Scotland

Boris Johnson is in Scotland today and once again this counts as news. This is intolerable to everyone. Intolerable to Unionists because a prime ministerial appearance in Scotland should be as routine as a prime ministerial appearance in the Cotswolds. It should not count as a newsworthy moment. And it is intolerable to Scottish nationalists because, well, because everything is intolerable to Scottish nationalists. The Prime Minister’s visit can hardly be deemed 'essential travel' in the current circumstances even if it is also essential that Scotland never becomes a no-go area for Johnson or, indeed, other cabinet ministers. Making it seem such, chipping away at Johnson’s legitimacy, is one small front on the SNP’s long, attritional, struggle against the British state.

Back in 2006, when he was close to executing his masterplan to chase Tony Blair out of Downing Street, Gordon Brown sought to address something that worried many voters: his Scottishness. 'My wife is from Middle England, so I can relate to it,' he pronounced, as if Middle England were a town somewhere off the M40. In fact, though Sarah Brown was born in Buckinghamshire, she spent most of her early childhood in Tanzania and her family moved to North London when she was seven. By mistaking a term denoting the provincial English psyche for a geographical area, Brown merely demonstrated that he was indeed all at sea.

By May, the acute phase of the Covid crisis should be over. But the elections scheduled for that month threaten to throw the government into a fresh crisis. Nicola Sturgeon looks set to lead the Scottish National Party to a majority in the Holyrood elections. Given that the SNP manifesto will commit the party to a second independence referendum, she will claim this victory as a mandate for holding one. But no legal referendum can take place without Westminster’s consent, which will be refused. As Covid recedes into the distance, a fresh justification will be needed for saying no But, as I argue in the Times today, the danger is that a two-letter answer with no further explanation could be seen as typical Tory, or English, arrogance.

Scottish nationalists put a lot of stock in the mystical powers of independence, but this is a new one to Mr S: independence would apparently have improved Scotland’s response to Covid-19. At least according to Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at Edinburgh University and member of the Scottish government’s Covid-19 advisory group. Interviewed on Holyrood magazine’s podcast, she was asked whether a separate Scotland would have made different decisions on the pandemic. ‘Yes, definitely,’ she reportedly replied.

Seventh time lucky? Richard Leonard, who has resigned this afternoon, was the sixth Scottish Labour leader since the SNP elbowed the party out of power in 2007. His tenure was the second-longest since devolution began, mostly because Labour is in such bad nick north of the border that no one else wants the job. The Yorkshire-born Scot secured the leadership in 2017 in part by allowing the impression to get about that he was a Corbynista. In truth, he hails from the harder edge of the soft-left and in his three years at the helm of Scottish Labour he did not shift the party significantly to the left. He leaves little in the way of a legacy and cannot claim to have changed much.

Scots may be getting vaccinated against Covid, but they already have the highest rate of immunity to the appeal of Nigel Farage to be found anywhere in the UK. So it was not a particular surprise that Farage today stayed away from the launch of the Scottish offshoot of his new entity, Reform UK. Instead it was left to party chairman Richard Tice to unveil the identity of the leader of Reform UK, Scotland. The sitting MSP Michelle Ballantyne, who stood unsuccessfully for the leadership of the Scottish Conservatives less than a year ago before going independent, has become the Scottish leader of Reform UK, without needing to win a single vote. The good news for the party is that Mrs Ballantyne came over as sensible, credible and inoffensive, not unlike Mr Tice himself.

This is a big deal. The Times says it has had advanced sight of Alex Salmond’s evidence to a Scottish parliament inquiry on sexual harassment and it makes for uncomfortable reading for Nicola Sturgeon. The former SNP leader is allegedly accusing his one-time protege of misleading the Holyrood parliament and contravening the ministerial code. If true, that would be the end of Sturgeon’s premiership. The inquiry stems from a botched probe into sexual harassment allegations lodged against Salmond relating to his time as Scottish First Minister.

Nicola Sturgeon called it ‘not the New Year statement I wanted to give’. The SNP leader addressed the Scottish parliament earlier this afternoon to confirm reports of a new, March-style lockdown across mainland Scotland. It came as 1,905 positive cases were recorded yesterday, though this is likely to be a significant under-calculation as most registry services are closed on Sunday. The positivity rate now stands at 15 per cent, up from 10.1 per cent on New Year’s Eve, and since Christmas there have been 289 deaths recorded in relation to Covid. Against this backdrop, Sturgeon’s government is taking Scotland into the most severe lockdown since the outset of the pandemic.

As political journeys go, it’s akin to Jeremy Corbyn quitting his allotment to grow marrows on an Israeli settlement. Nicola Sturgeon, a lifelong pro-European since June 24, 2016, has decreed that the SNP will vote against the free trade pact agreed by the UK and the EU. This is quite the turnaround. Sturgeon has previously said ‘a no-deal Brexit is a catastrophic idea’, warned of ‘the dire economic consequences of a no-deal Brexit’, described ‘the nightmare scenario of a no-deal Brexit’ and urged the UK Government ‘not to countenance in any way a no-deal Brexit’.

Ursula von der Leyen quoted TS Eliot’s poem ‘Little Gidding’ in her press conference today: ‘What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end, is to make a beginning.’ The free trade deal between the UK and the EU marks beginnings (new arrangements on commerce, fishing and security cooperation) and ends (the single market, free movement, Erasmus), but what we can’t yet be sure of is which category Scottish independence falls into. We might glean the answer from the 2,000-page agreement when the text is published but it is more likely that the question will remain open for some time.

The Speaker was busy at PMQs. He jumped in at the start and told Michael Fabricant, the orange-haired member for Lichfield, to stop rambling and get to the point. He admonished an SNP member for addressing the Prime Minister as ‘you.’ Convention dictates that ‘you’ in the Commons means the Speaker himself. ‘You keep saying 'you'. I’m not responsible for any of this,’ Lindsay Hoyle said. And he jokingly called Boris, ‘Father Christmas,’ after a Tory suggested that the PM was like Santa for school kids. So there seemed to be a semblance of seasonal cheer in the chamber. And then Sir Keir Starmer stood up and read out a list of apocalyptic tidings like a town-crier during the Black Death.

Before Covid-19, if you can remember such a time, this was supposed to be a difficult year for Nicola Sturgeon. Her party had been in power in Edinburgh since 2007 and, like all ministries of such antiquity, was beginning to look jaded. There was never any doubt that she would remain First Minister following next year’s Holyrood elections, but the prospect of her winning a majority seemed to be receding. Opposition parties believed that a relentless focus on the SNP’s record in office would be enough to clip Sturgeon’s wings. After 13 years, it was hard to point to many stunning successes: on the contrary, failures and scandals were accumulating. Time ruins all governments and hers did not seem to be an exception.

The Spectator recently ran a piece by Andrew Wilson, author of the SNP’s Sustainable Growth Commission, under the headline 'Scotland can’t afford to remain part of the Union'. For those seeking any fresh insight into either the moral or economic case for breaking up the United Kingdom, it was thin gruel.  Instead of coherent arguments, we were offered bold and unsubstantiated assertions. We are asked to believe that the separatists’ position is 'highly sophisticated' and that because of Brexit, 'staying in the Union is riskier than independence'.