Three hundred years ago on Tuesday, the Scottish parliament voted to ratify the Treaty of Union and join Scotland to England. Three centuries of shared history later, Britain is waking up to the realisation that the UK could soon be no more.
A YouGov poll for today’s Sunday Times shows the Scottish National party is poised to win 44 seats at Holyrood, ahead of Labour with 43, the Liberal Democrats with 18, the Scottish Tories with 18 and smaller parties and independents sharing the remaining six seats in the 129-seat legislature.
Increasingly an SNP-led coalition looks the likeliest outcome and Alex Salmond, the SNP leader, has pledged to hold a referendum on independence when he becomes Scotland’s first minister.
Recent polls suggest that in such a referendum Scots would back independence, leading to the start of negotiations between London and Edinburgh on full separation.
Scotland would demand its share of the value of Britain’s myriad assets, from British embassies abroad to the Parachute Regiment. Naturally these assets would include the North Sea oilfields, which in the next five years alone are expected to produce £75 billion in revenue for the UK Treasury.
Negotiations would begin on the removal of Britain’s nuclear missile submarine base from Faslane on the River Clyde. And the MP for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath — Gordon Brown — would have to decide whether he should resign himself to a political future in an independent Scotland or try to switch to a safe seat in England.
So is it the end for the United Kingdom? Is the partnership that founded an empire and defeated Nazism to be consigned to history? New evidence suggests the nationalist surge might not be all it seems.
The YouGov poll commissioned by The Sunday Times suggests that despite the SNP’s current strength, talk of the Union’s demise may be premature. Support for Scotland going it alone seems to vary considerably, depending on how the question is posed.
When Scots are asked if they want “independence”, increasingly a majority say yes — an ICM poll last week had 51% backing independence and just 36% saying no.
Our survey asked though: “Do you think the union between Scotland and England is or is not worth maintaining?” To this question 53% said it was worth maintaining and 33% disagreed.
This seesawing of opinion in the minds of Scots voters is the result of complex loyalties as Scottishness tussles with Britishness. Many Labour supporters would not dream of voting SNP, but back independence. Many SNP supporters are simply anti-Blair and want to give Labour a bloody nose over the war in Iraq, but would return to the fold if Brown were party leader.
“Although I want independence I have no problem calling myself British,” says Alison Blair, 43, a hospital consultant from Uddingston, highlighting another contradiction. “Independence is a great idea and it will happen. This year I am going to vote SNP for the first time because I cannot believe a Labour government took us into war. The only way to ensure this will not happen again is to gain more control over our country.”
For other voters, support for independence is conditional. “I am unsure about Scottish independence — it depends on how much they would raise taxes,” says Richard Murphy, a 20-year-old sales assistant from the Ibrox area of Glasgow. “If they could run the country effectively I’m all for it, but I wouldn’t sacrifice quality of life or public services for independence.”
To many Scots the English are simply “the auld enemy”. Yet the poll gives a revealing insight into how these two neighbours regard each other. Neither nation accepts the stereotypical view of the other. Only 9% of English people believe the Scots are tight fisted, for example, and only 18% think they drink too much.
Just one in four Scots believe the English are stuffy and uptight and only one in five believes the English are xenophobic. However, some prejudices die hard — just one in four Scots would support England in an international sporting contest.
Lazy assumptions about what English voters think are also undermined by the poll. Rising hysteria in some sections of the UK media about high public spending in Scotland and the numbers of Scottish ministers in Whitehall is not mirrored in the English population at large. The quintessentially English virtue of tolerance, it seems, is stronger than many commentators imagine.
Only one in three (34%) English voters agree that “Scottish people get more than their fair share of public money at the expense of English taxpayers”. And only one in four believe there are “too many Scottish ministers running Britain”.
Many Labour supporters in England think they detect a Tory plot — and an effective one at that — to cause trouble for Labour ministers such as Brown and John Reid, the home secretary.
The results of the poll present a reality check for the Scottish political debate, which has been dominated by a seemingly inexorable drift towards separatism. In recent months a number of prominent intellectuals, business leaders and senior churchmen who previously backed the Union or had kept their political affiliations private have stated publicly, if not their support for independence at least their belief Scotland has the wherewithal to thrive as an independent country.
The nationalist surge may owe itself in part to a greater sense of aspiration in a country whose capital city and whose largest city on the Clyde have transformed almost beyond recognition in recent years. Visitors cannot help but remark on the prosperity, the confidence and the buzz around Scotland.
Some members of the business community who have traditionally kept well away from the arena of constitutional change believe devolution is holding back economic expansion. Even stalwarts of the Conservative party — whose working-class vote in Scotland held unionist opinion firm from the 1950s until the rise of the SNP in the mid-1970s — are making an intellectual case for separatism.
