December 17, 2020 - 11:00am
It won’t be news to anybody with a passing interest in the Scottish Conservatives that Douglas Ross is not going to be putting Boris Johnson front-and-centre in the party’s campaign for next year’s Scottish elections.
The Prime Minister is not popular north of the border, and the Tories need as little ballast as possible if they’re to challenge the Scottish National Party, who are managing to sustain a gap between their public image and the grim reality that Dorian Gray would be proud of.
Yet for an avowedly unionist party, jettisoning Johnson — perhaps even by splitting the Scottish Tories off altogether — is not the straightforward matter some like to pretend.
While it might bolster the short-term electoral position of the Tories, it would do so at the expense of the long-term health of the United Kingdom, which rests on the continuing legitimacy of a British political culture.
Devocrats are always tempted to try to shift blame outside their own arena and onto ‘Westminster’, just as London politicians used to do with ‘Brussels’, but the result is that this blame corrodes public understanding of the external institution in a way which eventually makes its defence extremely difficult, if not impossible.
It’s basically a marshmallow experiment, with the survival of the UK as the stakes. To win a future referendum, Scottish unionists need to persuade the electorate that the Union is legitimate and the source of good things. But doing this means abstaining from the short-term gratification of blaming things on it and demanding more powers from it.
Otherwise the Tories risk becoming like the Democratic Unionists, heavy on British symbolism and rhetoric but embodying a political and institutional system that has over decades hugely alienated Northern Ireland from the mainland and vice versa, opting out of national politics in favour of sitting with the ‘Others’ at Westminster whilst minimising its role in Ulster life.
Nor are such high-minded considerations the only thing militating against Ross putting too much distance from the wider Conservative Party. There is also the growing fractiousness of the Conservative electorate.
For all her personal qualities, the core of the Tory revival engineered by Ruth Davidson was her positioning the party as the unequivocal party of the Union. This added to its surviving base of die-hard Conservatives an extra chunk of voters who are Unionist (capital-U) before they’re anything else.
There aren’t enough of these voters to put Ross in Bute House. But there are enough of them to completely wreck his campaign if they decide the Conservatives have gone too soft on the Union.
As the Holyrood elections loom, the Scottish Tory leader undoubtedly has an uneasy eye on Wales, where an explicitly anti-devolution party, Abolish the Welsh Assembly, is on track to win seats in May. The arrival of a viable devosceptic challenger has forced the Welsh Tory leadership into a rather panicky effort to stave off a full-blown mutiny among their membership, and almost certainly killed off their traditional hope of ousting Labour by forming a coalition with Plaid Cymru.
Devoscepticism is less developed in Scotland, but it is still a significant body of opinion in the Conservative electorate, as is a broader sense of loyalty to British institutions and identity. This is probably part of why Ross’s solution to the Johnson problem is silence, rather than strident criticism.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeI didn’t know there was a party called Abolish The Welsh Assembly. Finally, a party to vote for! It’s not that I’m against devolution per se, but the denizens of the Welsh Assembly really are an unholy bunch of incompetent chancers whose every action and policy leads to disaster – and a very malicious disaster in the case of Carl Sergeant.
Do you know anything about the ATWA? Are they pro-independence? Are they radical socialists? What are they?
Sorry, no idea. I hadn’t even heard of them until I read this article.
Having worked and lived in Wales for many years I have to say your comment on the Welsh Assembly is the nicest I have read, The general view of Welshmen and women of this group of totally useless, and dangerous braggarts is I believe not strictly translatable from Welsh. Suffice to say I would probably be arrested if I could. Nuff said?
Perhaps it’s time that Douglas Ross (ghastly, useless Scottish Conservative leader) told the people of Scotland the truth about independence. Tell them the facts about not being able to use the £sterling and that the Bank of England would no longer be their banker of last resort. Tell them that, if they manage to join the rotting EU, they would have to use the Euro. Tell them about the hard border which would have to be erected between England and Scotland etc etc.
Come on, Ross, do something useful!
They have been told all that relentlessly. They don’t care. And that’s perfectly reasonable, just as the people who voted for Brexit were not swayed by the ‘economic arguments’.
# I like that of negotiating a withdrawal agreement proposed bellow, that is very good, but after that let us accept the obvious. James VI of Scotland was right, two parliaments is a bum idea period and he did the right thing.
