IN Aesop’s fable, the sun and the wind compete to see which of them can remove the cloak from the man’s back as he walks along the path.

First the wind blows, using all its strength to whip up a ferocious gale, but all this achieves is that the man hugs his cloak ever tighter around him. After the wind has puffed itself out the sun takes over, the clouds part and the air warms. As the man enjoys the sunshine and starts to feel hot, he takes his cloak off, puts it over his arm and continues along his way.

Brain over brawn. Smart thinking over brute strength. Kindness and light over force. And, most of all, calmness over tumult and storm. Each is a lesson Aesop’s old story teaches us.

In recent months, too many of my friends in the unionist camp of Scottish politics have urged for a much more aggressive approach to be taken to combat the re-emergent threat of Scottish nationalism (the military language is theirs). What have become known as the “muscular unionists” are now a distinct troop within unionism’s ranks.

They are the wind. They blow a lot of hot air. Neither the unionist parties in Scotland nor the United Kingdom government would be wise to adopt their ways. If the unionist argument is to prevail in Scotland, we will have to be much more like the sun than the wind.

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After some flirtation earlier this year with the muscular unionists, London has, it seems, seen the light. In the weeks leading up to May’s Holyrood elections, there was a real risk that the Prime Minister’s ill-fated “union unit” would become the plaything of the muscular unionists. That would have seen London intervene more aggressively in the affairs of Scottish politics, laying down the law about matters reserved to Westminster, making devolution more difficult and, perhaps, even trying to roll aspects of devolution back. (Dominic Cummings, by the way, is neither to be believed nor trusted when he makes his aggressive interventions on this matter.)

One can readily understand where this impulse comes from. Of course it is irritating to our base that the nationalists conduct themselves as if international trade or Britain’s relations with the European Union were matters for the devolved administrations rather than for the UK state. Of course our base noisily demands that the First Minister’s wings are clipped and that the SNP are put firmly in their place. But our base is not our target audience, just as the nationalists’ base of impatient Yessers, desperate for indyref2 before the turn of the year, is not theirs.

For both camps the target audience is the same – moderate opinion in the centre ground that is nailed to neither pole and could plausibly vote either way in the event that the great constitutional question is, one day, put to the people again. And that centre ground is not remotely attracted by belligerence.

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The one thing the muscular unionists have right is that we cannot carry on into the future as we have in the past, sitting idly on our hands as we watch enthusiasm for the Union ebb away and support for independence solidify into majority opinion. The case for the Union does need to be re-made and re-asserted. But, to have any hope of being effective, it has to be about showing, not telling.

There is no point in UK ministers finger-wagging at Scottish voters, hectoring them about the Union dividend, or the costs of independence, or all the powers that are already devolved which the SNP are doing nothing with. No one outside the unionist base listens to any of this.

What the target audience needs is to see (not hear) the added value that the Union brings. How the Union helps our devolved government achieve its policy objectives.

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How the Union assists our economy as we struggle to recover from the effects of Covid. How the Union harnesses the heft and weight of the UK state to support jobs (furlough), to protect public health (the UK’s virus-beating vaccination programme), to boost growth in the economy (new trade deals).

An enlightened Union government would seek not to compete with devolution, but to work alongside it. The muscular unionists are right that what Theresa May called the tendency to “devolve and forget” has cost us dear, but if they think that getting into a funding war with the Scottish Government over infrastructure spend or business support is the answer, they are deranged.

Likewise, if they think the solution lies in trying to out-green the SNP, rather than in working with Britain’s devolved administrations to address the climate crisis on a genuinely four-nations basis, they could not be more wrong-headed.

Imagine a Union government that, instead of crowing over the SNP’s appalling failures on drugs deaths, child poverty or mental health, offered constructively to work together to address these ills. Muscular unionists say that, because the SNP have failed in these policy areas, we should take back control over them, re-reserving them to Westminster if necessary or just trampling over devolved competence if we feel like it. The minority of voters who cannot distinguish between their personal loathing of Nicola Sturgeon and their dislike of the institutions of devolution would love this, but it would be a monumental mistake.

Devolution is, after all, a unionist strategy. In the end, it is going to take a unionist government to show how it can work. It is the nationalists who want to pull apart. We unionists should want the opposite – not to compete with them by blowing them away, but to get alongside them and work with them to show that, together, we really can do better.

It’s not easy, to keep your friends close and your enemies closer, but an enlightened Union will prove to be not only stronger but also more effective.

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