Why the union is in deep crisis

THE lands, they said, were “debatable”, neither England nor Scotland, neither here nor there.

For fully three centuries local strongmen, reivers they were called, ruled the baronies of Kirkandrews, Bryntallone and Morton, a slice of no-man’s territory, 10 miles by four, between the rivers Esk, Liddel and Sark.

Then – way, way back in 1552, after talks brokered by a French envoy between London and Edinburgh – a deal to end border conflict was done: a line was drawn on a map and it is still there today

So, too, are the earthworks and some of the stones which marked what became the final stretch agreed of one of the world’s oldest and least-disputed frontiers.

Scots’ Dike, the English called the line. The lands it divided may have once been debatable. But the border itself was not. Until now.

That is because Scotland is again suffering border skirmishes. Rhetorical ones. They broke out early in the coronavirus crisis as frontiers – village, local, regional and international – shut around the world to slow down the movement of the virus.

Some unionist politicians declared any such move on the Scots’ Dike and the rest of the ancient frontier from the Tweed to the Solway to be unthinkable. They did so even as no-one – in England or Scotland – was actually thinking about such a move.

Eventually, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon declined to rule out quarantine for people crossing the border if England’s Covid-19 infection rate remained, as it it now, much higher than Scotland’s.

Some Tories smelled blood. Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared there was no border. Later his ally Jacob Rees-Mogg added that the UK was “one country” and appeared to suggest Scotland was an “area” or a “district” rather than a nation. Finally, last week, Moray’s Tory MP, Douglas Ross, said that frontier checks at Gretna or Berwick were “reckless” but those between Australia’s federal states were not.

The legal facts are that there is definitely a jurisdictional border between Scotland and England, and the Scottish Government, like sub-state administrations around the world, definitely has the power to use this border to impose public health measures. The political realityis that border restrictions could be explosive.

For Michael Keating, professor of politics at the University of Aberdeen, Johnson’s “no border” rhetoric sounded like the abandoning of the old complexities of mainstream unionism, of Britain as a “family of nations”, of a country made up of countries, of a plurinational state where people of different identities or none could feel at home.

“This is not unionism,” Keating told The Herald last week. “It is British nationalism.”

The change in political language around the frontier is big. It is big for political theorists, who say it suggests a whole new concept of the United Kingdom, of devolution, and of the union. But it is big too for political practitioners, who say it gives early warning about new tactics for those who want to keep Scotland in Britain.

Ailsa Henderson was struck by quite how visceral rhetoric on border restrictions had become. “What has puzzled me is just how anathema it seems to certain people in the UK,” said the professor of political science at the University of Edinburgh. Henderson has spent much of her career comparing and contrasting the sub-state politics of Canada and the UK, of Quebec and Scotland.

In Canada, Nova Scotia put up border controls. In the UK, old Scotia did not – but was also told, in no uncertain terms, that it must not.

For Henderson, sub-state border controls are a “normal thing” to contain a virus.

“The Ontario-Quebec border has been closed temporarily from time to time,’ she explained.

“But this has not been seen as nationalism on the part of the Quebec government, just a recognition that the infection rates in Ontario were very high.”

Her take? Britain may have long seen itself as a plurinational state, as described by Keating. But it is still getting used to itself as a multi-level one where significant power is decentralised.

Covid has made devolution more salient than ever before. And not everybody likes the look of that.

She said: “Under lockdown, as a result of a pandemic, we have seem some frustration