These two parliaments for Scotland and none for England was nothing but a clear Marxist attack against England which they intend to split up and swamp with immigration. The Westlothian question was posed next to Gordon Brown’s constituency and has never been answered. This is a very bad system of the Marxist government which brought England to its knees leaving behind no more money (or even gold!).
This didn’t go the Marxist way either, to make Scotland more Marxist /International, they went and lit up the nationalist cause in Scotland and Scotland went the other way to what they intended it to go. But the Marxists at least have kept all the enemies of England together and left England without a voice so far.
In Scotland the Marxists have lost. Their only option may be now to promote a different internationalism including England and Wales, I think theirs is a lost cause, Gordon Brown has tried to change things which his administration did but he really can’t unseat nationalism which he brought.
Boris is right, as James VI of Scotland knew this was a bad idea.
# So back to Scotland, this country of 5 million only needs ONE parliament and that it what it must chose in any referendum: does it want the James VI solution of a United Kingdom with a Scottish Parliament in London incorporated with all the other Parliaments or does it want ONE Parliament in Edinburgh and to go back to before James VI? We shouldn’t have anything to do with their desire to re-join the EU, they don’t meet the conditions and perhaps the EU may have a lot of other Barnett formulas and doesn’t need any more liabilities than what it already has, if Scotland goes, what it does afterwards it is Scotland’s issue and all English jobs Gordon sent up there must come back.
So Sturgeon must be aware that her job is on the line if she fails it all goes, no more guerrilla tactics, no more fun and games messing up the lives 60 million by 5 million in the UK any more.
# The other issues which a referendum would need to address is the self determination of the Islands which don’t want a nationalist SNP dictatorship of the lowlands. So the Islands should be given their choice.
# Finally there is a case for saying that all the Kingdom should vote in the referendum as to if a union with Scotland is a desirable thing.
All the people of the UK are suffering the nationalist immaturity of Scotland, this has not been a once in a generation referendum, and if Scots do not observe their word this time what guarantee is there that they will observe their word next time? The lives of so many people shouldn’t be subject to the changing and unstable character of such a small group. Gordon tried to give them all our ship building and lots of other English jobs of all types and then there is the Barnett formula which is surpassed, they are getting so much more than the English and this English money is being used by the nationalists to promote the nationalists, money doesn’t buy friends and if these are friends for money then we don’t really want them.
The union of the parliaments happened during Queen Anne.
During James’s reign there was “only” the union of the crowns.
Ruth Davidson managed to corner much of the Unionist vote partly because of her charisma. Ross is simply a standard Tory, lacking in any charisma and likely to lose his Westminster seat if he were to stand again.
The Scottish Conservatives should have distanced themselves from the English party as soon as Johnson became leader. In fact they should have followed the example of conservatives in Bavaria and formed an entirely separate party, unionist but with a distinct Scottish flavour, willing to form a coalition with Tories in Westminster but not tainted by little English nationalism.
Does this article actually say anything?
My reading was that it says that keeping the Scottish Conservative vote together for the next Scottish Parliament election may more difficult because a part of their base are becoming vocally anti-the Scottish devolution settlement. If the Scottish Conservatives are too enthusiastic about devolution (i.e. devolution good, SNP government bad) they risk alienating that part of their base. If their tone is more devosceptic they risk alienating the other end of their base.
Even the media is preparing the ground for what is inevitiable”the complete and absolute break up of the UK.
Both SKY and the BBC have altered their Style Books such that references to political dynamics involving the UK are now “the four nations of the UK.”
That’s just wokery in response to concerted battering from the SNP, and thus encouraged, the historically less voiceferous Welsh separatists. The BBC and Sky TV view Nicola Sturgeon almost entirely through the prism of Brexit and see her almost completely only as a source of anti-UK govt rhetoric onto which they can piggyback.
The UK govt, far more libertarian than the SNP_ (Named Person, the current Hate Think bill from Umza Yousaf’s Ministry of Truth,) has not responded with a concerted, pervasive and committed campaign in the way the SNP have. I believe that this campaign will expose many of the downright lies and fabricatrications upon which the SNP message is founded.
tell it to the people of the “…four independent nations…”