UK Edition
It may be a bit hackneyed nowadays to borrow that old wartime expression, but “Keep Calm and Carry On” is precisely what those who wish to maintain the Union should do now that the Scottish Parliament’s election results are in.
By all means let the SNP and their acolytes in the Scottish Greens rejoice over what they claim is their mandate for a new independence referendum and scream blue murder over how they say they’d be betrayed if Boris Johnson refuses to give that vote the necessary legislative approval.
But there is absolutely no need for the rest of us to panic. Asked by this newspaper on Friday about the prospects for indyref2 – which remember only the UK government can authorise – in the event of a big nationalist vote, the Prime Minister said that a “referendum in the current context is irresponsible and reckless”. That, I would suggest, is the right line to take. Beating the pandemic comes first and last.
It was most certainly the line that Michael Gove, who appears to be the Cabinet Minister for just about everything, stuck to in his exchanges with Andrew Marr yesterday. And he was correctly vague when pressed on a major row that’s brewing about whether the UK Government would go to the Supreme Court to stop Nicola Sturgeon holding an unlawful referendum.
In a slippery – his friends might label it masterful – performance, he made it plain that neither he nor the Prime Minister were inclined to get involved in such a hypothetical issue as possible court action. It might disappoint their media critics but, in any case, any member of the public could go to court to stop an unlawful vote. There is also the question of whether the Scottish Parliament is legally competent to proceed with a referendum bill, an issue that’s expected to be thrashed out this week.
Nicola Sturgeon has always said that her clear preference is for a legal vote on independence whose result would be respected by the international community but demands from nationalisms’ wilder fringes for double-quick or “wildcat” referendums have met with little encouragement thus far from the First Minister. But if they were to be held, the simplest solution to render them completely worthless would be a widespread public boycott, which I’m certain would take place.
However, as well as keeping calm in the face of increasingly strident attacks from the SNP, what the UK Government must not do is follow the example of the Unionist community after its victory in the 2014 independence referendum.
Back then the winning side seemed almost ashamed that they’d won and were determined to lob sweeteners at the Nats, following a wholly ridiculous “Vow” of how devolution should be made stronger. It was dreamed up by a newspaper editor, who is now the SNP’s communications’ chief, and supported by Gordon Brown.
The effort was followed by a high level committee, headed by a captain of industry, which sought to mollify the separatists with an array of extra powers for the Scottish Parliament – powers, which in the case of some welfare benefits, have had to be handed back under the “too hard” label.
There must be no repeat of that exercise in the face of SNP success. Too many Labour and Tory governments have believed that appeasing the nationalists by bunging them extra powers would kill off the demand for separation. Instead, all that tactic has done is to increase the nationalists’ fervour for going the whole hog and breaking up Britain.
The message coming out of Downing Street thus far seems, thankfully, to be completely different, with the Prime Minister backing plans for significant infrastructure spending on road and rail links between Scotland and England. Furthermore, as it has been doing for some time now, the Treasury plans to continue spending directly on Scottish projects rather than funnelling the cash through the SNP government in Edinburgh.
It’s fairly obvious that No 10 has learned a hard lesson from the Covid pandemic, where the UK Government masterminded every aspect of the vaccine programme, paying for its development and roll-out, yet it was the devolved governments in Scotland (and Wales) that got most of the credit. Never again, seems to be the new message.
Keep calm and quash Nicola Sturgeon's dreams of Scottish independence
The Government appears to have finally learned the lesson that appeasing the SNP always backfires