Despite SNP hysteria, the cold truth is the Union really ISN’T on the brink

THE SNP is at last enjoying its ‘longawaited Brexit bounce,’ panted one London columnist the other day, ‘a bounce foreseen by many of us who warned that Brexit could very easily lead to the destruction of the United Kingdom – but it is a bounce that has made the future of this country a 50-50 proposition.’

Really, this is but another reminder how the protracted Brexit farrago increasingly leaves many commentators ever so slightly unhinged and, as is human nature, eager to talk up apocalyptic fulfilment of their past, 2016 jeremiads.

Let us, rather, amidst the cool air of Scotland, look calmly at the evidence that the Nationalists are on the brink of sweeping all before them – a clutch of opinion polls splashed by one newspaper last weekend and seized on by others, with variants of ‘Union on the brink’ headlines.

Yet the numbers support no frenzy. They show support for independence at 50 per cent; the SNP standing at 39 per cent if a Westminster election were called now; and at, respectively, 42 per cent in the constituency vote and 38 per cent in the regional list vote for a Scottish parliament election still 20 months away.

Even disregarding all that might go wrong for the Nationalists before then, on these numbers they would again be denied an overall Holyrood majority.

That matters, for the SNP’s present claim to a mandate for a second independence referendum is that (with the Greens) a pro-independence majority was installed at the Scottish parliament in May 2016.

Manifesto

The Nationalist manifesto was unambiguous. ‘We believe that the Scottish parliament should have the right to hold another referendum if there is clear and sustained evidence that independence has become the preferred option of a majority of the Scottish people – or if there is a significant and material change in the circumstances that prevailed in 2014, such as Scotland being taken out of the EU against our will.’

Let us take this apart with some relish. First, a single opinion poll suggesting that precisely half the country now supports independence – after some excessively exciting weeks in our wider politics – is scarcely ‘clear and sustained evidence’ of anything.

Practically every poll since June 2016 has shown most Scots prefer the Union, by an average of 55 per cent to 45 per cent. More, there have been two subsequent electoral tests. At the 2017 general election, the SNP shed 22 seats and slumped to 37 per cent of the vote (having secured 50 per cent two years earlier.)

And, at the European Parliament election in May, the Nationalists took 37.8 per cent. They won it as they ‘won’ in 2015, but on both occasions, six out of ten Scots plumped for parties of the Union.

And only four out of ten Scots are ready to back the Nationalists now, even at the coming Holyrood election and when, by then, there will be no nasty surprises such as Leave winning the EU referendum a few weeks after the last one. Scots, it seems, have now ‘priced in’ Brexit and would still really rather one constitutional psychodrama at a time.

These votes – and those recent opinion polls – demonstrate another embarrassment; that the SNP has shed support since the 2015 tsunami. It was not just that Ruth Davidson campaigned, two years ago, like Tizer on stilts or that the Unionist vote suddenly burgeoned.

Rather, in seat after seat, it coalesced time and again behind the candidate most likely to snatch it from the Nationalists. The pro-Union vote scarcely increased, but the SNP tally fell. Not one of the 35 survivors took more than 40 per cent of the vote.

What went wrong? Well, a significant tranche of SNP support was always Eurosceptic, as was once the SNP as a whole. (It campaigned against the Common Market as recently as 1983.)

And, in June 2016, when more than a million Scots voted Leave, it was reliably calculated that some 30 per cent of these were habitual SNP supporters. How did their party’s leadership respond? By declaring a Scottish emergency, a national disaster, and – ever since – insulting Scotland’s Leave voters.

And they still do not get it. ‘I see people like me who campaigned Leave have again been denounced as liars by my colleague Ian Blackford,’ Jim Sillars, a redoubtable SNP warhorse who loathes the European Union, remarked dryly to me on Tuesday.

‘The contempt he and others are showing also for the million of us who voted Leave is not a good basis to get us to vote for independence linked to EU re-entry.’

In truth, the party has coldly written off a historic slice of its own old faithful – paying the price, especially in its traditional North-East heartland, at the last general election.

That 50 per cent showing for independence, in what may well prove to have been a ‘rogue’ poll, must also be set in context. These are torrid times in Westminster politics. In many respects we have not had a functioning London government since June 2017.

Partisan

Meanwhile, Labour has retained as its leader a man noted for his admiration of the enemies of the West and whose economic policies would reduce us to Venezuela.

We have a blatantly partisan and odious Speaker, we have MPs overwhelmingly elected on unambiguous manifesto commitment to honour the EU referendum result doing their best at every turn to prevent Brexit – and in recent weeks Parliament as a whole has become the roaring, belligerent, spittle-flecked equivalent of teatime at the zoo.

Is it any wonder that many Scots have, albeit briefly, recoiled in disgust and that, against that spectacle down south, Holyrood for the present appears a model of courtesy and good order?

And yet there is decreasing regard for the SNP as, even overlooking such enormities as the poll tax on wheels or incompetence in the oversight of our schools, our hospitals and our policemen, we gain monthly a clearer picture of the Scotland they seek.

A state ruthlessly centralised and power everywhere suborned to Edinburgh; a state given over to the verities of cultural Marxism, a state that is anti-faith and anti-family.

A Scotland obsessed with placating the latest looney tunes demands of extreme LGBT activists.

And a Scotland to whom the European Union must be as venerated as a Marian grotto – a new, small, independent nation on its knees before a European Union personified in the gruesome Guy Verhofstadt, who so recently exulted to massed Liberal Democrats that ‘the world order of tomorrow is not a world order based on nation states or countries, it’s a world order that is based on empires. China is not a nation, it’s a civilisation...’

We should not be so sure that independence is inevitable or that the Nationalists have only just begun their 1,000-year Reich. There is something rotten here – unhinged; extreme – and it may be, in a decade or two, that nationalism will be as busted a force in Scotland as it has long been in Quebec.