Chancellor has shone in crisis but cares nothing about Scotland

In his first Budget on March 11, he put an immediate end to the previous decade-long policy of austerity. Not content with this, a week later he announced a package of loans and rates relief for business. Three days after that, he created an employee retention scheme, so that companies need not sack workers they can no longer pay during the pandemic.

To be sure, this structure is not yet wholly complete and sound, but Sunak is adding to it as fast as he can. Compare that to the bumming around by his boss, Boris Johnson – admittedly from a prone position, having been floored by the big bad bug. Most people believe he should have locked down sooner. Even The Daily Telegraph, a cheer-leader for him since the beginning, carried a headline last week saying: “Let’s stop dithering and fight this virus.”

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Apart from his fiscal decisiveness, Sunak has in these troubled times revealed another interesting political side of himself. Last week came the remarkable statement that the continuance of the United Kingdom in its present form was a matter of indifference to him.

A profile piece, published in the Financial Times after he had taken office as Chancellor, traced the young minister’s meteoric rise from being a mere under-secretary for local government just a year ago. This was a time when he could look forward to only slow progress towards the top, and so had little to hide.

The journalist had done his job by asking round Sunak’s Conservative colleagues to see what they thought of him. One source told the paper: “I remember discussing the future of the Union with Rishi and he argued that England should break away. He was advocating the end of the UK because it doesn’t make financial sense to him. He doesn’t have any love for the institution and I suspect he looks at it as he looks at anything: what’s the profit?”

A vigorous fluttering in the Sunak doocots followed. After just two months at the Treasury, he was forced to declare his belief in the Union and deny it made no financial sense. On his own social media, the Chancellor said this: “There are some comments about the Union falsely attributed to me in the FT today. My parents moved to the United Kingdom, not England, because the Union represented an idea of opportunity. I am a strong believer in our Union of four nations. Hope that clarifies that!”

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A ministerial statement of such force is not to be pooh-poohed, but even so there’s something odd about it. At the time Sunak was born, in Punjab in 1980, I was travelling extensively in India. In fact, I spent a whole year there, on and off, and I made many Indian friends, admittedly of a pro-British sort. They looked nostalgically back to the era before 1947 now that, in their view, their country was going to the dogs under Indira Gandhi.

Yet I never heard one of these people refer to the UK. It was always England – the term came across, of course, offensively to Scots, but was in general use in the outside world at that time. I wonder, then, if the Punjabis of the period felt really so keen on the UK, which had been responsible for a massacre of their countrymen at Amritsar in 1919. Just a thought.

At any rate, Sunak also has loyalties to the values of a different kind of community. He started making his way in life as a member of the international financial elite. He first worked for the investment bank Goldman Sachs, then as a partner in a hedge fund, The Children’s Investment Fund Management. In case the latter sounds unusually charitable for the sector, let me point out it was indeed intended to be. But the realities soon forced it to pay as much heed to profit as to charity, and that is how it has continued. I can believe that “what’s the profit?” remains Sunak’s basic outlook on life.

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I CAN also believe, then, that Sunak, at his objective heart, sees not much purpose in the UK hanging on to Scotland. As North Sea oil revenues run down the place will become a drain on public finances, at least in the way governments in London choose to rule it.

Because of the need to provide for a sparser population, services are always going to be more expensive. And in return it offers a constant rumble of political agitation – so what’s the point?

In this context, I have been struck by a piece of analysis sent to me by my economist friend David Rae. We agree on the whole in our outlook on the present situation – you can find out what he has to say at www.davidrae.scot – but don’t worry, he is a lifelong nationalist and even a former parliamentary candidate!

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A scathing paper on the UK Government’s handling of the crisis, Death and Democracy, leaves the Scottish Government’s latest consensus-seeking with London looking limp. A sharp shaft is reserved for the Archbishop of Canterbury, who purred on the BBC that “Boris Johnson has risen to the occasion”. This implied 60% of the UK population, or 40 million people, would need to be infected, with six million of them in hospital and 400,000 of them soon dead.

It was the laughable nature of this first set of estimates, according to Rae, that pushed the UK Government towards the policy it is sticking to for now: we should all opt for a personal goal of self-isolation.

But the hit-and-miss response was overtaken when China released the genetic code for coronavirus, including a blueprint for producing tests. The UK, with Germany and South Korea, immediately produced one and was soon tracking down suspects.

Yet while the other two countries pursued a mass strategy, UK processing of tests was first confined to a single laboratory that even now is doing only 500 a day. The figure is meant to rise to a target of 10,000 tests a day, which does not well compare with the 70,000 tests being carried out in Germany, possibly accounting for the relatively low death-rate there. Boris Johnson claims UK testing will reach 250,000 by the end of April. But his own internal official estimates, according to Rae, are that it will not reach more than one-tenth of that target.

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So the situation we are faced with is a response quite inadequate to the coronavirus crisis we face. Johnson got different types of advice, but couldn’t choose the right type.

This is because he has no true friends among his colleagues. On the contrary, he only has contempt for most of them – the exception being Rishi Sunak who, while having superior qualities to his boss, is far too much of a novice to take over running the country.

Generous Scotland may optimistically expect UK co-operation, but the real prospects seem to me deeply gloomy. Boris in reality only has contempt for us. Sunak is sunny enough, as he would be to any chirpy chairman or macho manager he had to meet and get on with. But in his world-view – however amiable – Scotland counts, and will continue to count, for nothing at all.

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