Oh how the SNP will miss their Brexit bogeyman
Nationalists called him their best recruiting sergeant — but despite his unpopularity in Scotland, Boris thwarted their ambitions...
THE resignation of Boris Johnson will have been greeted by many in Scotland with a mutter of ‘good riddance’. he was serially dishonest, a cynical performer and a degrader of public office. he should have gone long ago and should never have reached Number 10 in the first place.
Others will have shaken their heads and lamented the media’s power to bring down its nemesis. To these voters, Boris was their Prime Minister. A cheeky populist with cheerful disdain for political correctness. The sort of politician they had longed for after so many shiny salesmen and wet flannels.
Most in Scotland will fall into one of these two camps, but there is another response and it is altogether more conflicted. That is the sentiment inside the SNP and especially at the top of the party. On the one hand, Nicola Sturgeon and her lieutenants hold the Prime Minister in sincere contempt.
he is not their sort of politician and not because he’s posh or english. Under the new social etiquette of wokeness, Boris is common as muck. he doesn’t take a knee, introduce his pronouns or acknowledge his privilege. It’s entirely possible he has no firm views on the rulings of the US Supreme Court or the latest TikTok video from Congresswoman Alexandria OcasioCortez. his professed political priorities are job creation, health funding and levelling up. how déclassé.
On the other hand, Sturgeon will feel a grievous loss. There is no one she and her party wanted more as Prime Minister. Not even in their fieriest fever dreams could the Nationalists conjure a more nightmarish vision of Westminster rule. The boisterous former London mayor with a journalistic back catalogue of off-colour remarks about the Scots. The jowly face of english euroscepticism who won an eU exit referendum in the teeth of Scottish opposition. The Prime Minister who drove a hard Brexit and in doing so divided the Tory Party and halved its Scottish seats.
Boris has been a fine bogeyman for the SNP, the ever-lurking Freddy Krueger of Tory Unionism. In reality, though, he was not the recruiting sergeant for independence they had hoped and believed he would be. Rather, three external events robbed the SNP of its opportunity to turn an unpopular Tory Prime Minister into a constitutional tipping point.
The first was Covid-19. Whether it was the UK’s early vaccine buy-up or unprecedented injection of cash into the economy, the pandemic illustrated the advantages of being part of the UK. even the most hardened separatist must have wondered, in moments of private doubt, how an independent Scotland would have weathered Covid without the resources and international reach of the UK.
NEXT, there was the cost-ofliving crisis. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Johnson government’s response, it is difficult to imagine a separate Scotland – eye-watering deficit, no currency, no Barnett formula, outside both the UK and european single markets – faring well.
Finally, there was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Vladimir Putin’s revanchist ambitions and his willingness to interfere in other countries’ affairs, including the 2014 independence referendum, have forced us to reassess our definition of the unthinkable. how could Scotland defend itself, and its valuable oil fields, without the UK Armed Forces? Could a breakaway Scotland afford to cut defence budgets for generous social spending, as was the plan in 2014? The cognoscenti might long to force Trident out of Scottish waters but would giving up the protection of Britain’s nuclear deterrent be wise in this new world order?
There is another factor that vitiated the SNP’s plans to make Boris the centrepiece of their campaign for another referendum. he said ‘No’. Boris’s repeated refusal of a referendum followed in the tradition of Theresa May’s ‘Just Say No’ strategy. Like May, he saw to it that ‘No’ stuck. At the moment of greatest opportunity for separatism. At the point when Brexit turned British politics into a daily circus. At a juncture where some critics of independence, weak-kneed and enraged by Brexit, went wobbly on the constitution. Nationalism has scarcely enjoyed a more favourable playing field and yet, three years after Boris’s elevation was predicted to end the Union, the Union is going strong. The polls on independence have not shifted significantly, either.
Johnson knows this and it gave him a confidence that, on paper, he had not earned. Note that on Wednesday, with his government falling apart around him, he took time to write to Nicola Sturgeon to reject her latest attempt to secure a referendum. It may prove to be one of his last significant acts as Prime Minister.
Was that all it took? One little word, repeated over and over? Was this the masterstroke that eluded other prime ministers? Yes and no.
Boris took the just-say-no strategy and firmed it up. he overcame the habit, introduced by David Cameron, of trying to appease the SNP with more powers. Cameron gave the Nationalists a referendum and holyrood not one but two tranches of additional powers. In return, he got evergrowing agitation for separation. In feeding the beast, he succeeded only in enlarging it.
For the most part, Johnson avoided these mistakes. Where Cameron believed his constant capitulations to the SNP and its fellow travellers demonstrated his ‘respect’ for Scotland, Johnson grasped that they telegraphed weakness. The SNP said the Scottish parliament should run everything; Cameron-era Whitehall said it should run lots more things, but not quite everything. The Scottish electorate was presented a choice between 100 per cent independence and 75 per cent independence. What about the people who didn’t want independence at all?
Boris understood there had to be an alternative to dismantling the UK immediately or dismantling it gradually. he knew that, as Prime Minister, he had the power to make this change. The constitution was reserved and there was no law written or otherwise that required the Prime Minister to dance forever to the Nationalists’ tune. Boris sent this message early on when he created a new ministerial role for himself: Minister for the Union.
