In Britain today, there are many creaking institutions and industries that are dubiously described as “world-leading” — our higher education sector, our underfunded military, and our sclerotic civil service, to name but a few.

Yet if there is one thing that Britain remains truly, genuinely world-leading at, it is our ability to invent self-destructive public policies. In this space, we are true innovators, exploring new frontiers of ill-considered bunkum while finding novel ways to continue our country’s stagnation, despite our obviously strong fundamentals.

And the latest such innovation may have come from Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, who is reportedly considering a separate system of “Scottish visas” designed to attract migrants north of the border.

For years, the SNP-led Scottish Government has advocated loudly for greater migration to Scotland, but to little avail. While England’s population has boomed, Scotland’s has stagnated, exacerbating the fiscal burden of the country’s ageing population. Meanwhile, as the number of working-age people in Scotland has fallen, business organisations have stepped up their lobbying efforts in order to induce the Government to provide them with more low-cost labour.

So far, so standard. The remarkable absurdity of Cooper’s temporary tartan visas is the notion that migrants who move to Scotland will actually stay there. In practice, Scotland-specific visas will quickly become another backdoor route for low-skilled migrants to enter the UK’s broader workforce — expect to see an exodus of “informal economy” workers heading southwards at the first opportunity.

In theory, the Government’s plans to tie visas to Scottish tax registration would help to ensure that new migrants remained local. However, as recent issues around student and care visas have demonstrated, Britain is now a country with a large and growing number of businesses willing to give false information to the authorities and collaborate in the breaching of visa conditions. Given the Scottish Government’s woeful administrative record, I am sceptical that Holyrood will be able to effectively enforce any theoretical restrictions on southward migration. 

In a strange way, for the SNP, these are surely the perfect migrants — all of the virtue-signalling opportunities, with none of the fiscal overheads.

Yet the proposal’s specific flaws are not the most worrying thing about today’s announcement — the political instincts which lead us to this position are far more concerning.

The hastily constructed “MacVisa” proposal betrays the fact that this Labour Government still sees low-skilled migration as a quick fix

For one, despite overwhelming public opposition to low-skilled migration, Starmer’s new Labour Government continues to find new excuses to create open-ended visa routes. There is no democratic desire for greater migration to Scotland — quite the opposite, in fact. According to YouGov’s latest tracker, 60 per cent of Scottish voters feel that immigration has been too high over the past ten years. Just 7 per cent say that it has been too low. The SNP’s pro-migration fervour is by no means the norm in Scotland.

The hastily constructed “MacVisa” proposal betrays the fact that this Labour Government still sees low-skilled migration as a quick fix for any and all economic hardship. This is, in the truest sense, a blatant example of the “human quantitative easing” described by Tom Jones, occasionally of this parish. Rather than reforming our broken pension and social care systems, we continue to prop up the ponzi scheme with more low-skilled labour. Rather than encouraging businesses to innovate and reduce their labour demands, we plug gaps with open-ended immigration. 

Just as concerning is the notion that the UK Government is considering regional visas in the first place. A Scottish visa system would effectively give Scotland control over its own immigration policy — another step towards the breakup of the country, and another dilution of Westminster’s once-superior authority. For centuries, the great jewel in the British constitutional crown was our centralised administration, which enabled us to make decisions quickly and holistically, in the interests of their entire country.

And yet this core strength is roundly ignored by Labour ministers who seem to believe that paying the Danegeld will actually get rid of the Dane. In fact, the more legally and politically distinct Scotland becomes from the rest of the United Kingdom, the easier it will be for Scottish nationalists to break the country apart.

But as Scotland’s own King Malcolm III attests, the best way to get rid of the Dane is to defeat them on the battlefield — rather than giving over more authority to Holyrood, any serious unionist should be thinking about how we can empower central government institutions which legislate for the whole United Kingdom. Ever-greater devolution is a sign of decline, of atrophying state capacity, and of faltering political will.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, though. So far, Starmer and co have shown themselves to be little more than a second-rate New Labour tribute act, making all of the same mistakes despite thirty years of hindsight. With Oasis set to return to the stage next year, you’d be forgiven for thinking that we’ve travelled back to the late 1990s — albeit without any of the economic growth, confidence, or optimism.