Brexit might still mean the break up of the United Kingdom
Well, this election has produced two clear winners, Boris Johnson in England and Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland, and two clear losers, Jeremy Corbyn everywhere and, in Scotland, Boris Johnson. In England and , to a lesser extent, Wales, the election has been a triumph for the Conservative Party. The slogans “Get Brexit Done” and “Vote for Boris and keep Corbyn out of Number 10” have won the election with a little bit of help from Nigel Farage whose Brexit Party took enough Labour votes in some Leave-leaning constituencies to enable the Tories to win the seat.
In Scotland it was very different. The Conservatives went into the election holding 13 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats; they lost 7 of them. Even more distressingly, their spirits and hopes had risen in the course of the campaign. A few hours before the poll Ruth Davidson, till recently the party leader in Scotland, named three more seats they were in contention to win. In one sense, Johnson himself shouldn’t be blamed for the Tory failure in Scotland; the Scottish Party mostly kept quiet about him. Although, oddly, Ruth Davidson, a fierce critic of Johnson in the past, said in that last-minute intervention that she had found “strong support for him from some aspirational working-class voters across Scotland.” Be that as it may, the Tories flopped and have ended with only two more seats in Scotland than the Liberal Democrats who hold four despite their leader Jo Swinson being defeated in her own constituency.
Of course, the once-mighty Labour Party is not even a shadow of what it used to be, and is reduced again to having only a single MP, Ian Murray in Edinburgh South. Murray, one should say, has been so distinguished by his contempt for Corbyn that the Unite Trade Union tried to have him deselected as the Labour candidate there.
The SNP is the clear winner in Scotland, going up from 35 Commons seats to 48. One seat, Kirkcaldy & Cowdenbeath was even won by a candidate whom the party had disowned and suspended on account of anti-Semitic comments he had made, but did so too late for him to be removed from the election. He got 16,568 votes. Evidently anti-Semitism counts for little in that part of Fife.
Why the difference between Scotland and England? Set aside the question of Johnson’s popularity or unpopularity in Scotland, and the first answer must be that there is still a Scottish majority against Brexit. In the referendum Scotland voted 62-38 for Remain, and, though this means that a million Scots voted to leave the EU, far more voted against doing so. The two Remain parties, the SNP and the Liberal Democrats both increased their share of the vote while the Scottish Tories, officially committed to Brexit despite the pro-Remain sentiments of some of their surviving MPs, saw their share fall, as of course did the vote for “we don’t have a settled opinion on Brexit” Labour.
So, the first and natural response to the results is that the United Kingdom is more disunited than ever. It’s a divided Kingdom, and understandably Nicola Sturgeon, fresh from victory, is calling for a second referendum on Independence, a call that Johnson will be deaf to. There is this to be said for Sturgeon’s position: it is the only referendum that can be put on the table, the second EU referendum being now dead as mutton.
And yet… and yet… one wonders how hard she will really push for it. Of course, she has to keep the troops happy and must demand what she knows will not be granted, and threaten recourse to the Law Courts when she is denied it. But in her calm and reasonable moments she has said that she will only seek a referendum that she is likely to win, and this would be only when opinion polls repeatedly showed 60 percent in favour of Independence. We are some distance short of that position.
This election has been a success for the SNP, but the extent of that success is magnified by the UK’s outdated first-past-the-post electoral system. When you have one Nationalist Party and three Unionist parties, the odds are tilted in favour of the Nationalists because the Unionist vote is divided .On Thursday the SNP took 45 per cent of the vote, which is impressive, and has been rewarded with 48 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats. The three Unionist parties which in aggregate got just over 53 per cent of the vote won only 11 seats. It requires only a small shift of opinion to produce a different result. Going into this election 40 Scottish seats were judged to be marginal. There were pro-EU Remainers who voted SNP in the hope, vain as it turned out, of giving Johnson a bloody nose.
Clearly Brexit, in some form, is now inevitable. The Remainers’ defeat in the 2016 referendum can’t be reversed. Johnson in his victory speech spoke of his “stonking great mandate”. The size of the Tory majority means that the 48 SNP members will have little of the importance their 35 ones had in the last Parliament. There is no balance of power in the new House of Commons and they will have nuisance value only. Unlike Brexit, Scottish Independence is still avoidable.
Nevertheless, the survival of the United Kingdom is at risk. It will depend, first, on how Johnson uses that mandate and what form Brexit eventually takes. The next test will come not with an Independence referendum in Scotland but with the elections for the Scottish Parliament in less than eighteen months’ time. If Johnson’s Government can before then find a means of appeasing Scotland and strengthening the Scottish Unionists, the UK may survive. This would require him to face down those on the Tory Right who hope for a hard Brexit, even the hardest of all possible Brexits.
So, the immediate question is: can we trust a man whom so few trust to repair the tattered fabric of the United Kingdom or will History remember him as the man who took the country out of the European Union and, in doing so with a contempt for Scottish opinion, prepared the way for the break-up of the Union established in 1707?