London: The worst has not happened; Scotland has not seceded from the United Kingdom. But British Prime Minister David Cameron will have known some time ago that, whichever side won in the referendum, there would be no victory. On September 20, the United Kingdom woke up to one of the biggest constitutional messes in its history.
Given that the unionists had the best product to sell — Britain — it is alarming that they were supported by only 55 per cent of Scots. For months, the opinion polls had suggested far bigger support. The unionists may have won the election, but the separatists emphatically won the campaign. The Prime Minister had to turn to Gordon Brown, and seemingly give him the authority to redraft the Constitution at will. He must now accept the consequences.
Ever since the YouGov poll that put “Yes” ahead, the British government has — one Cabinet minister admits — operated by one principle: to live another day. “Nothing less than a modern form of Scottish home rule” was offered, and a vow to keep the Barnett formula was made in a desperate bid to persuade the Scots to stay. Having acted in haste, the Prime Minister will have to repent at leisure — starting now.
This referendum was meant to settle the question of Scottish independence for good. But few believe it has done that. “We have heard the settled will of the Scottish people,” said the Prime Minister. Alistair Darling, leader of the Better Together campaign, said, “The people of Scotland have spoken — we have chosen unity over division.” Both will have known this to be untrue. There is no such thing as the settled will of the Scottish people, and almost half of them chose division. As one Labour insider admits, “There’s no way this is over.” But this referendum — and more specifically the scramble to win it in the last fortnight — has created another question which now threatens to dominate politics.
The English Question is unavoidable, for as soon as Parliament returns, the parties will move on the timetable dictated by Gordon Brown. He promised that a motion would be moved in Parliament, on the day of a “No” vote, to agree extra powers for Scotland (he meant powers to the Edinburgh Parliament, which is a rather different thing). They will discuss which powers to devolve, focusing on income tax, housing benefit and welfare assessments. According to Brown, there will be agreement by St Andrew’s Day (November 30), and a bill will then be presented to Parliament in the New Year and agreed by Burns Night (January 25). The Union is to be rewired at breakneck speed.
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is quite happy with this, and Cameron, despite private reservations, set out the timetable in his statement outside Downing Street on Friday morning. Those who have spoken to the Prime Minister say he does not envisage any significant powers passing to Holyrood before the general election in May. As for Labour, current Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Ed Balls is understood to be seething at all of this, saying that it makes it impossible for Labour to pass a budget for England.
How could Scottish MPs vote on income tax that did not affect their constituents? He has pointedly refused to endorse the Brown plan.
But the biggest problem may be backbench Tory MPs. “I have never known the party so angry,” says one minister. “They’re seething with this ‘vow’ and believe that Cameron has no right to sign anything away to Scotland without his party’s approval. They’re quite capable of withholding their support for the bill, and to hell with the consequences.”
Of course, any failure to deliver “Scottish Home Rule” to the Brown timetable will give the Nationalists the excuse they need to reopen the whole independence debate. Alex Salmond conceded only that Scots did not want to separate “at this time”. Scotland’s First Minister would be delighted to be able to claim that Scots rejected independence on a false premise: that they were pledged far more powers, but perfidious Westminster did not honour this pledge. So if Cameron is reined back by his party, then the Scottish National Party will be pushing for another vote — and the result will be a “neverendum”, with constant constitutional instability.
The origins of this mess go back to the last century. The whole New Labour devolution settlement has been a disaster. It was intended to (as Labour then put it) “kill demand for independence stone dead”. And it was an obsession for Scottish Labour. The idea was to make a separatist majority impossible. After all, in a four-party system with semi-proportional voting, was any party ever going to win an outright majority? But rather than strengthen the Union, devolution weakened it by creating separate national conversations.
It was Cameron, not anyone in the Labour party, who granted the referendum, and accepted Salmond’s loaded question. It was Cameron who ruled out the middle option, “devo max”, which he came close to offering anyway. At the time, No. 10 aides briefed that Cameron had cleverly forced the issue by forcing Salmond to hold a referendum on a single yes-or-no question. It does not seem so clever now.
Once the terms of the referendum were agreed, the coalition parties outsourced the winning of it to the Labour party, but the coalition could not decide whom it wanted to run the Better Together campaign. Former defence secretary John Reid was at first regarded as the perfect choice, but he could not be persuaded, so Alistair Darling was chosen. Darling is one of the most decent men in politics — but he is a cerebral, cautious Edinburgh lawyer: not the type who would be expected to triumph in the pub brawl that the referendum was to become. With the notable exception of the first debate, Darling struggled to expose Salmond’s fact-twisting demagoguery.
To be fair, Darling has had many crosses to bear. He has had to deal with a slew of negative briefings against him, including stories that he had effectively been replaced as head of the campaign. Those close to him regularly erupted at Labour’s inability to avoid this kind of self-harm. A mixture of Labour squeamishness and Tory uselessness ensured that the battle for Britain was never properly fought. The case for the Union was reduced to a series of dire and sometimes implausible warnings. “No ifs, no buts — an independent Scotland would not share the pound with the rest of the UK,” declared Osborne. But were the redcoats really going to come north and prise the pound from Scottish purses? Of course not. As Darling later admitted, Scotland could keep using the pound if it wanted. The issue was whether it could share a central bank.
Even Gordon Brown, a ninja of attack politics, complained that Better Together was too negative. He sulked in his tent for much of the campaign, and his suggestion that David Cameron should debate Alex Salmond was positively malicious. He was passionate and effective in the last few weeks, but the last Scottish Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, a living rejection of the SNP’s colonial-oppression argument, spoke up too late to have the positive impact he should have done.
Even more striking is the fact that the most powerful union in Britain, Unite, sat out the contest. Its leader Len McCluskey’s public explanation for this was that his Scottish membership was split. But senior Labour figures believe that his real motivation was to show the party that Unite’s support could not be taken for granted. This gambit nearly contributed to the break-up of the United Kingdom and with it the end of any possibility of a genuinely Left-wing government at Westminster.
The unionist campaign was designed to achieve a victory clear enough to end the independence question for a generation. Instead, it found itself taking support for separation to levels never seen, or anticipated. Scotland is now a divided country, after a debate that has split families and damaged friendships. The healing process will begin, but no one can claim the country is stronger for all of this. It would have been bad enough for the combination of Cameron, Miliband and Clegg to have had no impact in saving the Union — but in many ways they managed to make things worse. This weekend, all three party leaders have a lot to answer for.
By arrangement with the Spectator
