26 Britain The EconomistJune 29th 2019
G
ordon brownis doing a much better job of being an elder
statesman than he did of being prime minister. A man who was
seen as a failure in office has transmogrified into a widely respect-
ed figure. In April he delivered an electrifying speech on the shame
of anti-Semitism in his Labour Party. This week he was at it again.
He warned that “the union is today more at risk than at any time in
300 years—and more in danger than when we had to fight for it in
2014 during a bitter Scottish referendum.” He added that there was
more at stake than just the unity and integrity of a country. Also on
the line is a collection of values—“tolerance, respect for diversity,
being outward-looking”—which are embodied in the United King-
dom and now threatened by various competing, narrow national-
isms. He is right on all counts.
England and Scotland have been drifting apart for decades.
Scotland increasingly feels like a different country rather than just
a distinctive part of a multinational kingdom. It has its own parlia-
ment, its own ruling party, its own tax rates, its own welfare ar-
rangements (Scottish students go to university free of charge) and,
if things go according to plan, will soon have its own Scottish Na-
tional Investment Bank. The Scots wake up every morning to curse
different politicians and chew over different political scandals.
The country is currently obsessed by a scandal that has got little
traction in the south but could shake the ruling Scottish National
Party to its foundations: Alex Salmond, Scotland’s first minister in
2007-14, is awaiting trial on multiple charges of sexual assault and
two of attempted rape.
Britain’s great political parties are also losing their Scottish di-
mensions. Historically the Labour Party has drawn on Scotland for
a disproportionate share of its leaders: Keir Hardie, Ramsay Mac-
Donald, John Smith, Tony Blair (just) and Mr Brown. The Conserva-
tives had a strong tartan streak, albeit usually of the landowning
variety. Today they are thoroughly Anglicised. Excluding the Scot-
land secretary and shadow-secretary, there are only three Scots on
the front benches—Michael Gove and Liam Fox on the government
side and Barry Gardiner on the Labour side—and none of them rep-
resents a Scottish seat. The transformation of Labour is particular-
ly striking. What was a Tartan Raj in the days of Mr Blair and Mr
Brown has become a London clique, with six members of the shad-owcabinetrepresentingLondonseats—and four of them, Jeremy
Corbyn, Emily Thornberry, Diane Abbott and Sir Keir Starmer, rep-
resenting adjacent constituencies. Chris Deerin, head of Reform
Scotland, a think-tank, points out that the Scots have little time for
Mr Corbyn’s student-union brand of politics: “The Scots have his-
torically been serious about their socialism. They know bullshit
when they smell it.”
Until recently it looked as if Scotland’s drift could be held back.
The result of the independence referendum was decisive enough,
at 55%-45%, to force the nationalists back to the drawing board.
The Brexit result further complicated the independence project. A
third of people who voted for independence also voted to leave the
European Union. And Britain’s difficulties in extricating itself
from a 46-year relationship with the euhave emphasised the diffi-
culties that Scotland would face if it were to untangle its far more
complex, 312-year-old tie with England. But now pressure for
break-up is rising dramatically.
The Brexit debate in England is becoming increasingly radical
and irresponsible. The Scots voted by 62% to stay in the eu,with
every one of the country’s 32 authorities backing Remain. Since
then, all of Scotland’s preferred options for a “soft Brexit”, such as
staying in a customs union or the single market, have been reject-
ed. Many Scots feel that this is an omen of worse to come. If the
English have been so unwilling to listen to them so far, why would
they be more willing to listen to them when it comes to shaping a
post-Brexit Britain?
The Conservatives are set on crowning Boris Johnson as prime
minister. Yet north of the border, Mr Johnson is kryptonite: a bum-
bling Bertie Wooster who takes his privileges for granted and ex-
pects other people to clean up his messes and darn his socks. The
Scottish Tories are so worried about the damage he will do to their
brand that they organised a stop-Boris plot, code-named Opera-
tion Arse (“We called it that so we’d all be clear who we were talking
about,” one reportedly said). It is a measure of how desperate they
are that they are pinning their hopes on Jeremy Hunt, a man who
only has an approval rating of minus 24 in Scotland, compared
with Mr Johnson’s minus 37.Take back control
Both Boris and do-or-die Brexit can be explained by something
deeper: the rise of English nationalism. The Conservative Party is
on its way to becoming an English nationalist party rather than a
unionist one. A recent YouGov poll showed that 63% of Tory mem-
bers would rather see Scotland independent than lose Brexit. Mr
Johnson is surrounded by a clique of people such as Jacob Rees-
Mogg and Iain Duncan Smith who exude Englishness and talk
blithely about turning Britain into “Singapore-on-Thames”. The
party is now more worried about losing voters to another English
nationalist outfit—Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party—than it is about
keeping the country in one piece.
The economic cost of a Brexit-induced break-up of Britain
would be big enough. But Mr Brown is right that the cultural cost
would be even bigger. British nationalism is a peculiarly capacious
sort of nationalism that makes it easier for people from all sorts of
backgrounds to identify as British. English nationalism, by con-
trast, has a tinge of narrowness about it that excludes not only the
Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish, but also English people from
ethnic minorities. Mr Johnson’s reckless approach to Brexit risks
not just precipitating a no-deal exit from the eu,but also wrecking
one of the most creative fudges in the history of nation-making. 7Bagehot The other union
Leaving the euis putting the union with Scotland under greater strain than at any time since 1707