Support from the right is predicated on the belief that Scotland’s overly subsidised economy — public spending north of the border exceeds 50% of gross domestic product and one in four jobs are in the public sector — will only become truly wealth creating if its politicians are given complete fiscal responsibility.
South of the border there has been a reawakening of English identity, with flags of St George becoming ever more present at sporting events and on the rear windows of cars. At the same time, resentment about Scotland’s apparently privileged arrangements have led to claims that England, too, would not be sorry to bid farewell to Scotland and its countrymen, who increasingly run English affairs governing English-only matters such as health and education while the English have no say in such matters in Scotland.
The results of today’s poll will provide some succour to supporters of the Union such as Brown, who yesterday marked its impending tricentenary with a dire warning that the world’s most enduring and successful partnership of nations was under threat from this “dangerous drift” towards separatism.
“It is time to speak up for supporters of the Union,” he told the staunchly unionist Daily Telegraph. “It is time to acknowledge Great Britain for the success it has been and is: a model for the world of how nations cannot only live side by side but are stronger together and weaker apart.
“Perhaps in the past we could get by with a Britishness that was assumed without being explicitly stated. But when our country is being challenged in Scotland, Wales and now England by secessionists, it is right to be explicit about what we, the British people, share in common and the patriotic vision for our country’s future.”
Even if the independence referendum fails to deliver a positive result, the problem for Brown remains that the process could paralyse political debate in Britain for years to come, in the same way the issue of separatism for the province of Quebec dominated Canadian politics during much of the 1980s and 1990s.
The last thing the chancellor needs is for anything that reminds English voters that he is Scottish. Demands at Westminster for English votes for English laws and demands for Scotland to get a smaller share of public spending are issues where he is caught between a rock and a hard place.
Give in to them and he risks turning Labour supporters in Scotland towards the SNP. Resist them and he allows the Conservatives the freedom to seed the English shires with discontent at his Scottishness.
So far in the Holyrood election campaign he and other Labour big hitters from Westminster have taken a heavy-handed approach against the SNP, arguing that independence would impoverish Scots because of a “black hole” in Scotland’s economy.
This tack, however, is in danger of backfiring as Scots voters become resentful at being told they are incapable of governing themselves. Professor Tom Devine of Edinburgh University, Scotland’s pre-eminent historian, warned Labour this weekend: “This could have counterproductive effects. It could even be Labour’s equivalent of the patronising attitudes towards the Scottish people that existed in the 1980s.”
The Labour onslaught on nationalism stems from a private meeting last year between the prime minister, Douglas Alexander, the Scottish secretary, and Jack McConnell. While McConnell wanted to fight a positive campaign based on policies, Alexander persuaded Blair to back a modern-day battle of Britain, in which Labour’s biggest commitment would be to saving the Union.
His sister, former enterprise minister Wendy Alexander, and a succession of Labour big guns have since bombarded the nationalists with scare stories. Unfortunately, some of their bombshells have exploded in their faces. While nat-bashing terrified Scots into voting for unionist parties in the first Holyrood election in 1999, the latest cack-handed claims by Reid that an independent Scotland would lead to border posts being erected in England and leave Scotland more vulnerable to a terrorist attack do not wash with a more sceptical public. Our survey shows just 10% believe him.
Even some Labour ministers believe such hysterical arguments could backfire. “Reid shot us in the foot with that one. There’s a strong economic and social case to make for the Union without resorting to nonsense like that,” said one.
The effect was to flush out senior public figures otherwise unlikely to have entered the fray. Last week Christopher Smout, the queen’s official historian in Scotland, rejected Reid’s claims and Lord Fraser, the former lord advocate and a committed Tory unionist, was so angered that he dismissed them as “pathetic”, arguing Scotland could flourish as a separate country.
While Labour’s election campaign team remains in disarray, with some members furious at how long it has taken the party to wake up to the SNP challenge, our poll shows that Labour has landed some serious blows on the nationalists.
Salmond’s Achilles heel appears to be his economic strategy. His personal approval rating is far higher than McConnell’s, who is viewed as less trustworthy, less visionary and a poorer first minister, but Salmond has failed to convince Scots that independence would be viable without tax hikes or spending cuts. It follows Labour claims that an independent Scotland would suffer a deficit of up to £11 billion — the gap it claims currently exists between how much public money is spent on Scotland and how much is raised from Scottish taxpayers.
Almost half of Scots believe there is a “black hole” in the SNP’s spending plans and that its sums do not add up — compared with just 20% who think they do. In addition, some 43% of Scots fear independence would mean higher taxes. For all Salmond’s sunny talk of emulating the success of the Scandinavians, the nation is split on whether Scots would be better off economically (35% believe they would be, 32% expect they would be worse off). This, more than anything, explains why more than half of Scots are not ready to back independence after they consider the issue in detail.
