IT is now as good as a foregone conclusion that Boris Johnson will win the Tory leadership race, and with it the keys to Downing Street. This marks the failure of last year’s “Operation Arse” strategy, created by those at the head of the Scottish Tory Party, to persuade their London colleagues that a Johnson premiership could spell the end of the Union.
Their logic was not unreasonable. If Nicola Sturgeon were given a blank sheet of paper and asked to create her perfect Tory – the one which plays into the hands of the SNP and the independence movement – he would look a lot like Boris Johnson. A posh, southern, Leave campaigner, with a penchant for political incorrectness and a streak of English nationalism. Bingo!
The reality of life in the British Conservative Party should, by now, be hitting Scottish Tories around the head – at least, for those whose heads do not remain in the sand. As has been clear to some for years, whilst the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party is Unionist before it is Conservative, its parent is Conservative before it is Unionist. If saying goodbye to the EU means saying goodbye to Scotland, so be it.
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This is the new normal. So what should the Scottish Tories do? First, don’t panic. Spend a short but calm period of time observing the fallout of a Johnson win next week.
There are a couple of presumptions. One is that there will be a sustainable 10+ point bump to the pro-independence vote. The other is that there will be a similarly-sized reduction in Tory ratings ahead of the critical 2021 Scottish Parliament elections.
Neither is certain. YouGov, in a poll last month, found that Yes would lead 53:47 under a Johnson premiership; a bump, for sure, but not the 60 per cent or so that many presumed. And the UK Government’s calamitous handling of Brexit has taken around five per cent off the Scottish Tory polling, but with some of this loss having been to the Brexit Party, Mr Johnson could fairly be considered to be someone who could win that support back. Nonetheless, that is not to minimise his potentially negative impact both on support for the Scottish Tories and for the Union. We deal in fine margins, and the end of the UK does not need a 15-point uplift for the Yes campaign – just a five-point one.
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The Scottish Tories should calmly observe this period of relative chaos from next week, leading into at least October 31, then extract the opportunity which exists therein.
The opportunity, here, is presented by the common ground which I believe exists between the interests of Mr Johnson, the Scottish centre-right, English democracy and the maintenance of the UK, which can be fertilised by calm and considered, but massive, constitutional change.
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Throughout my life, the British version of Unionism has been inextricably tied to centralisation. In a disease which has been particularly rampant in the Tory Party, any decentralisation of power from London to anywhere else is seen as a defeat at the hands of nationalists. We do not have to look back far to see this in action. Why did the Calman Commission and the Scotland Act 2012 happen? As a reaction to the SNP majority in 2011. And what about Smith and the Scotland Act 2016? A reaction to the near-loss of the independence referendum. Short-term, tactical, reactionary. Not a whiff of a long-term strategy in sight. It is these actions, not those of nationalists, which are endangering the UK. Other countries in similar positions derive strength from their decentralisation rather than their centralisation.
Take Canada. A country with an historic separatist “problem”, in Quebec, has a federal structure in which the provinces have significant power and authority. A recent poll showed that fewer than 20 per cent of Quebecers want to revisit the independence issue, and indeed the only mild threat to Canadian unity comes from Alberta, with its tar sands and its jealousy at the deal the eastern provinces, including Quebec, gets from Ottawa.
Hand-in-hand with its federalism is Canada’s mature approach to the composition of political parties. The aforementioned Alberta is run by the United Conservative Party, a new party brought about by a merger, which is unrelated to the federal Conservative Party of Canada. Quebec’s Assembly is controlled by the Coalition Avenir Quebec, a nationalist party unrelated to the federal Parliament’s Bloc Quebecois. Nobody cries “We’ve let the nationalists win” at Canada’s federalism. Nobody cries “end of the union” at there being separate political parties in provincial and federal parliaments.
The UK is, no doubt, in grave danger. Brexit poses immediate questions, but more structurally the absence of a voice of and for the English nation poses arguably the biggest risk of all.
There is a cure for these ills. If the UK is to have a future, that future will have to include powerful national parliaments, including an English one. It will have to remodel Westminster as the heart of a federal country, with an elected lower and upper house. And it will have to let a thousand flowers bloom, with different political parties at different levels of government.
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