Unionists must make a better case

In 1999, Donald Dewar heralded the opening of the Scottish Parliament as “not an end” but “a means to greater ends”. “There is a new voice in the land,” he said, “a voice to shape Scotland, a voice for the future.” It is deeply ironic, more than 20 years on from Dewar’s proclamation that Holyrood would allow Scotland to reach “greater ends”. An intellectually exhausted SNP bereft of legislative ambition and achievement continues to wield power because of the salience of the constitutional question – and the coherency it allows a party split between “Tartan Tories”, agitprop radicals and orthodox social democrats.

Over the past year, bitter arguments have opened up between pro- and anti-Salmond factions on all manner of questions, including over trans rights. Even on the essential question of independence itself, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, an instinctive gradualist, has found herself at odds with her party in favour of a Catalan-style wildcat vote.

And yet, despite a pretty comprehensive victory for the Better Together campaign in 2014, the momentum towards Scottish secession has felt oddly inevitable. The devolution settlement has not, as its architects imagined, cemented a pro-Union bloc of votes in Holyrood (they could not have foreseen the precipitous decline of the Scottish Labour party), but rather consolidated a state of constant drift in Scottish political culture with the ruling party the SNP liberated from the constraints of robust debate over the hard stuff (education, health and public services) by a poorly organised opposition.

But there is cause for optimism – a group of academics, activists, commentators and politicians, broadly in favour of the Union, gathered in Newcastle over the weekend under the aegis of the think tank These Islands, to do some hard thinking about how Scottish, and British politics with it, might be revitalised.

Another referendum if it comes will not be won by tub-thumping “Unionist” values with the Nats portrayed as disloyal subjects to be brought to heel. John Bull might have been the invention of a Scot but that kind of talk will alienate swing voters, many of them in the chattering classes.

In 2014, long-term SNP strongholds like Moray and Perthshire voted No while Glasgow, in 2014, a Labour area voted for Yes. Why? Yes did far better in areas of high unemployment. But the electorate now looks rather different. The assumptions of middle class Scots, in the Central Belt and in the north up to Aberdeen and the Laich of Moray have shifted in favour of independence, primarily because of the Brexit vote. Polling evidence accumulated over recent years points to a significant segment of disenfranchised Remain voters who have swung into the “yes/no swing voter” camp.

Scottish politics has for 300 years been haunted by the spectre of an overmighty English executive, the “Crown-in-parliament” dictating terms – the aftermath of the Brexit vote and some of the constitutional antics of the last year (ahem, prorogation for example, which was ruled as unlawful by Edinburgh judges before the case was put to the Supreme Court) have given some credence to the anxiety that in a union of nations of asymmetrical size the smaller members will always have to kowtow to the interests of the majority (83% of the UK’s population lives in England).

Unionists must make the case for creative constitutional change that actually improves governance. An overly centralised Holyrood has stripped power away from towns and denuded the strong local state which was central to the way Scotland was administered after 1707. Why not work out how to reanimate in modern form the Convention of Royal Burghs that helped give coherency to the sovereign Scottish state of the medieval age? If Bristol has a metro-mayor, why doesn’t Inverness get a beefed-up metro-provost?

Pro-Union people must also get to know Scottish culture as it actually exists in the present – no snark please at the supposed provincialism of cultural activity north of the border. To be seen to be as at ease with the world of modern folk festival Celtic Connections as well as rugby at Murrayfield should be the goal.

It is no surprise to me that the most effective politician in the UK over the last few years, Nicola Sturgeon, is a voracious reader – she wrote eloquently for the New Statesman recently of the formative influence on her sense of Scottishness of Grassic Gibbon’s great novel Sunset Song which she first read as a teenager. It was one of Alex Salmond’s greatest tactical achievement to unite the emotional cause for independence with the romantic egalitarianism of Robert Burns.

The vitality of Scottish culture runs deep and has many currents. In Dewar’s address to the Parliament, he referenced “the speak of the Mearns, with its soul in the land,” a clear allusion to great rural themes of Grassic Gibbon’s masterwork and the lyricism it gets from the Aberdeenshire dialect.

In that spirit, those of us who want the Union to prosper must build a picture of a country which all of us, both nationalist and unionist, can call home.