Boris has one year to save the Union

Boris Johnson has a year to stop the next decade from being defined by constitutional acrimony. If the SNP win an outright majority in the 2021 Holyrood elections, in a proportional representation system designed to avoid majorities, they will claim to possess an overwhelming mandate for a second independence vote.

For that reason, a recent set of polls showing marginal majorities for independence and over 50% support for the SNP, are causing panic in Westminster. The Prime Minister has rushed north of the border today to emphasise the benefits of the Union in times of crisis. Visiting Orkney, one of the more Unionist parts of Scotland, Johnson said:

“The Union is a fantastically strong institution. It’s helped our country through thick and thin. It’s very valuable in terms of the support we’ve been able to give to everybody throughout all corners of the UK. We had a referendum on breaking up the Union only six years ago, that is not a generation by any computation. What people really want to do is see our whole country coming back strongly, together.”

Johnson emphasised the Treasury’s furlough scheme, which is paying the salaries of around 900,000 workers in Scotland, along with an extra £250 million in NHS spending through Barnett consequentials. These aren’t new policies, but the government believes it hasn’t received sufficient credit for the scale of financial support provided to Scotland in recent months. It would have been difficult for the Scottish government to raise similar amounts of money as an independent country.

The increased pressure on the Union has come from two large shifts in the electorate. First, a significant proportion of 2014 Unionists who voted Remain in 2016 have switched sides. They see independence as a route back into the EU, and were repelled by three years of chaos in Westminster. It’s not clear how a visit from Johnson, the physical embodiment of Brexit, will help alleviate their concerns.

The second is an improved perception of Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership. She is thought to have handled the crisis well, even if the outcome in Scotland has been similar to England on deaths per capita, and arguably worse on care homes. Her regular message-disciplined press conferences, sometimes followed by news bulletins about disorder in Westminster, have convinced some Scots that their politicians can go it alone.

The hope in Westminster is that these new pillars of separatist support are weak: Sturgeon’s approval ratings may drop when the data on excess mortality in Scotland becomes more evident; the despondency of Remain voters may fade if a trade deal is reached with the EU. An SNP majority in Holyrood, however, is an immediate threat.

As The Spectator’s James Forsyth reports, Downing Street’s plan for the Holyrood campaign is to avoid discussing constitutional matters and instead to focus on the deterioration of public services and education. This, they hope, will make it difficult for the SNP to claim a mandate for a second referendum. There will however be a cost to the Scottish Conservatives’ vote share, as their recent surge in support came in large part from coalescing the Unionists around a staunchly anti-second referendum message.

In the longer term, the government intends to increase its visibility north of the border. More money will go into promoting the Barnett consequentials of nationwide spending announcements, and cabinet ministers have been advised to take Scottish broadcast programmes just as seriously as they do BBC Breakfast. In sum, the strategy is Visits, Flags, and Big Numbers.

There are indeed several silver linings for Unionists. The return of an electorally viable Leader of the Opposition will strengthen the resolve of the Scottish Labour Party, the only Unionist force that can appeal to economically left-wing SNP voters. And, contrary to his predecessor, Sir Keir Starmer has said he will oppose a second independence referendum under any circumstances.

There also remains the possibility that the SNP will soon be worn down by the strains of government. Voters tend to grow tired of the governing party after more than a decade in power, and opposition parties believe they have an abundance of material on the nationalists’ record on public services. In light of the epidemic, criticism of the SNP’s performance on schools and hospitals may strike a chord in next year’s campaign.

And YouGov polling from January shows that even in the event of the SNP winning a majority of seats in Holyrood, a majority of Scots would be opposed to a second referendum, by a margin of five points. If the SNP fails to win a majority of seats, the majority against a referendum increases to 26 points. This casts doubt on Westminster that there would be a severe backlash to Westminster’s rejection of a second vote.

In any case, there will be a reckoning next year over the future of Scotland. If all else fails, Downing Street intends simply to say No to a second referendum.