Hugo Rifkind
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Because the anti-union case, right now, is so much easier to make. Post-election, look at that map. When I was at primary school, up in Edinburgh, I spent a lot of time colouring in maps of the UK. Not sure why. It was either that or long division, I suppose. We had a box of stencils of Britain in our classroom, with a cut-out indent for drawing in the Scottish border, which was where they always snapped in two. Oh, the symbolism! Anyway, you’d trace the coastline, and you’d draw in the border, and then you’d colour Scotland in the Scottish colour, which was blue, and England in the English colour, which would have been white if the lines on your page didn’t make that look rubbish, so instead was red. Blue up top, red down below. Exactly the opposite of how the map looks now. Oh, the symbolism! No, wait. I’ve done that.
That map’s not great, is it, union-wise? It’s misleading, a bit, because Labour’s southern seats tend to be geographically mini, and clustered in cities, but still. Without Scotland, the Conservatives would have a majority of 52 in the Commons. I’m ignoring the issue of Wales, of course, but then I always did. I don’t know a thing about Wales. I can’t even remember if I gave it it’s own colour. Maybe yellow.
‘Aha!’ you might think, ‘but you may as well say “without the southeast” or “without Cornwall”.’ Well, not really. Because, on 6 May, England (and maybe Wales, do write in) had one election, and Scotland sort of had another. That Scottish Labour vote (defying the national trend, with a 0.1 per cent swing in favour) wasn’t just pro-Gordon Brown, or even anti-David Cameron. It was also anti-Alex Salmond. Post-devolution, general elections in Scotland have the feel of European elections in England. No matter how the vote goes, your day-to-day government remains the same. Who knows, maybe that’s where Gordon Brown got the idea.
Increasingly, I suspect the union has only survived so long because the English have basically forgotten about it, using ‘English’ when they mean ‘British’, and vice versa, and not really caring that it’s wrong. But once they start remembering, that’s where the trouble starts. Once Jeremy Clarkson deploys the word ‘Scottish’ as an insult, and it works. Once you start talking rainbow coalitions, with nationalists of various hues chivvying in to hold wobbling governments to ransom, even if they don’t happen. Once you consider the West Lothian question, and remind people that it isn’t ‘what’s the point of Susan Boyle?’ Once you drag out all the hoary old noises about the Barnett formula; once you have a World Cup in which Scotland unites in wanting England to lose in the quarter finals; once Andy Murray doesn’t win Wimbledon, again.
All of a sudden, once you have all that, things become worse than shaky. And the defensive case, the one that matters to me, emotionally, because that I don’t want to feel like a foreigner in the city to which I have moved (except for sometimes, when I do) just isn’t being made. Indeed, it’s hard to figure out where anybody who wanted to make it would start.
Unless, you start a bit like this. You say, wait. You say, this is how our system is supposed to work. You say, a region elects its MPs, and dispatches them to Westminster, to lobby on its behalf. That is the basis of our democracy. It’s not Scotland’s fault that England’s MPs have long forgotten this. It’s not Scotland’s fault that its sons and daughters have flowed south to colonise public life, to occupy 10 and 11 Downing Street, to front Newsnight, to run banks, to run Manchester United, to do voice-overs for insurance adverts, to play tennis, to win Britain’s Got Talent (what is the point of Susan Boyle?), to create Harry Potter, to write The Thick of It, to front the Today programme, to be Andrew Marr, to be Andrew Neil, to edit The Spectator. It’s not Scotland’s fault that it looked inward, politically, saw something that didn’t work, and changed it to something that did.
In fact, none of these things are faults at all. A functioning union would be one where every region behaved like Scotland, from the northeast to the southwest, to the Midlands and to Ulster. It’s not Scotland that’s failing the union. It’s everywhere else. Except for Wales, maybe. I don’t know a thing about Wales.
Spare a thought for Paul Chambers, this week found guilty of ‘sending a menacing electronic communication’ for threatening, on Twitter, to blow up Robin Hood Airport. ‘You’ve got a week and a bit to get your s*** together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!’ he wrote, when the place was closed by snow in February. According to a district judge at Doncaster Magistrates Court, this was ‘of a menacing nature in the context of the times in which we live’. He has now been fined, and has a criminal record. Frankly, it’s the sort of situation for which the phrase ‘contempt of court’ was invented.
The argument, I suppose, is that you need to discourage people from doing this sort of thing, because you never know when they might mean it. But wasn’t it glaringly obvious, from the start, that Mr Chambers probably didn’t? Never mind why was he convicted. Why was he even charged? Why was he even arrested? Listen here, police. People motivated by jihad? Definitely a problem. People motivated by race? Probably a problem. People motivated by politics? Possibly a problem. People motivated by a seemingly mediocre clean-up response to a light covering of snow? Probably not a problem. Just my hunch.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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