Union on life support, but not quite dead yet

The award for best and most cynical piece of political phrase-making this summer goes to Alex Massie. On hearing the amusing news that Joanna Cherry MP QC has been effectively blocked by the SNP leadership from running for the Edinburgh Central Holyrood seat at next year’s elections, my colleague and friend Massie described it perfectly as “Cherrymandering”.

Joanna Cherry will be furious. Or, rather, Joanna Cherry will be even more furious than usual. During the extended Brexit fandango, the able lawyer Cherry was periodically so furious about the Westminster government’s legal shenanigans, and so comically scunnered in her demeanour, that she made the party’s doom-laden Westminster leader Ian “Mr Speaker, Scotland has been shafted” Blackford look like a cheery Eric Morecambe singing “Bring me Sunshine!”.

If you are one of Reaction’s subscribers in North America, or perhaps even in England, you might be wondering why any of this matters. Who is Joanna Cherry? What is an Ian Blackford, apart from being the owner of Scotland’s largest collection of waistcoats?

On one level these are legitimate questions. When a pandemic stalks the planet and China and the US are gearing up for the next phase of a great power struggle that could quite easily tip by accident from cold war into hot conflict in the next few years, who cares about the parochial doings of the Scottish National Party?

The answer to the question – why does this matter? – is that Britain is a key component in the Western alliance thanks to its intelligence and security capacity. And with Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon soaring in the polls ahead of next year’s devolved elections, Britain has never been closer to coming apart.

Even if large numbers of voters in England say they are relaxed about Scotland’s departure, the disintegration of the UK would have troubling geopolitical implications. To say nothing of the cultural catastrophe involved in two countries so interwoven, with a shared history, currency and economy, undergoing a messy divorce.

The Scottish Nationalist notion that Scotland and England would settle it all amicably is a blasé delusion, when the SNP is unsympathetic to the Western defence alliance and a Scotland deprived of access to the orthodox capital markets would have to look to the enemies of the West (such as China) to loan it the money it would need to fill a huge public spending shortfall. This is a recipe for Scotland returning in the eyes of England to the status of hostile power to the north. The Unions of 1603 and 1707 were designed, from the English perspective, to deal with this strategic dilemma, while Scotland wanted – and got – trade and a disproportionately large role in running what became the UK.

That settlement of convenience was bolstered by a series of joint missions combining both the mercenary and the moral. There was Empire – the Scots loved it and shaped it. There was war. And there was the welfare state.

Now, a substantial majority of younger Scots see no common mission, cause or endeavour in Britain. The European Union project is more appealing to them. Westminster is simply alien and Sturgeon – on television daily playing Miss Jean Brodie talking sternly to naughty Covid-19 – is perceived as Scotland’s leader, against a British Prime Minister who is exceptionally unpopular north of the border.

I do wonder if part of the reason voters are prepared to consider the gamble of independence is that successive international crises in the last decade and a half may have had a bigger impact on younger voters in countries such as Scotland than we yet understand. In the banking crisis and now in Covid-19, the money needed in an emergency was always found somehow – printed, borrowed, to worry about later – to keep the show going.

Take the case of Iceland, a small independent state. After the financial crisis of 2008 it was ruined. Yet a dozen years later there it is, somehow, still afloat with life going on perfectly respectably. When the Unionists warn rightly that Scottish independence threatens economic catastrophe (and it would entail disaster on public spending, pensions and investment) might not younger and middle-aged Scottish voters shrug and say the lessons from all these other crisis is that “they” – central bankers, governments – always sort something out even if it is imperfect.

The British government is so exercised by such shifts and the threat to the Union that this week Number 10 organised the removal of the Scottish Conservative party’s leader. Jackson Carlaw is not a household name in England. He is not a household name in Scotland either, which is part of the reason (lack of name recognition) that he was whacked. Recent polling presented to the Tory leadership in London showed that Carlaw had made no impact in his six month tenure.

Ruth Davidson, the former leader who rebuilt the fortunes of the Scottish Tories and then quit, will stand in for combat with Sturgeon in the Scottish Parliament, although Davidson will go to the House of Lords and stand down from Holyrood next year.

Instead of persuading Davidson to return to the leadership full-time, Boris Johnson, and Scot Michael Gove, want the Scottish Tories to be led by Douglas Ross, the MP for Moray and a football referee.

Ross had better be good on the pitch. Sturgeon is set for an overall majority next year. From there she will be able to demand a referendum on independence.

The Boris line is that he will in all circumstances refuse to allow another referendum after the Holyrood election. This will be an extremely difficult position to stick to, especially when Boris declining a vote could easily create the conditions for a campaign of civil disobedience in Scotland.

In such a febrile context, the Cherry business was significant not least because it is a reminder that the SNP is not a unified force, especially after the trial of ex-leader Alex Salmond. Salmond was acquitted after a sensational trial earlier this year and he blames the party leadership for what happened to him. Cherry is an ally of Salmond.

Cherry had intended to take on Angus Robertson, the party’s former Westminster leader, in the race for that Edinburgh seat. Robertson is a former ally of Salmond but now very much an ally of Sturgeon.

The Cherry-Robertson selection battle in Edinburgh was to be a proxy fight over the future of the SNP itself, and perhaps even a proxy for a future SNP leadership battle. For all the SNP’s cockiness the party is woefully short on next generation leadership talent beyond Sturgeon, who has been a front-line figure for more than two decades and leader since 2014.

Team Sturgeon knows from experience that understanding and controlling the party rulebook is essential for the maintenance of dominance. A party rule change was made this week that meant, in effect, Cherry would have had to resign her Westminster seat immediately to fight the Holyrood battle. She backed off. It was a device to stop a leading SNP rival to Sturgeon getting into the Scottish Parliament next year.

A party spokesman explained the dastardly operation as follows: “The National Executive Committee backed an approach that will guarantee constituents a full-time commitment from day one, and minimise the disruption to voters.”

Minimise the disruption to the voters! I do love a party spokesman with a sense of humour, especially when the SNP’s entire reason for being is to cause maximum disruption by breaking up the United Kingdom.

The situation looks pretty desperate for the Union, then. There is no sign yet that Unionists are anywhere close to constructing a post-Brexit rationale for the United Kingdom beyond pointing to extra spending. The Union was truly popular when it had a mission, built on a shared endeavour. Its advocates will have to find a positive story to tell and popularise it.

Not all is lost, yet. This week Number 10 – and Gove – showed in removing Carlaw that they are prepared to act ruthlessly. If Labour’s Keir Starmer would make a similar move and remove the beyond hopeless Richard “who?” Leonard, Scottish Labour’s notional leader, then there might be a chance of slowing the SNP march. What the Unionists really need is a Labour revival in Scotland, to take votes off the Nats.

The SNP offer is also vulnerable to coherent, sustained attack because Sturgeon’s party is stuck post-Covid-19 with a dated world view. The rationale of a small northern European state seeking security by joining the EU might have had a certain logic in the 2000s.  But the EU today is in the midst of transitioning, via mutualising its debt, to become something akin to a state while not being a meaningful security, intelligence or defence alliance. Meanwhile, the major democracies outside the EU are realigning to deter China. In the midst of all that, Scotland post-Union is… what? A state with bombed out finances applying to join the EU, while establishing a new currency (maybe) but trying to ensure public sector pensions in Scotland still get paid in the currency of a much bigger neighbour (England), while trying to maintain trade with its biggest market, again England, and abandoning its defences in an era of intense global instability.

The risks of breaking up Britain can be presented as even greater this time because they are.