This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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The Starmer government’s first great triumph is already proclaimed: Labour’s return to dominance in Scotland ensures the survival of the United Kingdom.

It’s not a wholly implausible claim. After all, Scottish nationalism and hatred of the Tories go together. It should augur well that Scotland’s largest political party is for the first time since 2015 a unionist one. The SNP crumbled from 48 to 9 MPs. With that collapse, the political wing of the IndyRef2 movement has been, like proud Edward’s army, sent homeward tae think again.

Front-runners to become the new leader of the Scottish Conservatives appear to agree. “We must move on from simply opposing independence,” argues Russell Findlay MSP, implying that Labour’s success has shot the Scottish Tory fox.

That, too, seems to be the assumption of the party’s current deputy leader at Holyrood, Meghan Gallagher. Planning for a future beyond nationalist and unionist labels assumes that Labour has indeed put the cause of independence to sleep, however, at least for the current parliament.

The SNP remains the party of government in Holyrood (the next Scottish Parliament election is in 2026), and its First Minister will have the wit to continue blaming all Caledonia’s ills on Westminster, merely switching the grievance from how the Tories don’t understand Scotland to how Labour doesn’t — the very strategy that got the SNP into power in Holyrood in the first place, against New Labour in 2007.

Do young Scots want to break up the UK because what Britishness offers is made invisible?

What is more, none of the SNP’s recent failings have hindered support for independence, which remains in the 46–48 per cent range in the opinion polls, well within touching distance of a majority.

The belief that Scotland is shackled to a failed British state is commonplace, from Motherwell to Montrose. Well over two-thirds of young Scots want to break up the UK. Is that, perhaps, in part because what Britishness offers them is made invisible, except when it is identified as objectionable?

It is optimistic to assume that Labour’s promise to “reset the UK government’s relationship with the devolved governments” will strengthen the appeal of being British.

Labour is committed to giving the Scottish government enhanced international recognition (it already has multiple “overseas offices” in EU countries, as well as in Beijing, Ottawa and Washington DC).

Labour also supports devolving to the Scottish government the disbursement of UK structural funds (so UK grants can be rebranded in Scotland as if they are a gift from the Scottish parliament and not, as is reality, overwhelmingly from English taxpayers). The guiding principle of these changes is to enhance the prestige of Holyrood at the expense of Westminster.

Potentially greater mischief is in store through Labour’s manifesto commitment to establishing a new Council of the Nations and Regions. This additional layer of government is the brainchild of Gordon Brown, a professed unionist who, having witnessed how devolution has weakened the Britishness of Scotland, has concluded that the solution is that devolution hasn’t gone far enough.

Someone with a clearer grasp of psychology might ask whether national unity is better served by replacing the existing, relatively discreet, channels through which the UK and devolved governments interact with a (presumably televised) forum in which the tribunes of the devolved nations can publicly grandstand with their demands for more power and money and then blame the hapless UK government for denying “our people’s will”.

In this council of the nations, the traduced British prime minister will feel like Francois Mitterrand at EU summits, except far worse — getting handbagged by three Celtic versions of Margaret Thatcher not just simultaneously, but forever.

With policies as foolhardy as this, it is optimistic to imagine that Labour’s constitutional tinkering can long suppress Scotland’s separatist instincts. More remarkable is that one of the most senior of the Scottish Conservatives’ leadership contenders argues for something similar.

As worries grew that the 2014 Scottish independence referendum could be lost, Murdo Fraser MSP, began promoting quasi-federal “solutions” to make devolution work in the interests of the whole UK.

His version of the Brown proposal was for a council of the four nations to replace the House of Lords — which could become an eternal blocking chamber for British government policies.

Whatever Fraser may imagine, this is a fast track to making British government impotent outside England. In this, he has form. He has long advocated the Scottish Conservatives break away from the national party to become a new, wholly autonomous party, as the Bavarian CSU is to Germany’s CDU.

The analogy is unhelpful. Unlike Scotland, federal law prohibits Bavaria seceding from Germany. Mountains and the shared love of cholesterol do not a comparison make. Deeply socially conservative, Bavarian politics have not resembled those of Scotland since Bonnie Prince Charlie was at Holyrood.

Is the nationalist challenge waning? For the moment, perhaps. Don’t underestimate the witlessness of Scottish Labour and Conservative unionists to give it fresh impetus, though.