In the end, his many failings of leadership prevented him from fashioning this into a comprehensive, coherent alternative to the SNP’s
independence and devolution’s ever-weaker-Union as introduced by Labour and hastened by the Conservatives. This could have been a historic legacy – the Prime Minister who saved the Union – but he frittered it away like so many opportunities his premiership afforded.
We can, however, sketch out the beginnings of a new Union policy. At its centre was the Internal Market Act, a seemingly dry piece of legislation tidying up commercial and other arrangements for a post-Brexit Britain. Its effect, though, was to cohere various arrangements for buying, selling and regulating goods and services within the UK into a single market. In doing so, it grafted onto existing devolved arrangements new layers of law and policy direction. That allowed Westminster to reassert itself across the UK. It meant certain powers returning from Brussels went to central rather than devolved government.
WHILE this sounds terribly technical, it was a clever way of strengthening Westminster without directly attacking the devolution settlement. The SNP cried ‘power grab’ but to the extent that it was, it was a power grab you needed a 5,000-page instruction manual to understand. Easier to comprehend was the decision to replicate the European Regional Development Fund and European Social Fund in a UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF). Billions that previously went to Brussels and were sent back to Britain in various grants would now be issued directly from the Treasury. Boris’s innovation was to use the UKSPF to invest directly in Scotland. Projects, including those run by Scottish local authorities, would be bankrolled straight from the Treasury, rather than giving the money to Scottish ministers and allowing them to choose how to spend it.
Like everything else Downing Street does, this provoked howls of indignation from Holyrood but, in an inversion of the Internal Market Act, this was a policy everyone understood. Direct spending meant more money for Scotland. Key ventures and infrastructure paid for out of Treasury coffers. As hard as the SNP tried, it couldn’t get Scottish voters outraged at the prospect of being showered with more cash. It was a vivid illustration of the power of the UK purse.
It is a tack Boris was to repeat in his promotion of freeports, economic areas with lesser tax and custom burdens in order to spur investment. The SNP was originally hostile, spitefully opposed to any UK Government venture that would deliver jobs and prosperity to Scotland. But Scottish ministers finally backed down and agreed to implement the policy, albeit rebranded ‘greenports’ to spare their blushes. While it is still early days, the experience in England suggests greenports will bring much-needed economic activity to Scotland. In time, they could come to represent yet another way being part of the UK puts cash in the pockets of ordinary Scots.
Boris Johnson has advanced what Unionist commentator Henry Hill calls ‘Ukima Unionism’, after the UK Internal Market Act. Ukima Unionism does not seek to reverse the mistakes of devolution by changing the Holyrood settlement but by erecting a new structure of laws, policies, programmes and priorities over and above it.
Whether this is the correct approach to a constitutional arrangement the Prime Minister himself reportedly described as ‘a disaster’ is another matter. What it represents is the first Tory attempt to wrestle with devolution that did not involve expanding it.
BORIS’S Ukima Unionism avoided the central problems of devolution but it didn’t make them worse and may, in time, prove to have made some of them more manageable.
Whoever replaces Johnson must not revert to Cameron-era accommodationism. Ukima Unionism may or may not be the way forward but Salami-Slice Unionism, in which Westminster tries to fend off full independence today by carving the Union up piece by piece over time, is the road to defeat. It will lead to a stronger SNP, more constitutional instability, and ultimately the end of the United Kingdom.
The next Prime Minister should make the Union top priority. The cost-of-living crisis matters. Supporting Ukraine matters. Ridding Northern Ireland of (Boris Johnson’s) disastrous Protocol matters. In achieving all of these, however, what must emerge is a stronger, more confident UK.
The United Kingdom is an international oddity in being so laidback about its own existence. Around the world, the political and territorial integrity of the state is so fundamental that, in more than eight in ten countries, there is a constitutional provision to prohibit or inhibit secession.
That doesn’t mean the UK should necessarily take the same approach but it highlights how irregular is Britain’s relaxed approach to sovereignty. The next Prime Minister will have to confront the role played by this complacency in energising Scottish separation, a United Ireland and much more.
Just as the consequences of weakness cannot be ignored, nor can the opportunities that await a Britain out from under the deadweight of constitutional uncertainty and a global reputation as a country forever on the brink of breaking up.
A truly United Kingdom would be one in which the instability that can deter investment has been removed. One in which the future of a nuclear power that sits permanently on the UN Security Council is no longer an open question in foreign capitals. The issue of Scottish independence – of any dismantling of the UK – must be put to bed for good.
Many Scots fall into the ‘good riddance’ camp when it comes to Boris Johnson. Nevertheless, it would be churlish to deny he got some things right. On the Union, he displayed a confidence others lacked and opened up a space for Unionists to imagine an alternative to managed decline.
He broke the dismal spell of David Cameron’s self-lacerating ‘respect agenda’ and showed that a British Prime Minister can stand up for the UK and stand up to the SNP without the sky falling in. He leaves for his successors a possible way forward that might reinforce rather than quietly retire the Union. Let that be his legacy.