It seems that an ocean now divides Scotland and England
ONE country went to the polls on Thursday and two returned. One philosophy, based on fear and suspicion of others, captured the heart of England but repelled and disgusted Scotland. As a blue tide swept up and across the Pennines the sound you heard was of doors clanging shut and barriers going up. This is what a country turning in on itself looks like. In Scotland, imperfect, incomplete and inchoate as it surely is, the doors opened a little wider nonetheless.
The commentators and analysts all said this has been a historic election: the biggest Tory majority since 1967; century-old Labour strongholds coming out blue in the Brexit rinse. The new boundary changes and a beaten Labour Party, leaderless and clueless, may even presage a Tory reign that will come to be measured in generations.
At this moment in the history of the United Kingdom its two biggest countries have never seemed so far apart. The fault-line is visible in almost every area of politics, culture and identity; in the way each country views the rest of the world; in how each has come to regard the NHS and education; in their attitudes to the nature and reality of poverty and inequality.
Some of these have always existed but they were divided only in nuance and interpretation. Now it seems that oceans and wildernesses separate Scotland and England in how each regards itself and those with whom they share the planet. Brexit and the messages on which it sailed seem to have unleashed something elemental and unnerving across England: how else are we to explain why Bolsover and Workington and Burnley – towns hollowed out by the free-market tyranny of ultra-conservatism – now think their future interests are best served by the same party that cut these communities loose as it embraced the unregulated flow of finance and the Klondyke in national assets?
A few weeks prior to this election the SNP was deemed to have had a bad campaign. The Unionist press and BBC Scotland ramped up pressure on the party’s stewardship of the NHS by manipulating, to an almost fetishistic degree, the tragic deaths that had taken place at the flagship Queen Elizabeth University hospital in Glasgow. In education they were pilloried and castigated for Scotland’s slide down global league tables in mathematics. Yet, voters still opted to send 48 SNP candidates to Westminster, an increase of 13 in two years.
An underlying truth explains this apparent anomaly. While the Scottish Government has questions to answer in its management of health and education voters seemed to be adopting a mature approach. They know that the party’s heart is in the right place; that any faults in health and education are in strategy and structure and in the failures of leadership of chief executives. The SNP doesn’t want to dismantle the NHS and parcel it up to be offered as collateral in future trade deals with a voracious US pharmaceutical industry.
As England’s working classes voted to be governed by a privileged caste of old Etonians and members of an Oxford University drinking club, Scotland, meanwhile, was beginning to dismantle the bizarre privileges of its own elite educational institutions. Thus, some of the richest schools in Scotland, monuments to unearned privilege which provide the means for the mediocre to get ahead, are now losing their tax-exempt charitable status.
The Labour Party in Scotland, if it hadn’t permitted itself to be eaten alive from within by a host of fake socialists, could have been the beneficiaries of England’s annexation by the Brexit cult. It’s been sickening these last few weeks to watch a procession of careerists whose betrayal of their own leader contributed to this apocalypse offering their self-regarding analysis of it on election night panels.
This is not to suggest that Scotland has become a socialist state where Jeremy Corbyn would have been welcomed with carpets of flowers.
For many former supporters, though, who were alienated by the appeasers in Scottish Labour, Scottish nationalism provides a temporary refuge until an authentic Scottish Labour Party rises from the ashes of this one or until independence is achieved and they can take the decent bits out of the former SNP and form something truly radical.
The SNP’S overwhelming victory in Scotland on Thursday night is its sixth electoral triumph across four UK and Scottish jurisdictions encompassing Holyrood, Westminster, the European Parliament and local authorities. In each of these its desire for independence has been clear and unambiguous.
No other party has come close to them in any of these elections. This is what an unequivocal mandate looks like. If Boris Johnson continues to disparage it not only a constitutional crisis will ensue but perhaps something more visceral too which could contaminate and undermine his One Nation delusion for a generation. He took a calculated gamble in going to the country with his populist Get Brexit Done mantra and he cashed in. A second independence referendum represents no more of a risk for him.
Nicola Sturgeon acknowledged yesterday that a significant number of those who voted for her party on Thursday might not be supporters of independence.
If Mr Johnson wants to put the matter to bed once and for all he could wrong-foot the SNP by moving for a referendum as soon as possible. It’s by no means certain that Yes would win. And what’s the worst that could happen if he does lose Scotland? This would at least let him pursue his dreams of Agincourt and Trafalgar unencumbered by those truculent
Scots who can’t spell Pinocchio.
Ms Sturgeon knows that complaining about Scotland yet again getting a government it didn’t vote for and being taken out of Europe against its will simply won’t butter the parsnips. In the next referendum she needs to reach those few hundred thousand who remain to be convinced by independence. In 12 years of SNP rule those communities who were blighted by multi-deprivation a century ago remain scarred by it today. Life expectancy is actually receding in some areas.
Many in these communities finally lost patience with a Labour Party that lost sight of them. Ms Sturgeon needs them to make her dream of independence come true. They won’t hang about for ever, though.
If Mr Johnson wants to wrong-foot the SNP he could move for an indy referendum soon. It’s by no means certain Yes would win