Johnson’s plan to buy Scotland
Prime Minister Boris Johnson is planning to spend billions of pounds on new road and rail links and treating Scottish patients on English NHS beds in a desperate counter-offensive against Nicola Sturgeon.
The strategy to save the Union, to be unveiled days after a feared SNP landslide this week, will also offer student exchanges between UK nations and will see diplomats ordered to make the case against Scottish independence in foreign capitals.
Whitehall lawyers have also been ordered to sharpen their pens to fight in court any attempt by the SNP to call a referendum without the consent of the UK Government amid fears nationalists could win a Scottish Parliament majority this week.
Johnson will chair a Downing Street meeting of senior Cabinet ministers including Michael Gove and Rishi Sunak this week, along with the secretaries of state for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, to finalise their crossgovernment response plan to Friday’s vote. While the Tories are expected to do well in the English local elections, and even clinch an historic victory over Labour in the Hartlepool byelection, there are real fears of big gains for the SNP in Scotland and Plaid Cymru in Wales.
Several Cabinet ministers and senior figures close to Johnson at the weekend privately expressed their grave fears at the prospect of a big win for Sturgeon who – Downing Street sources fear – could try to order a new independence referendum as soon as the result is announced.
A senior source said that the result was likely to be ‘‘bloody awful’’ in Scotland.
One minister said that the SNP were viewing Friday’s vote as ‘‘a referendum on a referendum. There is no room for complacency. We are in a bare knuckle fight.’’
Another Cabinet minister privately advocated voting for other unionist parties than the Conservatives to see off the SNP threat. They said people should ‘‘vote for parties that will save the Union and avoid Scotland going into the chaos of economic uncertainty at a time when we have to build back better under Covid’’.
The hope is that if the SNP fails to win a majority of the vote, it will stop calls for a second independence referendum in their tracks. The minister said: ‘‘If you have a combined Lib-Lab-Con vote of over 50 per cent, 45 per cent, that is very significant.’’
Gove’s team at the Cabinet Office, working with the Cabinet ministers in charge of the devolved regions of the UK, has been working on plans to strengthen the Union.
The strategy is currently to brazen out an SNP win and focus on fighting the pandemic by not wielding what one minister described as a ‘‘clunking fist’’.
Instead, the blueprint will use powers given to London in the UK Internal Market Act to spend billions of pounds on road, rail and other transport infrastructure.
A ‘‘Union connectivity review’’ by Sir Peter Hendy, the Network Rail chairman, published by July, is likely to recommend higher capacity and improved journey times on train travel between England and Scotland, and major improvements to the A1.
It is likely to recommend better connections for passengers from the new HS2 line to Scotland and North Wales.
It will also recommend better rail links between England and northern Scotland.