Could an independent Scotland remain unified?

If Scotland votes for independence, some disaffected Unionists may want to break away

Even Unionists should not begrudge the SNP’s electoral triumph. For a party which has been in government for 14 years to be returned for a fourth term is remarkable. While the SNP has not won an overall majority, there remains a pro-independence majority in Holyrood. The SNP intends to seek a second independence referendum as soon as Covid is conquered.

But power to grant that referendum lies with London. Schedule 5 of the 1998 Scotland Act declares the Union of the Kingdoms of Scotland and England to be a reserved matter. After the SNP won an overall majority at Holyrood in 2011, David Cameron agreed to a section 30 order delegating the power to hold a referendum to the Scottish parliament. And Boris Johnson has said that he will not agree to another such order, since the SNP insisted in 2014 that the referendum was a “once in a generation” attempt.

Nicola Sturgeon has threatened to defy London by preparing legislation for a Scottish advisory referendum. But such a referendum would be outwith the powers of the Scottish parliament, and any Scottish taxpayer could take the Scottish government to court on the grounds of ultra vires. There is no legal route for Scotland to hold a second referendum if London maintains its refusal.

But of course these legalisms do not resolve what is essentially a political issue. Ciaran Martin, a former Cabinet Office adviser involved in preparing the 2014 referendum, has said that if London refuses a second referendum, the Union with Scotland will be shown to rest not on consent but on force. Scotland, he believes, has an inherent right to self-determination, a right that can apparently be exercised whenever there is a pro-independence majority in Holyrood.

The argument is that a minority in the United Kingdom is entitled to break away if it represents a compact majority in one part of the kingdom. Could that same right be exercised by a compact majority within Scotland? Even if a second referendum yielded a majority for independence, few can doubt that there would be a large and disaffected minority against it. That minority would be a compact one in the three borders constituencies of Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk, Dumfries and Galloway, and Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweedale, all of which voted by nearly two-to-one against independence in 2014 and return Conservatives to Westminster. It is hardly likely that these regions would support independence. Should they be extruded from the United Kingdom against their wishes?

It will, of course, be said that Scotland is a nation while the borders counties are not. Similarly, in 19thcentury Ireland, few doubted that Ireland was a nation until Gladstone proposed Home Rule. But at that point most Protestants declared that they were not part of the Irish nation if that meant rule by a Dublin parliament. They wanted to continue being governed by Westminster. And, as the centenary of Northern Ireland has reminded us, in six counties they were a sufficiently compact majority to make good their claim.

For many years Irish nationalists refused to recognise the Unionist case, insisting on the inherent unity of the island of Ireland. Not until the Belfast/ Good Friday Agreement in 1998 did Ireland accept that unity could not be achieved until Northern Ireland consented to it. The Agreement retrospectively legitimised partition, something inherent in the Irish situation. The only way in which Ireland could have stayed united was, paradoxically, if it had remained part of the United Kingdom.

There are of course huge differences between Ireland and Scotland. The Irish national claim was based on a deep feeling that under British rule the Irish were a stigmatised people. The Scots are in no way a stigmatised people. And fortunately there would never be an equivalent in Scotland to the terrorism of the IRA or the Unionist paramilitaries.

Nevertheless, the claim that Scotland can break away from England if a majority wish it entails that a majority in the borders counties can break away from Scotland and remain in the United Kingdom if a majority wish it. Nicola Sturgeon’s claim that a second referendum is validated by Brexit which took Scotland out of the EU against its wishes would be paralleled by the claim that Scottish independence was extruding the people of the border counties from the United Kingdom against their wishes.

It is, paradoxically, only by remaining in the UK that Scotland can be assured of maintaining national unity.