New Statesman: The twilight of the Union

The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic overshadowed the trial, and made the constitutional debate about Scotland’s future seem trivial. Suddenly there were other more pressing issues to think about, a lethal and mysterious plague that threatened to overwhelm the NHS and devastate the economy. Although, technically speaking, NHS Scotland is a distinct entity, founded on separate Scottish legislation, this fact belongs to the arcane lore of policy wonks: the NHS is widely regarded in Scotland as a UK institution. During lockdown Scots banged pots and pans on a Thursday night for the NHS, not specifically for the NHS in Scotland. And everybody knew that the Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s generous furlough scheme came courtesy of the deep pockets of the UK Treasury.

Yet, bizarrely, the Scottish Question did not hibernate. Instead, opinion about Scottish independence shifted significantly during the Covid lockdown. At the start of the year, the pro- and anti-independence camps were running neck and neck in the opinion polls, and remained tied as late as May. But more recent polls demonstrate a marked rise in support for independence, which is now running at 54 per cent, once the don’t knows are excluded. [...]

To be sure, nationalism plays a significant part in the independence cause. But in the broad miscellaneous coalition of voters that supports independence, flag-waving nationalists, though the most obviously visible cohort, rub shoulders with a range of other social types. There are the voters, often middle-aged, who think independence is the best way of preserving what remains of Britain’s cherished welfare state; those who want to live in a normal northern European country – like Denmark or Norway – with a Nordic model of egalitarian social democracy; those who despair of the Brexity delusions of Britain’s post-imperial nostalgia; and a radical younger generation that identifies with Rise, the alternative movement for “Respect, Independence, Socialism and Environmentalism”.

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The Conversation: SNP surge in European elections has major implications for a second independence referendum

Unlike most of the rest of the UK, where the upstart Brexit Party topped the poll, in Scotland the SNP finished first yet again. The party took more than 38% of the vote, picking up half of Scotland’s six seats in the European Parliament.

This is quite a remarkable success for a party that has been in power in Scotland since 2007 and has finished top in every election since 2011. [...]

For the SNP, Scotland voting differently from the rest of the UK feeds into the narrative that Scotland is just politically different and should make its own decisions. [...]

The Conservative anti-independence message to an extent prevented the party from having an even worse election. They are likely to remain the main unionist party, particular as their leader Ruth Davidson has a very high profile, rivalling only the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon, and is also relatively popular too. [...]

Meanwhile, the Brexit Party did finish a distant second with around 14% in Scotland but this does not place them to do well in the next Holyrood election. UKIP won a seat at the 2014 EU elections in Scotland and gained less than 2% two years later at the Holyrood elections.

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New Statesman: England’s political narcissism could break up the Union

Whither the English Unionist? Properly put to the test by Brexit, those who have for so long professed their damp-eyed commitment to the integrity of the UK have been found wanting. Asked “if Brexit means the collapse of the Irish peace process, what is your choice?”, they reply “Brexit”. Asked “if Brexit leads to a United Ireland, what is your choice?”, they reply “Brexit”. And asked “if Brexit means Scotland leaving the Union, what is your choice?”, they reply “still Brexit”. This really does bring new meaning to the idea of going it alone. [...]

I honestly don’t know where all this will leave the Union. But I do not think the display of English arrogance and contempt will be easily overcome, on any side. Now awakened, English nationalism is unlikely to quiet itself any time soon. The decision to leave the EU is an English one, taken against the firmly expressed wishes of Scotland and Northern Ireland. The (relatively popular) Scottish government, and the Scottish viewpoint, has been treated as an irritant throughout the process. Internal Westminster Tory politics is all that has mattered. Corbyn’s Labour has been shamefully complicit throughout. [...]

At the last Holyrood Budget, the finance secretary Derek Mackay used the parliament’s new income tax powers to raise tax on the wealthiest – only by a small amount, but the point was made. If the Tories cut taxes in next year’s Westminster Budget to provide a Brexit stimulus – and this is the chatter I hear from Tory cabinet ministers - what does Mackay do? Does he keep Scottish taxes higher on the basis that his values dictate such a course of action, and risk a significant competitive disadvantage? Or does he accept that the Scottish parliament controls income tax in name only, and will always be bounced around by the fiscal decisions of Westminster? Humiliation is a real possibility. [...]

