Alex Salmond has a few things in common with his English
nationalist counterpart Nigel Farage.
They both admire Vladimir Putin, for example, and despise what they call
the ‘Westminster elite”. They both
appear to be electorally very shrewd politicians, but if Salmond has his way in
a couple of weeks time he will make the title of Farage’s insurrectionist party
look a little redundant. For of the
United Kingdom there will be no more.
This debate has failed to properly permeate English
consciousness, perhaps one indication that the Scots may not be wrong when they
claim that England exudes a general stand-offishness towards its northern
neighbour. This weekend, however,
appears to have changed that. A poll
from Yougov shows the ‘Yes’ campaigners (i.e. ‘Yes’ to an independent Scotland,
for those whose failure to follow the referendum includes ignorance of the
question being asked!) ahead of the ‘No’s” for the first time in the
campaign. Given the substantial lead that
the No team had at the start of the campaign, that’s a pretty bad blow. And a shocking indictment of the way the
“Better Together” campaign has been run.
The momentum is now with Salmond and the independence
advocates, and it might just succeed.
Momentum counts for much, and two weeks or so before the vote it might
be enough to take them over the finish line, while two weeks represents a very
short window for the complacent and unimaginative No campaigners to get their
act together again.
It is in some ways astonishing how little attention this
campaign has had south of the border, given that it is one of the most
significant constitutional challenges since….well, since thirteen colonies on
the eastern seaboard of America chose to go their own way. Perhaps it was because no-one ever really
believed Scotland would possibly want to go independent. I’ve lost count of the number of English
friends who have no possible ground-connection with Scotland but who have
cheerfully asserted that Scotland will clearly not vote ‘Yes’. Hmmm.
Maybe we should have paid more attention to, er, the Scots themselves on
this one? The Scots may have a natural
wariness of the dangers of independence but they also appear to be warming to
the high-risk strategy that says whatever the downside, at least we are our own
nation again. We are Scots, and we don’t
have to live under the yoke of English government ever again. I suspect that if that is the case, it could
be a dangerous delusion. The Economics
Editor of the Sunday Times is just one of the several voices suddenly raised
today warning that an independent Scotland is doomed to fail (his article is
behind the paywall, so I haven’t bothered linking here, but probably worth
begging or buying a copy of the Sunday Times for today).
The shock of the poll has prompted unrest in Tory ranks –
never very far away to be honest.
Several un-named ‘senior’ Tory backbenchers have given voice to the idea
– gaining momentum on much the same trajectory as the move towards a Scottish Yes
– that David Cameron, the Englishman with the Scots name, might be forced to do
a Lord North and resign if he presides over the loss of Scotland. Quite apart from the fact that it is a
remarkable feature of modern British politics that Tory MPs cannot bear to stay
united behind a Prime Minister for more than a week or so, the ‘Cameron must
go” brigade is making much of the advantage given to Salmond in allowing him
the upper hand when negotiating the date, franchise and question of the
referendum. But their real issue
probably remains a belief that Cameron still represents a marginally more
constructive attitude towards Europe than most of his party wants, and a
triumphant ‘Yes’ vote offers them the opportunity to get rid of him. The Tory responses to the Scottish campaign,
and their continuing travails as an utterly dysfunctional party are worth a
separate post, but it does indicate how the referendum north of the border is
finally making its tentacles felt in all aspects of the British body
politic. Perhaps it should have done so
earlier.
Whatever the tremors in the Tory Party, they should be as
nothing compared to what might happen in Labour’s ranks. “Better Together” is as much a Labour
campaign as anything, and while Scottish Tories remain solidly pro-Union (and
over 400,000 Scots voted Tory in the 2010 election, a mere 80,000 fewer than
the SNP) the key to the campaign lies with wavering Labour voters seduced by
Alex Salmond’s promises of a state with pretty well free everything. Labour have 41 Westminster seats in Scotland,
and a Yes vote could traduce them as a governing party in Westminster. It isn’t just Cameron who might fear for his
position if Scotland votes to go it alone.
The Sunday papers are awash with the sort of articles about
Scottish independence that could usefully have been part of their warp and weft
for many months prior to this weekend, but what we have is fascinating. The single best analysis, in my view, in that
it takes a broad look at all of the implications behind the vote without
reducing itself to a particular partisan view, is Andrew Rawnsley's commentary in
the Obsever. Will Hutton, in the same
paper, offers a crie de coeur against breaking the Union, while Dominic Lawson
over in the Sunday Times suggests that an independent Scotland would soon
become a low-tax, right-wing haven.
There is also the interesting notion being raised of an independent
Scotland seeing a revival of a centre-right party, once the Tories have been
freed from the hated English link. In
the Telegraph, Iain Martin writes a more viscerally anti-Salmond piece under
the giveaway headline “The final push for Alex Salmond’s land of fantasy”.
The Scots have been arguing about independence for months
without us taking much interest. Time now
to sit up and notice, for an earthquake might be coming.
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