Covid border measures look like rehearsals for the breakup of the Union

Photo:The Scotsman

Only in corridors of power in London has the latest opinion poll on support for Scottish independence registered a modicum of shock to disturb the  prevailing confusion.

The analysis of the results by Sir John Curtice contains only one small note  of comfort for the Union cause.

A new poll from Ipsos MORI for STV has suggested that 58% now say that they would vote Yes in another independence referendum. Just 42% state that they would vote No, and thereby back staying in the Union. What conclusions can we draw? No previous poll has put ever support for independence so high.

More importantly this is the ninth poll in a row since June to put Yes ahead. On average, these polls have put Yes on 54%, No on 46%.

It is the first time in Scottish polling history that support for independence has consistently outstripped backing for staying in the Union.

However, we should be careful about drawing the conclusion from today’s poll that support for independence has now risen further.

A poll from Savanta ComRes released over the weekend, the interviewing for which took place at the same time as today’s headline grabbing poll from Ipsos MORI, put support for independence at 53%, one point down on the company’s previous poll in August.

We will need further evidence before we will know whether the higher level of support for Yes in today’s poll represents no more than the kind of random variation that we might expect in the polls given that Yes are well ahead, or whether it signals a further significant shift in favour of independence.

In any event, today’s poll provides valuable further clues as to why Yes are now ahead.

 This cry for the heart comes from the Spectator’s Scotland correspondent Alex Massie. It poses  a dilemma for the Scotsman who is  the editor of the Spectator Fraser Nelson, who is a critical friend of Boris Johnson.

…For no ministry that actually cared about the United Kingdom’s long-term integrity would behave as this ministry has done. The recklessness would be breathtaking if it were not for the suspicion that it is, in fact, a product of scandalous indifference. Time and again, I have been told that the government ‘gets it’, that henceforth it will be paying attention, and every time this is revealed as a worthless commitment that doesn’t even rise to the level of a promise. 

My postbag confirms the impact of this. Each week, and sometimes more frequently than that, I hear from people who never had to think about their no vote in 2014 but now find themselves contemplating their preferences should there be a second plebiscite on independence. Many of them would still vote no, but with markedly less enthusiasm than before; others suggest they are too depressed to vote at all; some find themselves surprised, and perhaps even a little alarmed, to discover they can imagine voting yes. Some have already changed their mind, deciding getting out is the only realistic way forward. These are company directors, farmers, lawyers, academics and if Boris Johnson is losing people like this — folk with plenty to lose from independence — then you may imagine how he’s faring with other kinds of voter.

No wonder it is now possible to find Scottish Tory politicians who will sigh as they pour themselves a late-night Laphroaig and confess that, miserably, it’s all over. Pessimism has always been an important part of the Tory sensibility but, right now, this pessimism is warranted. It is so even if the SNP is still unable to answer important but basic questions about the realities of independence. The first decade of the new state’s life would be astringent to say the least. But then the last ten years have been pretty ropey ones for the UK and that colours people’s views too.

For nearly a decade now, politicians and media figures in London have persistently underestimated both the appeal of independence and its possibility. It has been put in a box marked ‘unthinkable’ and so it need not be thought about. This complacency, this lack of imagination, has always been a significant problem for Unionism and yet, despite the obvious evidence before them, few Tory politicians have shown themselves prepared to grasp reality, let alone grapple with it.

Flag-waving is not the answer. Competent government in London and a prosperous United Kingdom is the best available response to this challenge. For a long, long time, independence has been a nice idea. If all other things were equal it would even be an attractive one. But all other things have never, quite, been equal and so the risks of independence have always been considered greater than the risks of Union. It might have some advantages but these would come at too high a cost.

Well, that calculation of risk and reward is changing. There has never been a time when ‘all things’ have ever looked so equal. That has certain obvious consequences and the opinion polls are merely reporting what is obvious on the ground.

For this is a three-legged crisis for Unionism. Covid is one leg and Johnson is another but the third, and most significant, leg is Brexit. It cannot be repeated too frequently that Brexit is the sole reason this argument has substance right now. No Brexit, no material change in circumstances that might justify revisiting the national question while the embers of 2014 still glow. Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP would still campaign for independence but they wouldn’t have any good argument for demanding a second referendum. Well, however disagreeable you may think it, they have a decent one now. (It remains decent even if you also think ‘once in a generation’ should mean something too.)

Once Brexit was pursued, and especially once it was decided to pursue it at all or any cost, some of this crisis became inevitable. For Brexit must happen even though two parts of the United Kingdom — Scotland and Northern Ireland — voted against it. But the manner in which Brexit is happening, with little regard for those who rejected it and still less interest in the privileges enjoyed by the devolved administrations, is placing the Union under renewed strain.

The detail is less important than the sentiment. Few people, I suspect, are truly exercised by the internal workings of the withdrawal agreement or, indeed, by the precise manner in which the Internal Market Bill may or may not impinge upon the devolved parliaments. But, to put it in architectural terms, they do care about the look of the post-Brexit house the government intends to build.

Perhaps this is a blip or a phase or just a passing flirtation. I would prefer it if this were the case but the numbers strongly suggest it is not.

Even now, most politicians at Westminster — and especially most so-called Conservative ones — do not get it. You might think the survival of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland should be considered a modestly important issue but plainly very few Tories at Westminster really think it is. So Douglas Ross was right to lambast his colleagues and it was miserably revealing that his speech received so little attention.

As he argued, correctly, if so-called Unionists do not care about the Union and if they mistakenly believe independence would come at little cost — psychological as well as civic — to England then they are both deluding themselves and helping to make the case for that independence. With friends like these, who needs the SNP?

There is something melancholy about all of this and a keening sense of Scottish Unionists being, as I have observed before, abandoned by the people they mistakenly considered their co-religionists. Verily, what do they know of the United Kingdom, who only England know?

Boris, Brexit and Covid is a combination of potent toxicity. Any two of those would have been dangerous; adding the third ingredient may prove lethal. If the United Kingdom dies, it may not do so on Boris Johnson’s watch but the conditions for its demise will have been created during his hapless spell at the helm.

Minister for the Union? What larks, eh?

Meanwhile the lockdowns in Scotland and Wales provide a sort of rehearsal for breakup

People from Scotland have been warned against travelling to Blackpool after it was linked to a “large and growing” number of Scottish coronavirus cases.

People in parts of the UK with high rates of Covid-19 will be banned from travelling to Wales under plans announced by Wales’ first minister.

Mark Drakeford said he would go ahead if the prime minister did not impose travel restrictions in England.