When Palmerston said that "we have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow," he was talking about the country’s foreign policy. Today it stands as England’s take on its fellow UK nations. A Union so constructed may be incapable of survival.

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Al Jazeera: Scotland still wants independence

These setbacks have occurred after a decade of nearly uninterrupted progress for independence supporters. The SNP first took control of Holyrood, Scotland's devolved national parliament, in 2007. In 2011, it won an overall majority of the parliament's seats. In 2014, it staged (and narrowly failed to win) a landmark vote on the break-up of Britain. So the rapid loss of momentum that has taken place this year has been profoundly disconcerting for a movement that had come to view independence as a cast-iron certainty. [...]

The baseline numbers tell their own story. A poll from September put backing for independence at 46 percent - one point higher than it was at the same stage in 2014. Other surveys suggest it might be slightly lower than that, but few indicate that it has fallen far below the symbolic 40-percent mark. Similarly, the SNP - which is now in its 11th year of office - continues to register double-digit leads over Labour and the Conservatives at both the devolved Scottish and UK parliamentary levels.

Until quite recently, polling of this sort would have been unthinkable for nationalists. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, barely a quarter of the Scottish electorate wanted Scotland to leave the UK. Today, it's cited as evidence that the independence movement has stalled and that the SNP is spiralling into decline.   [...]

Since the 2014 referendum, the case against independence has rested almost exclusively on the claim that Britain insulates Scotland from economic pain. In the absence of English public subsidies, unionists argue, Scotland would be a financial basket case, incapable of covering the basic costs of self-government. Even Jeremy Corbyn - who otherwise vigorously insists that spending cuts are an ideological choice rather than a fiscal necessity - has suggested that independence would mean "turbo-charged austerity" for the Scots. [...]

And the ongoing controversy in Catalonia is more likely to shrink the prospects of Scottish independence than it is to advance them. The constitutional standoff between Barcelona and Madrid may have animated the SNP grassroots, and even prompted the party's instinctively cautious leadership to launch a rare intervention into the affairs of a foreign state. But it also illustrates the pitfalls of declaring independence unilaterally (London will resist giving the green light to another Scottish vote for as long as it can), as well as the EU's intense institutional hostility towards regional and sub-state secessionist movements.

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UnHerd: Ruth Davidson - Ctrl + Alt + Del. Conservatives must reboot capitalism

In the UK, just 19% of people agree that “the next generation will probably be richer, safer and healthier than the last”. That figure falls to 15% of Germans and 14% of Americans. Markets might work but they aren’t seen to be working for everyone. [...]

And within those eons, we see individual currents and eddies. We are living at the tail end of a transition which started roughly 35 years ago. It’s a transition which has seen Britain gradually migrate from a manufacturing economy to a service-led one. The UK Commission on Employment and Skills shows the changes over the last 20 years in the UK workforce – fewer people in manufacturing, fewer in the skilled trades, fewer secretarial roles; but a great increase in managerial, professional and technical skills. [...]

It is not inequality that bites deepest, but injustice. People expect that the CEO of a corporation will be the highest paid person on the payroll. What they don’t accept is that FTSE 100 bosses are paid 174 times the average worker’s wage in this decade – compared to 13 to 44 times in 1980.

In 2011, YouGov found that 85% of Britons believed that income should depend on how hard someone works or on their talent. But analysis by the Institute of Policy Studies found that of 241 of the highest paid CEOs between 1993 and 2012, nearly 40% were either sacked, their company had to pay significant fraud-related fines and settlements, or their companies required some form of bail out from the state. Instead of bosses being paid for success, a significant minority were handsomely rewarded for failure.

Adam Smith’s diagnosis “when the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters” while blunt, contains a kernel of truth for the present. If business itself has flunked the opportunity to put its house in order following the 2008 crash, then it is time for governments to take the initiative. Reforms of corporate governance, the break-up of monopolies, restrictions on tax avoidance, lowering barriers of entry to market competitors – each of these actions is required and each needs governments to cooperate in order for them to be effective.

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Al Jazeera: Will the Scottish National Party lose to Corbynism?

