02 Jan 2015
At the start of 2014, I began this column with the words: “This year, the United Kingdom could be voted out of existence.” Repetition is not usually a good idea in my trade but, in my first column of 2015, I am tempted to use exactly the same sentence.
It might happen thus. At the general election in May, Labour become the largest single party, without a majority of the seats in England. They cannot command a majority in Parliament. To govern, they make a deal with the Scottish Nationalists to whom they have just lost, say, 20 seats. Ed Miliband becomes Prime Minister, but only with the support of one Alex Salmond, a newly elected MP.
The English, I suspect, would not stand for this. They would grudgingly accept a Labour government without an English majority, dependent on its own Scottish MPs. That is the price of the Union. They would not stomach being governed by separatists from another country. The pressure for English independence – to use a phrase scarcely imaginable – would become overwhelming. The legitimacy of the UK Government could collapse.
I hope, by the way, that the Conservatives exploit this danger in their coming election campaign. The fear of a Mili-Salmond agreement to impose state socialism in a way that threatens the state itself is almost enjoyably horrifying. It ought to scoop up English waverers, not to mention Scottish Unionists.
Ah yes, those poor Scottish Unionists. They really are the forgotten heroes. Last September, they saved the Union. You read that the vote was “so close”, but in fact 55.3 per cent of Scottish voters, on a high poll, voted No. This is more than the percentage achieved by any winning party in any British general election in this century or the last. (Tony Blair, for example, won his 1997 landslide with less than 44 per cent of the vote.) Such a No vote should have proved decisive.
Yet it has not. Having lost what Mr Salmond’s own White Paper called a “once-in-a-generation opportunity”, the Nationalists are trying to engineer other ones until, eventually, they win. Westminster seems to be helping them do so.
Why? Partly it is to do with the No campaign, which flipped from complacency to panic. At the last minute, Gordon Brown, who holds no government or party office, was allowed to present to voters the joint pledge of all the main party leaders to devolve far more tax-raising powers to Scotland. This confection of existing promises was unnecessary and weak.
Then – flip! – back from panic to complacency again. Speaking on the steps of 10 Downing Street as soon as the Noes won, David Cameron emphasised that English votes for English laws should go “in tandem” with the promised Scottish reforms. He was right about that. But it would have looked more gracious and more Unionist if he had flown straight to Scotland to say thank you.
His presentation allowed Gordon Brown to claim “betrayal” which – as he never seems to understand – helps the Nationalists much more than Labour. Between them, Brown and Cameron wiped the loser’s scowl off Alex Salmond’s face. He saw he could recapture his political future.
Behind these mis-handlings lies something deeper. It is a long-running theme among our guilt-motivated political elites that devolution is authentic and legitimate, and that a unitary state is bad.
It starts with the myth of Ireland. People fondly imagine that the immense divisions of that country could have been healed if only it had been given Home Rule at the end of the 19th century. This theory fails to notice that devolution usually brings out local enmities (look at the divisions in Scotland between the central belt and the rest). With the partition of Ireland – the independence of the Republic and devolution in the North – came civil war in the South and sectarian rule on both sides of the border.
When, 50 years later, Britain woke up to the injustices in the North, its eventual solution was to divide the statelet’s spoils between the nastiest big gangs, Sinn Fein and the Paisleyites – the two groups most hostile to British interests and keenest at grabbing British taxpayers’ money. Almost unnoticed on the British mainland, just before Christmas, in the usual mist of semi-secrecy, Mr Cameron handed out yet another massive dollop of public money to keep those scoundrels quiet.
Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon have observed this decades-long process carefully. Like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, they understand how to turn grievance to bogus moral advantage. They know that the ablest British politicians spend most of their time in Westminster and can be easily embarrassed by their lack of local knowledge.
They also understand – which it took the IRA 70 years to realise – that the attitude of the English to the Celts is not a lust for conquest but a feeling of boredom. If they can establish in the English mind that they are the voice of the Scottish people, the natural English inclination will be to say: “Oh well, give them what they want. Then they might shut up.”
They have succeeded. Even though Scotland voted No, I notice that English people now use the phrase “the Scots” interchangeably with “the SNP”. When Labour introduced devolution after their great victory in 1997, they thought they were building an anti-Tory citadel north of the border. Perhaps they were, but they were also ensuring that they would lose control of it. Thus does devolution start the slide towards independence. Like a date rapist, the SNP claims that No really meant Yes.
So what should happen now? Lord Salisbury, the former leader of the House of Lords, is the fullest exponent of wholesale change. The unitary state, he says, is lost. A crisis is coming. Why don’t we create a federal state, constructed by those who really do believe in the United Kingdom, and wrest the initiative from those who want to break it up?
Under the Salisbury scheme, no new house of politicians is created. The House of Commons becomes the English Parliament. The House of Lords is abolished and occupied instead by the elected Parliament of the entire United Kingdom, dealing only with those matters – defence, foreign policy, national budget etc – which are not devolved. The prime minister sits in it.
There is logic in this idea, and boldness too. It is certainly hard to imagine that the unitary state can be restored, and easy to see the fearsome complications if “English votes for English laws” create two categories of MP.
But is this really the time to move fast? I come back to the strangeness of our situation. Despite the Unionist result of the Scottish referendum, Unionism has only just begun to remember what it is.
During the campaign, a division was made between “head” (pro-Union) and “heart” (pro-independence). Do most of our citizens actually want to have to decide between the two? There is not the faintest sign that the Scots wanted to imitate the Irish leader Éamon de Valera’s image of his people, who “satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit” (thus condemning themselves to poverty and theocracy).
Instead, there were Mr Salmond’s claims about a northern “arc of prosperity”, wealth built on oil (price now $57 a barrel) and a pound which, he claimed, “no one can stop us using”. Such headless policies would have been heartless in their effects. Has it not been part of the British political genius to keep heart and head together for more than 300 years?
This argument, which cannot be settled without the context of the European Union, too, does not feel to me like one which has been lost – more like one which most citizens have not yet heard. The truth is, it has hardly started.
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