‘Two landslides. One collision course.” This was how the Scotsman summed up the UK election result a week ago with front page face-to-face images of Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson.
His Conservative victory in England and Wales secured him his parliamentary majority while the Scottish National Party’s one gave a popular mandate to put into effect her claim that “this election is Scotland’s chance to escape Brexit and to put our future in our own hands”.
The Scotsman quoted the veteran Scottish historian Tom Devine: “What we’ve got now is pretty close to a perfect storm,” with the UK facing an “unprecedented constitutional crisis” as Johnson refuses to approve another referendum on Scottish independence. Devine says “I have always thought that if [the union] was eventually destroyed the major battering ram would come from south of the border”, from an English nationalism unconcerned with the loss of Scotland – and indeed Northern Ireland.
The collision was articulated on Thursday when Sturgeon published a paper on Scotland’s right as a nation to make its own decision and demanded London agree. Johnson rejected that, having previously said he would mark any such letter “return to sender”.
His protean ability, as an amoral and agile actor capable of improvising and innovating to deal with radical uncertainties, will be challenged above all in Scotland. Will it prove to be his nemesis?
Conservatives were trounced in the election despite their hyper-unionist message
That depends on how he handles the two forces driving the UK’s constitutional moment: how to balance softer and harder versions of Brexit in deciding whether to converge or diverge with the EU’s regulatory regime; and how to balance the centralising and dispersal of power in governing the UK.
Johnson is an unpopular figure in Scotland. Conservatives were trounced in the election despite their hyper-unionist message that another referendum on independence is not required after it was rejected by 55 to 45 per cent in 2014. In the paper Sturgeon argues there has been a change of material circumstances because Scotland has been taken out of the EU against its will, since it voted 64-36 to remain in 2016. Additionally she demands the power to decide on whether a referendum should lie with the Scottish Parliament not Westminster/Whitehall, based on its national democratic credentials.
Backing up her case Sturgeon argues that Scottish views on the shape of Brexit have been disregarded in negotiations with Brussels. Powers and competences already devolved to Edinburgh from London like agriculture and energy are recentralised as they return from Brussels.
London is arrogating to itself through so-called Henry VIII powers the right to make such EU decisions and do trade deals and Johnson promises to re-examine judicial review after the UK supreme court overturned his prorogation of parliament.
Scottish politicians and civil servants regard the existing joint ministerial councils, meant to share decision making on these issues between London and the devolved administrations, as quite dysfunctional.
That probably postpones the full impact of the collision until after the 2021 Scottish elections
The direction of both driving forces is left unresolved by the election. Johnson’s ability to reach a softer, convergent relationship with the EU is constrained by his insistence that there will be no extension of talks beyond October next year. That weakens his negotiating hand with Brussels and puts him closer to a dependent trade deal with the US.
Such an outcome would compromise his ability to satisfy expectations from northern English voters who swung to him from Labour. They loom larger in his political vision than Scotland. It seems unlikely he can muster the political energy in the short term required to head off Scottish demands for the right to choose exit from the UK. That probably postpones the full impact of the collision until after the 2021 Scottish elections. A Catalan moment seems unlikely before then.
Ireland North and South watches this drama with fascination and a growing sense of preparedness for sudden change in Britain.
Northern Ireland’s unionisms and nationalisms are directly affected by Scotland’s stand-off with London. The intense efforts to get powersharing re-established happens under the shadow of direct rule and further marginalisation in the UK.
In an important initiative, given all these uncertainties, the Irish and Scottish governments are conducting a joint bilateral review of their relations, encompassing shared policy areas. They include formal structures like the British-Irish Council, political initiatives like the Scottish Citizens’ Assembly as well as business and economic, diasporic, cultural, linguistic rural, coastal and island communities and academic and research links. Irish-Scottish relations are now on a necessarily much stronger institutional and political footing.