At the UK's snap general election on June 8, the SNP shed 21 of its 56 Westminster seats and saw its share of the vote slump by 13 points. Angus Robertson, the party's chief strategist, and Alex Salmond, its former leader, both lost their once rock-solid constituencies in the rural north-east. Towering nationalist majorities across Glasgow and the central belt crumbled. Even the Liberal Democrats enjoyed a modest Caledonian revival, adding three new Scottish MPs, in Edinburgh, Dunbartonshire, and Caithness, to their previous, solitary total of one. [...]

Remarkably, given the scale of its losses, the SNP hasn't collapsed into acrimony, nor is Sturgeon's leadership in any serious trouble. However, a debate is starting to brew within nationalist circles about the exact nature and purpose of SNP strategy - a strategy that is clearly no longer working.

The most urgent criticisms are coming from the left. Some senior nationalists, such as Tommy Sheppard, the MP for Edinburgh East, want the party to embrace a more radical social democratic identity. They are worried that the appeal of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn runs much deeper in Scotland than anyone had initially anticipated and that, in the event of another election, the SNP could haemorrhage seats in its urban and working-class heartlands.  [...]

Davidson's unexpected success capped the resurgence of a party that had been relegated to the fringes of Scottish political life in the late 1990s, but has now navigated its way back into the mainstream on a wave of unionist frustration. For the first time since Holyrood was created 18 years ago, the Scottish right is brimming with confidence. Davidson has cast Sturgeon's referendum U-turn as a personal victory, and is pressing the SNP for additional concessions, notably, that any talk of independence is suspended until at least the next Scottish election in 2021, and that the nationalists get back to their "day job" of running Scotland within the constraints of the current devolutionary settlement. [...]

The numbers are stark. At the 2014 independence referendum, 1.6 million Scots voted "Yes" on a record-breaking turnout of 84 percent. The following year, at the 2015 UK election, the SNP soaked up most of that base, winning 1.4 million votes. At the 2016 Scottish devolved election, the SNP vote dipped to just over one million. In June, it dipped again, to 980,000, on a massively reduced turnout of 66 percent.

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The Huffington Post: Sturgeon’s Last Stand

One of the main reasons the SNP froze Council Tax from 2007 was because they wanted to court the Tory vote. This has been an extremely popular measure in Scotland, yet it has inflicted a massive amount of austerity upon local councils, with the council tax freeze leading to Scottish local authorities facing £14.8billion of debt, and having to make frontline cuts.

The general election paid testament to how reliant the SNP are upon conservative voters. Labour did make seven gains increasing their vote share in every seat. But it is conservative voters leaving the SNP who they really owe their seats to. Just look at Gordon Brown’s former super safe Labour seat of Kircaldy and Cowdenbeath, that he won with a majority of 23,009 in 2010.In 2017 although Labour won the seat with 17,016 votes, the number of Labour votes was down from 2015 when they lost with 17,654. This was because the Conservative vote surged with 13.4% swing from the SNP to them, doubling their votes to 10,762 whilst halving the SNP vote from 27,628 to 16,757. Even in seats where Labour did get substantial swings such as Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill or Glasgow North East were pretty much matched by the Conservatives. [...]

Of course Davidson is at odds with the hard brexit, social conservative brand of conservatism that became central to Mayism. Davidson is one of last Cameronians standing in a prominent position within the conservative party. She is socially liberal, a remainer and unlike the Cameroons ambivalent towards austerity. So the Conservative revival is very much down to Davidson’s brand of conservatism and unionism. She and her MP’s are now in a coalition with the conservative party. Her 13 MP’s are central to the Conservatives being the largest party and will be even more pivotal than the DUP at holding the Conservative party together.

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Jacobin Magazine: Independence on Hold

The Scottish independence movement did indeed continue after the referendum, and the SNP itself reached historic highs in the 2015 general election, winning fifty-six of fifty-nine seats, and a fresh mandate at the 2016 Scottish Parliament election. In March 2017, new SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon announced her intention to organize another independence vote. [...]

Labour minister George Robertson famously promised that Tony Blair’s creation of a devolved assembly in Edinburgh would “kill nationalism stone dead,” satisfying the demand for national autonomy. Yet this parliament in fact provided a platform from which the SNP could build itself as a party of Scottish government, even while in permanent opposition to UK administrations. [...]

