Union is stronger than Brexit row

Before the ink was dry on the ballot papers in June 2016, Nicola Sturgeon tied the fate of any second Scottish independence referendum directly to Brexit.

Every week since then, the SNP has tried – and so far failed – to weaponise Brexit.

The Nationalists do not care about Britain’s future relations with the European Union. They want Britain not to have a future. Everything they have said and done about Brexit has been with independence in mind. For them, nothing else matters.

As I write, two senior ministers have resigned from Theresa May’s Cabinet because they cannot support the draft withdrawal agreement. Both have cited risks to the Union among their reasons for quitting. Dominic Raab and Esther Mcvey are right to be concerned about the future integrity of the UK post-brexit. But they have jumped the gun and they have reached conclusions not supported by the evidence. If the withdrawal agreement clearly did pose a manifest danger to the Union, Secretary of State David Mundell would not be supporting it – and neither, for that matter, would the Prime Minister.

What Scottish Unionists understand, even if others do not, is that the Union not only accommodates, but requires difference. The UK is not one-size-fits-all.

The matter is far from straightforward, but one thing is clear: there is no higher test for Brexit than that it in no way undermines the Union. What Raab and others need to understand, however, is that the accommodation of reasonable difference strengthens the Union. l Adam Tomkins is a Glasgow Conservative MSP .