AGREEMENT is hard to come by in Scotland’s constitutionally divided politics, so it seems irresistible to highlight consensus where it exists. In that spirit, everyone accepts that the next Scottish election, now only a little over a year away, is a significantly more important one than the five which have preceded it.

The stakes could barely be higher. And the importance of individual political parties has never been lower. This is about Nationalism and Unionism. A nationalist majority is highly likely to result in a second independence referendum, the outcome of which is six to five and pick ’em, to quote an only slightly less believable political drama.

But Boris Johnson has said no, I hear you scream, once in a generation and all that. Well, I say, just wait and see.

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That, in any case, would be moot if the Unionists could secure a majority. It would be seismic, and would almost certainly produce a chasm in the SNP and a punishing introspection in the nationalist community. Indyref 2 would be dormant, at best. Despite that, the outcome has received relatively little attention, with a sense of inevitability amongst the media and commentariat that it is a forlorn Unionist hope.

That presumption is rash. SNP polling, whilst extremely solid and leading to it being comfortably the largest party, is well adrift of where it was at this point in the cycle before the 2016 election. So is that of the Greens. Given that the nationalist majority after that election was slim, perhaps there is reason for the Unionists, whose polling is conversely higher than this time five years ago, to be cheerful.

Well, only to a point. Seat projection calculators are generally still translating the current polls into a comfortable nationalist majority, often placing an SNP-only majority on a knife-edge.

So, at the very least, it might be wise for the Unionist parties not to cross their collective fingers and hope for the best on this one. To ensure a Unionist majority, they will most likely have to reshape the Unionist party landscape in some way. There are broadly three ways of doing that, all of which to varying degrees place the constitution as the number one priority and risk the end of the Unionist political parties as we know them.

The first would be to create a list-only "Unionist Party" to replace the three pro-Union parties, which would in turn stand only in constituencies. This concept would work spectacularly for the nationalists, but that is because the SNP wins most of its seats from first past the post and so has most to gain on the list. Most Unionist seats, conversely, are already from the regional list, so the value of replacing them with seats for a single party is minimal, and indeed their number would probably fall.

So, all pain and no gain.

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The second option, then, is for two parties to stand aside in every constituency in favour of the Unionist party which either already holds the seat, or which is closest to the SNP. And the third option, taking that to its extreme, would be the amalgamation of the three Unionist parties into a single force, and the full transition to the "Ulsterisation" of Scottish politics of which I have written before on these pages.

For those who put party before Union, this would be the ultimate pain, but for those who put Union before party, it may prove to be the ultimate gain. The SNP may be winning in all polls, but nationalism is not, and a straight fight between unionists and nationalists in the constituencies and, in the case of option three, on the list too, may well be the best option for achieving a unionist majority in 2021.

If successfully executed, this boldness would undoubtedly return a majority, with significantly more constituency wins and in theory only a minimally negative impact on the overall number of regional seats.

However, I just can’t see it. The three parties– Conservative, Labour and LibDem – would have to find a way to work together in a very short space of time. The Tories would find it easiest because their supporters would be least resistant to doing a deal with the devil in the name of Unionism. They’d also be the most obvious beneficiaries of the second option, being closest to the SNP in more constituencies than the others.

But the others, I sense, simply wouldn’t be able to make this idea fly within their parties. The Labour Party still (completely wrongly in my view) blames its relationship with the Tories in Better Together for its current problems, and this would be an even more explicit arrangement. And the LibDems have more reason to carry the scars of the Westminster coalition on their backs.

And I should be clear at this point that I am not attempting to construct an argument in favour of it. I happen to think it would be disastrous for our country. Our drift towards constitutional politics has already done great damage, crowding out the philosophical and ideological discussion we need to deal with our long-term systemic problems – schools, the NHS, public pensions and taxpayer demographics.

A Unionist alliance, or worse still a full Unionist Party, would cement that drift, doing something that could not be undone and ensuring that, irrespective of the result, we would be institutionally wired to talk about nothing but the constitutional future of Scotland.

Not to mention, of course, the other fairly material matters of whether this winning force intended to form a government, and what that government’s policies would be.

That these are even points worth discussing shows us how nationalism has changed Unionist politics. The single-minded focus of the Unionist parties – particularly the Tories and Li Dems – is to stop indyref 2, and it is abundantly clear that the cleanest way to do that is to prevent the nationalist parties from forming a majority out of the 2021 election.

In the final analysis, though, I suspect nothing will come of this. The timescale is exceedingly short. The barriers are exceedingly high. And there is no recent history of radicalism in any of these parties. Indeed, their approach to the Unio

Andy Maciver is Director of Message Matters

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