In office in Edinburgh starting in 2007, the SNP pointed to its flagship free education policy and measures to thwart the Tory “bedroom tax” (benefit cuts for those with supposedly “unoccupied” rooms) as evidence that Scotland could follow a different course. While Salmond’s SNP was always a pro-business party interested only in electoral politics, it projected a strong progressive image. Its sometimes-sharp opposition to Tony Blair’s foreign policy particularly focused this agenda. [...]

Purely episodic factors do much to explain the SNP’s difficulties. While Sturgeon has been First Minister for less than three years, the party has been in government in Edinburgh since 2007. This is a long time for any administration to maintain support; by the end of this parliament, the SNP will have been in office longer than either Thatcher or New Labour. [...]

Yet with the UK heading out of the European Union and the meaning of Scottish independence unclear, it is difficult for Sturgeon to provide a sharply defined vision of what comes next for Scotland. The fate of the now-weakened Tory government in Brexit talks will be decisive for the SNP’s chances of recovery.

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The Guardian: Tory-DUP deal: Ruth Davidson 'receives assurances' from PM over gay rights

In an apparent criticism of the plan, Davidson on Friday tweeted a link to a speech she made in favour of marriage equality, with the message: “As a Protestant unionist about to marry an Irish Catholic, here’s the Amnesty Pride lecture I gave in Belfast.”

“One of them is country, one of the others is LGBTI rights. I asked for a categoric assurance that if any deal or scoping deal was done with the DUP there would be absolutely no rescission of LGBTI rights in the rest of the UK, in Great Britain, and that we would use any influence that we had to advance LGBTI rights in Northern Ireland. [...]

While the party insists it is protecting the “traditional” definition of marriage, critics have denounced its stance as homophobic. Going back decades, the DUP was at the vanguard of the failed Save Ulster from Sodomy movement that campaigned against the 1982 legalisation of homosexual sex in Northern Ireland. [...]

In more recent times, former first minister Peter Robinson’s wife Iris, then an MP, described homosexuality as an “abomination”, while the MP son of Paisley, Ian Paisley Jr, said he felt “repulsed” by homosexual acts.

A party councillor in Ballymena reportedly claimed Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,500 people in the US, was God’s revenge for New Orleans hosting an annual gay pride event.

Former DUP Stormont minister Edwin Poots once hit out at a gay rugby team in Belfast, accusing it of introducing a sporting “apartheid” against heterosexual players. Poots also ended up in court for upholding a ban on gay men giving blood and, in a separate case, objecting to gay couples adopting. In the former case an appeal judge overturned a finding that he was motivated by bias.

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The Telegraph: Ruth Davidson: Next PM should not block Scottish independence referendum

Ruth Davidson has said that she would advise the next Prime Minister not to block a request by Nicola Sturgeon for a second independence referendum in the wake of the vote for Brexit.

The Scottish Tory leader said it was “incredibly premature” and “destabilising” for the First Minister to press for a rerun of the 2014 vote, but she had never thought that one should be denied because she is a “democrat”. [...]

It is hugely significant as it makes it even more difficult for the next Prime Minister to refuse a rerun. Sources close to the Scottish Tory leader argued that doing so would provoke a massive public backlash in Scotland that could further drive up support for separation. [...]

A series of opinion polls conducted since the Brexit result was announced show support for independence has just tipped over the 50 per cent mark.  Alex Salmond said there had been a “seismic movement in opinion.”

But Ms Davidson argued that Scots would be faced with an “utterly, utterly different” series of questions compared to 2014, including a choice between leaving their second biggest export market in the form of the EU or the UK, which is more than four times larger.

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Mashable: How a popular politician boosted an unpopular party in Scotland

Ruth Davidson, who comfortably won Edinburgh Central, an area where the Conservatives previously placed fourth, has become the driving force of the Tories in Scotland, winning over voters and inspiring others to join to the party along the way. [...]

Young, working class, Christian, openly gay and driven by liberal values, she famously described herself as a “tough old bird” but she has an affability that charms most who meet her. She also has in bucket loads that elusive characteristic – relatability – that so many politicians would give their second homes for.

On top of that she has some real world experience, having served in the Territorial Army, making it out to Kosovo and injuring her back at one point. Her stint as a producer and presenter for the BBC at the start of her career, meanwhile, has gifted her the gab essential to succeed in politics.

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