In the SNP camp this weekend, aides of Salmond are delighted by polls so close to the May election showing the party ahead of Labour. Others recall the first Holyrood election when less than a year out the SNP were 14 points ahead in the 2003 campaign when the parties were neck and neck just before polling day. At both counts the SNP lost by 10 points. James Mitchell, professor of politics at Strathclyde University, said the SNP should be “much further in front” at this stage if it is to win.
Salmond is on a high, but he knows there will be many obstacles to be negotiated before the saltire flies above Edinburgh castle.
Even if the SNP does become the largest party in Holyrood after May 3, all is not lost for the Union. To become first minister he will need the backing of one or more of the smaller parties. The Scottish Greens, who are expected to win two seats, back independence, but the LibDems do not, and will not even agree to a referendum on the issue.
If Salmond insists that any coalition partner must back the holding of an referendum, he could see the chance of power slip through his fingers. The biggest party could end up in opposition, with Labour and the LibDems forming their third coalition government, perhaps with the support of the Tories in a unionist alliance.
Some nationalists fear Salmond will be sorely tempted to sacrifice his referendum policy in a bid to have a taste of power. He is known to believe that the next big challenge for the nationalists is to prove themselves competent in government under the current devolution set-up and so ease fears about taking the next step to independence. He denies he is about to ditch the central plank of SNP policy, but doubts persist.
There is another problem. Under the Scotland Act, power over the constitution is reserved to Westminster. So there is some doubt whether an SNP-led administration in Edinburgh would have the legal competence to hold a referendum on breaking up Britain. Westminster may insist it runs such a referendum — and, crucially, choose the question.
The first article of the Treaty of Union reads as follows: “That the two kingdoms of Scotland and England shall, upon the 1st day of May next ensuing the date hereof, and for ever after, be united into one kingdom by the name of Great Britain, and that the ensigns armorial of the said United Kingdom be such as Her Majesty shall appoint, and the crosses of St Andrew and St George be conjoined in such manner as Her Majesty shall think fit, and used in all flags, banners, standards and ensigns, both at sea and land.” Brown and supporters of the Union will hope that is forever after. We’ll see.
The people have the final say on independence
Graeme Park, 24, journalist, Glasgow: “I don’t think independence is inevitable. It isn’t necessary and most people I know agree. Economically and socially it wouldn’t work. I don’t have any problem calling myself British. However, I do think the Scottish parliament was a good idea. It has the right level of power, as Holyrood takes some of the pressure from Westminster. I think most people aren’t aware of how much power the Scottish parliament has.”
Albert Stone, 85, audiologist, Cumbernauld: “I am not in favour of independence. I was a paratrooper for the British Army so I strongly believe we are one nation — British. The Scottish parliament is a waste of time. It is made up of ex-unionists who couldn’t even run a trade union. I don’t trust politicians or a word they say.”
Ken Neill, 57, tour bus company manager, Stirling: “I am all for independence. Scotland would be better running our own affairs rather than taking orders from Westminster. The Scottish parliament has given us a sense of autonomy but I think we should take it one step further and govern ourselves. However, we should remain in the EU and be a small country in the EU like Belgium. I will always call myself Scottish rather than British.”
Romaine von Runkel, 48, psychic, Helensburgh: “I don’t think independence is a good idea. Being part of one nation allows us to work with one another. If Scotland was independent we would be too concerned with our own country. I have lived in England for most of my life and when I moved back to Scotland I was shocked at how racist some Scottish people can be about the English. Being part of Great Britain encourages tolerance.”
Betty Flower, 68, retired, Waterfoot: “Scotland is too small a country to work alone. Independence would cause friction with England. I don’t think it is inevitable. Alex Salmond puts the fear of death in me and the Scottish parliament is made up of a bunch of wallies. I am proud to call myself British, although I get angry abroad when people presume I am English. When Scottish sports teams are not playing, I am happy to support England.”
Lynsey Munro, 29, recruitment manager, Charing Cross: “Independence is inevitable and it will be a good thing. The less we have to do with Westminster, the better. Decisions affecting our country should not be made in London, they should be made in Scotland by people who live in Scotland. The Scottish parliament was a step in the right direction, but not enough.”
Laura Franks, 23, student teacher, Carluke: “Independence would be good for Scotland. Scottish matters should be decided in our own country, by people who know more about Scotland. However, I don’t think independence is inevitable, I would actually say it’s pretty unlikely. It will only happen if the SNP get enough votes and I don’t think that will happen. Not enough people want independence.”
