Government prevented Scottish matters from coming before the Cabinet; it was none of its business. The Scottish card was a high-ranking one and could be played adroitly. It was often used to bring new industry to Scotland. Tory Secretaries of State like George Younger and Malcolm Rifkind took tricks with it too. The steel mill at Ravenscraig was kept alive for years after the British Steel Corporation wanted to close it; I remember a conversation with  its CEO Bob Scholey in which he fumed indignantly about his inability to override the determination of the Secretary of State and the Scottish Office to keep it going.

In the run-up to the 1997 referendum, Andrew Neil and I did a TV interview with Donald Dewar, then the Secretary of State appointed by Tony Blair to pilot devolution legislation through the Commons. Andrew asked him what he might be able to do as the First Minister in a devolved Scottish administration that he couldn’t already do as Secretary of State. Dewar had no answer and was reduced to waffling.

Dewar had long been a convinced devolutionist. In the preamble to his Green Paper “Scotland’s Parliament” he declared that its establishment would make for “the better governance of Scotland and the United Kingdom”. Really? He was an honourable man. Nevertheless he was happy in that referendum to campaign alongside the SNP leader Alex Salmond who argued that Devolution was a stepping-stone on the road to Independence and the break-up of the United Kingdom . I repeatedly wrote “they can’t both be right”.

Dewar paid no heed  to Tam Dalyell’s sombre warning that devolution would set Scotland on a  motorway to Independence –“a motorway with no exits”. Tam thought that what Scotland needed was more and better local government; the Scottish Parliament and Government have taken powers from local government, starved it of resources and made Scotland the most centralised state –or sub-state –in western Europe.  Dewar preferred to agree with George Robertson who confidently asserted that Devolution would bury the SNP; the grave has remained empty. It seems to be waiting for the formerly dominant Labour Party.

The third Scottish parliamentary election in 2007 left the SNP the largest party able to form a minority government. Evidently Salmond had judged well in 1997, Dewar badly. In 2011 the minority government became a majority one. Salmond demanded a referendum on Independence; this required the agreement of the UK Government, the Scotland Act having reserved constitutional affairs to Westminster. David Cameron sensibly assented. There seemed little danger. All the polls showed a  comfortable majority in favour of the Union. Cameron was so confident that he allowed the SNP to frame the question, with Independence requiring a “yes” vote, the Union a “no” one. This gave a psychological advantage to the separatists.

The SNP were surprisingly ill-prepared, unable to answer key questions about, for example, the currency to be adopted after independence or an independent Scotland’s membership of the EU. Nevertheless they gained ground in the weeks of the campaign. This was partly because the Unionist campaign was miserably negative; it would be dubbed Project Fear. Back in 1978-9, the Unionists had confidently declared “Scotland is British”. No such positive assertion was made in 2014. The case for the Union seemed to have been taken from Belloc’s “Cautionary Verses”: “always keep a-hold of nurse/ for fear of finding something worse”. This was not inspiring. The polls narrowed. The momentum was with the separatists. Only Gordon Brown’s late intervention turned the tide: he made a positive case for the Union and rebuked Salmond and the SNP for their annexation of Scottish identity and patriotism. In the end the majority for the Union – 54 to 46 – was bigger than had seemed likely a few days earlier.

Yet the significance of Brown’s intervention went unremarked in London and was completely ignored when the EU referendum two years later gave an overall 52-48 majority for leaving the EU, while Scotland voted 64-36 in favour of Remaining. Brown had argued that there was no incompatibility between Scottish and British patriotism. But since first Mrs May and now, more stridently, Boris Johnson have embraced Brexit, with Johnson not flinching from the prospect of  a “No Deal Brexit”, that incompatibility has become evident, no serious regard having been given to the vote in favour of remaining in the EU that was delivered by two of the constituent parts of the United Kingdom, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Moreover it has become evident that, given the choice between Brexit and the integrity of the United Kingdom, a majority of Tory MPs and members choose Brexit.

Consequently a second Scottish referendum on independence seems unavoidable, and not only because the present Tory government dismays many Tory voters in Scotland. It has become more difficult to make the case in Scotland for the Union than it was in 2014 – only five years ago. What sort of Union, Scots may ask, are we being invited to vote for?

Well, this week, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, has let the cat out of the bag. Saying that a Labour Government would not stand in the way of another Scottish referendum on Independence, he injudiciously added that this should not be blocked by the English parliament.

The English Parliament? There has been no such beast since the 1707 Treaty of Union. Yet even for Labour, a Unionist Party which has its roots in Scotland, it now seems that the Parliament in Westminster is the Parliament of England, not of the United Kingdom, an English Parliament, not a British and Northern Irish one.

No doubt Mr McDonnell will apologise for his slip of the tongue, but such slips are significant; they reveal what the speaker truly thinks. It’s going to be hard to push that cat back into the bag. The Union is on the brink of disintegration. It is the Union, not the SNP, that will be buried, and the grave-diggers will have been the Brexiteers and Labour’s Shadow Chancellor. When that second referendum comes, as it will come, Scots will be asked if they are happy to be governed by the English Parliament. No prize for guessing the answer.

And what will I who have written in favour of the Union and against Independence for forty years do, say or write?. The answer is: nothing. A few weeks ago at a farmers’ market in Selkirk I happened on friends manning a “Pensioners for Independence” stall. I told them we were all too old to make that decision. We should leave it to those who will live with the consequences. I said this half in jest, but really I think I’ve had enough. I’ve defended the Union while it seemed worth defending. I can’t see that it still is, but I’ll leave it to younger people to write its death notice.

Almost a quarter of a century ago John Major warned Scots ardent for devolution that they were in danger of rousing the sleeping beast of English Nationalism. The beast has awoken. British nationalism is all but dead, English nationalism is blooming, English Tories drag an unwilling Scotland out of the EU, and the SNP is in clover. Everything I’ve written over the years in favour of the Union has been futile.

When the Treaty of Union was signed, the Earl of Seafield, Chancellor of Scotland, said “there’s the end of an auld song”. The sound of the new song – let’s say  “Rule, Britannia” (words by James Thomson, a Scot, music by Thomas Arne ,an Englishman) – is now fading away. Listen hard, and you may just catch its last notes before they die on the wind of change.