Unionists should leave the SNP to fall apart and concentrate on promoting Britishness
The smell of decay is on the SNP. It happens to parties when they have been too long in office. It happened to the Conservatives under John Major and to Labour under Gordon Brown. The Salmond/Sturgeon row; accusations of a cover-up by John Swinney, the party’s deputy leader; the resignation of the SNP’s Westminster chief whip over sexual harassment allegations; the decision to legislate now for a future referendum, arrogantly assuming victory in May’s elections; even the proposed criminalisation of “hate speech” on private property – all tell the same story. After 14 years in office, the SNP has become tired, entitled, self-serving, too ready to confuse its interests with the interests of Scotland as a whole.
I don’t want to overstate things. The party is still polling at 48 per cent, comfortably ahead of its rivals. But that figure has fallen 10 points this year, and support for independence is also dropping. The decline predates L’Affaire Saumond/Esturgeon, and seems to have been triggered by two things. First, the successful vaccine rollout, partly delivered by Scottish regiments in the British Army. Second, the conspicuous failure of the UK economy to follow the Sturgeon script and collapse after leaving the EU.
When Brexit could be conjured as a terrifying phantom, it tended to push up support for both separatism and separatists. Once it became established fact, though, it started having the opposite effect. Now, the SNP must explain how it would go about rejoining the EU. Would Scotland hand its fishing grounds back again? What would it cut to meet the debt and deficit rules? Would its economy be sufficiently aligned with the euro?
How would it handle a hard goods border with England?
Scots are already asking these questions, and don’t need to be spoon-fed them by Unionist politicians. Nor do they need Unionists to spell out that the SNP is starting to rot. As a general rule in politics, voters discount anything that one party says about another (“they would say that wouldn’t they?”) Being disobliging about your rivals thus tends to damage them less than it damages you.
So what should Unionists be doing? As the Scottish Conservatives gather online for their annual spring conference, they should concentrate on celebrating Britishness as an extraordinarily successful global brand.
We have two textbook examples of how not to win a referendum. In the 2014 Scottish poll and the 2016 EU one, the anti-change side made the mistake of seeking to stir fear. It is true that, as a species, we are change-averse, often irrationally so. But stronger than our status quo bias is our dislike of being pushed around. A certain bloodymindedness defines the British character – and perhaps especially the Scottish character. Told that we can’t do something, we naturally respond: “I’ll be the judge of that, thank you”.
A better Unionist strategy is “show, don’t tell”. No speech or broadcast will do as much for the British brand as our global success in the inoculation race or, come to that, the Treasury credit that made possible the furlough scheme and associated payments. The EU liked to find existing projects, contribute a tiny proportion of the budget, and then put its 12-star flag all over them. The UK Treasury needs no such prestidigitation. It really is paying for some successful schemes, and should allow that fact to shine through.
This is true, too, of infrastructure projects. Much attention has been drawn to the quixotic idea of a tunnel to Northern Ireland, but there is plenty of more immediately practical work to be done, such as improving the A75 and dualling the A1. State investment
in highways in the eighteenth-century – until then most roads had been privately financed turnpikes – helped integrate both markets and people throughout the British Isles.
Bread-and-butter issues matter in politics, never more so than when a governing party is visibly running out of steam. One of the reasons the SNP keeps starting symbolic fights – Scotland is now the only place I can think of where official buildings refuse to fly the flag of the country of which they are part, but instead fly the flag of an organisation (the EU) of which they are not part – is that it does not want to talk about schools or hospitals. Sturgeon has calculated that her core supporters, like Donald Trump’s, will put up with a great deal provided she keeps telling them what they want to hear.
She may be right. Equally, those core supporters may be fewer in number than she supposes. While Scots are fairly evenly split on independence – polls currently show a small Unionist majority, having recently been the other way around – they are decidedly
against holding another poll now. Again, they don’t need Unionist politicians to explain why. Holding a needless vote in the middle of the epidemic and the worst financial crisis in history would be bizarre.
Boris is thus in the comfortable position of being able to follow public opinion rather than trying to lead it. He is right to say that he has no objection in principle to another independence referendum. One of the things we should be proud of in this country is that people can vote to leave it – something few states around the world can say. Equally, the PM is right to say that holding a referendum within the next four years, something only around a third of Scots favour, would be extraordinarily self-indulgent.
In the meantime, Unionists should unashamedly bang the drum for Britain. The Scottish Secretary, the wry and good-humoured Dumfriesshire businessman, Alister Jack, has a neat phrase. Britain, he likes to say, is a family of nations – and a nation of families. Most of us have relatives in more than one of the constituent parts, and we dislike the thought of turning those relatives into foreigners.
Michael Gove, the strategic mind behind Vote Leave, knows better than anyone how self-wounding were suggestions by various Eurocrats that Britain did very nicely out of EU membership. Instead of telling Scots that they’ve got a good thing going, he prefers to emphasise what they bring to the table.
The institutions most valued in this country have benefited disproportionately from Scottish leadership: Parliament, the universities, the civil service and, most of all, the Armed Forces. Pitt the Elder boasted of having turned Highlanders, whose loyalty had recently hung in the balance, into the Crown’s fiercest soldiers. “I sought for merit in the mountains of the North”, he told Parliament. “I called it forth, and drew into your service a hardy and intrepid race of men.”
Scots invented many of the things that improved the lot of our species: telephones, penicillin, cash machines, steam engines, golf, television, daily disposable contact lenses, toasters – and, not least, the United Kingdom, in the sense that both the Union of Crowns and the Acts of Union were chiefly driven from north of the border.
The UK went on to become the greatest force for freedom on the planet, ending slavery, defeating fascism and communism, driving the spread of liberty under law. All because of the outsize contribution of a hardy and intrepid race of men. That’s quite a song to sing.
Holding a needless vote in the middle of the epidemic and worst financial crisis in history would be bizarre