Boris’ strategy risks break-up
As Johnson wins over more English voters, Scots are turned off
The great realignment of British politics accelerated this week, but it pulls in starkly different directions either side of the Scottish border.
In England, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party scored decisive victories in regional elections on Friday, leaving the opposition Labour Party gasping for breath. But the same populist forces that propelled the Conservatives there cut against them in Scotland, where supporters of Scottish independence are on track to rejuvenate their long bid for independence.
For Johnson, the results add up to the ultimate split decision: Victorious in England, with an opposition so vanquished that it gives the Conservatives a simulacrum of one-party rule, but threatened by Scotland, which could make him the prime minister who presides over the dissolution of the United Kingdom.
“The tectonic plates of British politics had already begun to shift, and they are now shifting further and quite possibly faster,” said Tony Travers, a professor of politics at the London School of Economics. “What links these elections is Boris Johnson, not liked in Scotland, but pretty much liked in England.”
Johnson’s brand of soft-edged populism played well in the old Labour bastions of northern England. He was helped further by the rollout of vaccines and more generally by the pandemic, which enabled him to remake the Conservatives as a party of New Deal-style state intervention.
Yet Johnson remains unpopular in Scotland, where his pro-Brexit credentials still rankle Scots, who voted in a majority against leaving the European Union. The Scottish National Party has championed a second independence referendum that would reverse that decision, if only for Scotland.
“The challenge for Boris Johnson is that he is finding that the better he does in England, the more he alienates Scotland,” said Matthew Goodwin, a professor of politics at the University of Kent.
Vote counting was taking longer in Scotland than in England, so it was unclear whether the Scottish National Party would win an outright majority in Scotland’s Parliament. Even if it falls a few seats short, it can assemble a pro-independence majority with the support of Scottish Greens, guaranteeing that pressure on Johnson to allow a referendum will mount.
Still, there was plenty for Johnson to celebrate. The parliamentary byelection in Hartlepool was a humiliation for the Labour Party, which had held the seat since the constituency’s establishment in the 1970s. Conservative candidate Jill Mortimer captured nearly twice the number of votes as the Labour candidate, Paul Williams.
Labour candidates fared as badly in local elections in northern towns and cities, as the party’s “red wall” in working-class parts of the country crumbles. Conservatives benefited from the absence of single-issue pro-Brexit parties, which had previously split the vote.
Even as Brexit has receded as an issue, voters seemed determined to abandon the blue-collar party of their parents and grandparents for the Johnson government’s message of “levelling up” the Midlands and the north with London and other more prosperous cities.
Johnson struck an uncharacteristically modest tone. “What has happened is that they can see we did get Brexit done and, to a certain extent, they can see that we delivered on that,” he said in Hartlepool. “What people want us to do now is to get on with delivering on everything else.”
Reaction to Johnson’s election-eve deployment of navy ships to the island of Jersey, in a dispute with France about fishing rights, was more muted in Scotland than in England, where tabloids rhapsodised about a latter-day battle of Trafalgar.
“Up here it was seen as English nationalism, not British nationalism,” said James Mitchell, professor of public policy at Edinburgh University.
For Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, the path to independence remains tricky. If the SNP does not win an outright majority, the momentum behind another referendum might dissipate temporarily.
The last time Scots held a referendum, they voted against leaving the United Kingdom by 55 per cent to 44 per cent. Polls put support for independence at roughly 50-50, slightly weaker than six months ago.
Still, with support of the Greens, Sturgeon is likely to have the numbers to press on with legislation for another plebiscite, and to provoke a legal challenge from Johnson or allies.
Said Mitchell: “One way that could see more people coming over to the cause of a referendum is the perception of London blocking a referendum or of it undermining Scotland.”