Covid-19 is a great accelerator. In most of the countries it has struck, whatever inequalities, divisions and tensions were festering before its arrival have now sped into the political foreground. And so it has proved here. Race, class, gender, poverty, wealth, the north-south divide – even though it often feels it as if time has stood still, all of these things are now vividly in front of us, demanding attention. And one key issue has come roaring back: the fate of the United Kingdom itself. Brexit and the pandemic are pushing its countries and regions in strikingly different directions.
Clearly, nothing highlights our increasingly unsettled, estranged national condition better than the politics of Scotland. One should always hesitate before claiming that mere polls represent historic shifts, but in the last few months, a number of surveys have found support for Scottish independence running at more than 50%. Leaving aside undecideds, a Panelbase poll last week put the for-and-against numbers at 55 and 45 respectively: an elegant inversion of the 2014 referendum result, and another excuse for stories about political shockwaves supposedly now spreading from Edinburgh to London.
It is remarkable that the possible end of the union has yet to enter England’s political conversation, on left or right.
The superficial explanation is obvious. As one Tory put it to me last week, Nicola Sturgeon has succeeded in creating a contrast between her government’s “cautious and communitarian” approach to Covid-19 and the idea that Boris Johnson’s administration has been “chaotic and market-driven”. As the UK government has lurched from crisis to crisis, she has presented an image of grown-up competence – even if, as evidenced by Scotland’s exam results fiasco, an image is sometimes all it is. Brexit is also central to what is happening, not least in the sense that remain-voting Scots who backed the union six years ago have decided that independence is now the better option.
Elections to the Scottish parliament will take place in May 2021. Even if the Scottish National party has done surprisingly little with its 13 years in power, and governs in a narrow, cliqueish fashion, the most recent poll on voting intentions for Holyrood found 57% of the electorate planning to support Sturgeon and her party in the constituency vote, and the SNP heading for an outright majority. The Johnson government still insists that it will not countenance another referendum on independence, certainly not during the current parliament. But the current situation seems to point in one direction: towards a potentially historic showdown, and the fissures decisively opened in 2014 becoming unmendable.
For some of us in England, independence for Scotland is still a fascinating and exciting prospect. The idea may be laced with anxiety about what exactly it would mean for politics in our home country, but it also highlights basic notions of democracy and self-determination, and suggests a realistic chance for a modern kind of left politics that could jump away from cruel, reckless economic liberalism and the lunacies and nastiness of Brexit. From a more dispassionate perspective, what seems remarkable is that the increasing possibility of an end of the union has yet to enter England’s political conversation, on left or right.
.A sense of ignorance and complacency may go right to the top. According to a recent report in the Financial Times, Michael Gove recently warned the cabinet of the seriousness of the situation and outlined ideas about how to pull Scotland back, and the first minister to respond was Rishi Sunak. “I now understand why this is so important,” he said. An odd thing for a holder of one of the great offices of state to say, but there we are
Sleepwalking is one aspect of the English approach to the union; the other is a biting hostility, which mirrors some of the uglier aspects of Scottish separatism. A vocal part of English opinion still imagines Scotland to be a place full of entitlement and unjustified grievances, and therefore best let go – a belief cynically encouraged by David Cameron and George Osborne in the election campaign of 2015, when they pushed the idea that Labour might go into coalition with the SNP, and signed off billboards featuring Alex Salmond with the caption “Don’t let the SNP grab your cash”. In June last year, let us not forget, a briefly infamous survey found that 63% of Conservative party members agreed that Scottish or Northern Irish secession was a price worth paying for our exit from the European Union. Brexity patriotism is a strange thing: always clad in the union jack but so defined by a crazed and zealous Englishness that it embraces a surreal contradiction: that in pursuit of a supposedly reborn United Kingdom, the UK itself can be written off as collateral damage.
For now at least, this is more the stuff of emotion than practical politics – and even if it still festers in the Tories’ collective soul, given that the end of the UK would surely spell the fall of Johnson and his ministers, the government wants nothing to do with it.
.When I spoke to a senior Conservative minister last week, they acknowledged the gravity and urgency of the current situation, and outlined roughly what they may try to do next year. Even if the SNP won by a landslide, recession and a lingering pandemic would perhaps allow the government to play for time (“The question would be, ‘Do you want to call a referendum now?’ I don’t think Sturgeon would want to”) while it tried to re-emphasise the kind of cultural argument voiced in 2014 by Gordon Brown – that people should not be forced to choose between Scottishness and their place in the UK. Much would be made of steps Westminster had taken to fight the worst effects of the pandemic, such as Sunak’s furlough scheme. If the debate carried on for another two or three years, this source reckoned, tensions over Brexit might by then have receded, along with the idea of the EU as an “easy cushion into which you could rest” if an independent Scotland instantly faced big fiscal and economic challenges
Whatever these arguments look like on paper, as Johnson holidays in Scotland and ministers are dispatched on PR trips, the idea of the government styling itself as the union’s great defender sits rather awkwardly with a plain fact. However much Tory voices may try to portray independence as a fiendish conspiracy worked up by the SNP, they and their party have played a huge role in weakening the union, and continue to do so.
Labour also has a case to answer – about the hatchet-faced, factional, macho politics that it embedded in Scotland over decades, and the fall into disgrace of the Blair government, not least on Iraq. But from the miners’ strike, through the poll tax to the bedroom tax, it has been Tory actions and aggressions that have most outraged Scots. By 1987 – 33 long years ago – the Conservatives were down to only 10 MPs in Scotland; a decade later, they had none at all. To have even tried to rebuild any meaningful legitimacy would have required an emollient, open, progressive kind of Conservatism – to some extent, the kind of politics belatedly tried by the former leader of the Scottish Tories, Ruth Davidson. But in retrospect, Brexit killed that prospect, and now far too much of what the Tories do threatens to only deepen Scotland’s estrangement from Westminster.
All this makes for a mixed-up and confusing political stew. Wreckers of the union are now desperately trying to save it, while the effects of the pandemic could conceivably fall in two contradictory directions – fomenting change but also convincing some people that in times as turbulent as these, the status quo remains the safest bet. So far, only one thing is crystal clear: that even as England dozes, British politics is now brimming with fundamental issues, and the fate of the UK will sooner or later prove to be the most fundamental of all .
UK Guardian
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