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Six years ago Scotland voted by a 10-point margin to stay part of the UK. Yet the last nine consecutive opinion polls show the backing for leave as high as 58 per cent, and averaging at 53 per cent. This sustained lead for independence spells trouble for Boris Johnson’s government, which fears demands for a second referendum will become overwhelming.
The Scottish National Party (SNP) is expected to sweep to victory in local elections in May 2021, giving it an outright majority in the Edinburgh Assembly. The SNP has already been trying in the Scottish courts to circumvent a Johnson veto on another referendum. Whatever happens, the nationalists will ramp up their provocations.
Last week Bloomberg News revealed that Hanbury Strategy, a consultancy firm close to the Conservatives, had drawn up a detailed plan for ministers to defeat the nationalists. The main tidbit in the leaked memo was the advice that the government should “coopt the European Union†into arguing that an independent Scotland would struggle to rejoin the bloc. That would be an embarrassing last resort for an administration hellbent on Brexit, with or without a trade deal. The EU wouldn’t easily be coopted by Johnson. The last independence referendum was meant to settle the issue of the Union for a generation. Yet now it’s in peril again. The threat has international ramifications.
The end of the United Kingdom would raise a question about Britain’s standing in the world, a deeper one than that posed by Brexit. If Northern Ireland were ever to vote to join the Irish republic, the damage could be limited: The status of the North has been unsettled since partition in 1921. But if Scotland were to secede that would be the end of the extraordinarily successful 307-year-old partnership that created the British Empire and fought two world wars. Post-independence, London would lose its Scottish nuclear submarine bases and its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council might be challenged. The rump UK would be diminished, in self-confidence and size. Independence would impoverish the Scots, too. That argument clinched the vote last time and its force has redoubled since Covid-19. Sooner or later the Conservatives must make it again. But is Johnson the right man to do it?
Before the pandemic, the Treasury in London already subsidised Edinburgh by up to 12 billion pounds ($13 billion) a year. Scotland’s implicit budget deficit pre-crisis was 8.6% of gross domestic product, about 6 percentage points higher than the UK as a whole, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies. Post-Covid, the Office for Budget Responsibility estimates those numbers could balloon to a 19% implicit deficit. Total borrowing was already equivalent to £2,776 per person in Scotland as opposed to £855 for the UK. Pre-Covid even the SNP’s own Sustainable Growth Commission proposed holding down growth in public spending to 0.5%, “implying cuts to areas other than health, social care and pensions.†Post-Covid that would mean sharp tax increases and spending cuts.
—Bloomberg