Mike Small: How the argument between Yes and No has fundamentally changed

At that point we were being pleaded to “Lead don’t Leave” this “Family of Nations” and “Partnership of Equals” was the clarion call as wave after wave of Celebrities A through to Z list tramped up to declare their “love of Scotland” or how they would be bereft if they “lost” Scotland. It may have been strange and sickly, misplaced and deluded but it was heartfelt. Now the mood is distinctly darker. There will be no attempt at reconciliation – no promises (fake or otherwise) of more powers or of the “greatest devolved country in the world”. Whilst the Better Together campaigns oscillated between love notes and death threats, it at least had this variance.

The tone this time (and be clear, the campaign has already started) is very different. The Times last week was positively churning out articles about Scotland – Jamie Blackett popping up to retread the old canard about Shetland and

Orkney and positively willing on the Balkanisation of Scotland, wailing: “Why should pro-British Orkney, Shetland, Dumfries and Galloway, Borders and other regions be dragged out of the Union just because densely populated Glasgow and Dundee dictate it?”

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This was quickly followed by David Cameron popping up to declare that Boris Johnson should reject a second independence referendum if the SNP wins a Holyrood majority because the UK Government allowed the nationalists to set the terms in 2014. He seemed to forget that he had been the signatory to the Edinburgh Agreement, and he knows fine well that it says nowhere anything about a “generation”.

The landscape has changed dramatically.

If Donald Trump makes Dubya Bush look like a towering intellect, Alister Jack makes David Mundell look like a suave and confident media operator. Last week saw Jack giving evidence to the Scottish Affairs Committee. Flanked by two underlings, he spluttered out a message that was effectively saying that Scotland and Wales shouldn’t be allowed to decide what to do on tackling Covid. Despite the fact that there are clearly regional, local and city lockdowns and a variety of responses across Britain and across Europe, he insisted: “We are effectively one country ... I mean not effectively, we are

ABSOLUTELY one country ... we have borders that the virus doesn’t respect ... they are geographical borders not physical borders ... and we really have to understand people move around the UK ... we need to stop the confusion ... we should be grown up and not be different, not just for the sake of it.”

Setting aside the sense of erasure that’s now a common theme from Tory High Command about borders (they don’t exist and thereby neither do you) what’s extraordinary is the demand for complete compliance. What’s required is no deviance. If the Britain of Better Together 2014 could try and talk of a country evolving and promising change, the Better Together of 2020 just demands fealty.

Labour leader Keir Starmer effectively had the same line: “At this crucial time, we cannot have a situation where the four nations of the UK are pulling in different directions.”

This is all too late.

It’s as if the English commentariat seems to have woken up all of a sudden – bolt upright in bed – to the realities and consequences of Brexit Britain. They seem to be tumbling over themselves to make sense of it all. In the Financial Times, Philip Stephens (Boris Johnson’s Brexit plan will break the UK Union) writes: “The performance of the two nations in curbing the spread has not been that different; the styles have been miles apart. The cautious, open approach of Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish National party administration has sat alongside a strategy in Downing Street most kindly described as shambolic bluster.”

He notes: “Boris Johnson’s readiness to tear up the UK’s reputation for honest dealing by rewriting the EU withdrawal deal has grabbed the headlines. The news, though, is worse. Legislation to create a post-Brexit single market across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland shows equal contempt for the UK’s constitutional settlement. By asserting unassailable English supremacy, the Prime Minister is inviting Scotland to leave the Union.”

All of this points to the fact that Starmer and Jack’s desperate attempt to go back to pre-Covid constitutional relations is too little, too late.

It’s not just that they seemed to have woken up to the consequences of Brexit and Covid, but they seemed blissfully unaware of the consequences of devolution. What are you in charge of? Health? Schools?

As Johnson’s Brexit “negotiations” flounder in a pique of choreographed incompetence, Europe is carrying on, evolving and making plans for collective action. Paul Mason writes in the New Statesman (How the UK is destroying itself over Brexit): “In Europe’s capitals, the current flurry of rhetoric and recrimination in Westminster is seen not even as a negotiating tactic, but ‘Britain negotiating with itself’.

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"A more accurate view might be: the UK destroying itself. Because not only have Johnson’s bad faith negotiating tactics backfired in Berlin and Dublin, they are driving support for Scottish independence steadily upwards. The Scottish Government, despite its missteps, has looked like a model European administration in the face of Covid-19, while Johnson’s government has floundered. Now Scots, who voted for Remain by a clear majority, are handcuffed instead to a government of incompetents, spitting out xenophobia in response to all its problems ... Johnson’s confrontation with Europe is designed to pull a single organ stop: the xenophobic sentiments among old, white voters in small-town England. And he will go on pulling it, loading the blame for all future problems on the unfairness of any deal; or revelling in the economic pain that would result from tariffs and disinvestment in the case of a No-Deal Brexit.”

Johnson, Mason argues, will be nurturing his Withdrawal Agreement, as the German populist and fascist right used the Treaty of Versailles – “an ever-present explanation for failure and a driver of political resentment against a foreign ‘other’. ‘International law’, in this revived right-wing mindscape, will replace ‘European red tape’.”

THIS is a dangerous new terrain and marks the extent to which the entire political landscape has changed since 2014. But then, as Starmer and Jack seem to have overlooked, the entire world has changed because of Covid, and yes this has geopolitical and constitutional ramifications. The Brexit collapse and the pandemic has set Britain’s elite back to their old default settings: centralisation, cultural ignorance, tumbling backwards.

Writing in the London Review Of Books, Neal Ascherson (Bye Bye Britain) writes: “Rhetoric about ‘strengthening’ the Union really means centralising the UK state, so that no alternative source of power can challenge the ‘sovereign’ absolutism of the Westminster Parliament. Remember 1986? With a scratch of her pen, Margaret Thatcher ended the democratically elected self-government of English cities. She did it because some of the six ‘metropolitan authorities’, London especially, were daring to pursue their own un-Thatcherite policies. And she got away with it. In a constitutional republic, she would have been impeached. This sort of monarchical atrocity has a long record in the Anglo-British state, which is still, in its dark innards, a 17th-century kingdom.”

Why, then, this desperate bid to maintain a failed Union and to foster the hollowed-out construct of Britain and Britishness? One practical example given by Ascherson is the symbolic icon of Trident and what it means for world status and the UK’s permanent seat at the UN Security Council. But with enough bravado, Plymouth could do that for an Unchained England.

Another given reason is that “Britain” keeps en emerging “England” in check as much as it does en emergent Scotland. Ascherson writes: “The Union’s superstructure of Britishness also seems to maintain the myth. The elite, or upper crust, or ruling classes – whatever we call them – have a powerful interest in preserving this long-constructed British identity, using it to block the advance of political Englishness. They see English nationalism in class terms: as an angry and envious form of vulgar populism which potentially threatens the whole social order. For two centuries, the Ukranian middle class, in Tom Nairn’s coinage, in striking contrast to the role taken by bourgeois parties on the Continent, denied English popular nationalism a chance to mature into a radical, modernising force. Instead, it has been deliberately defined – by Farage-loathing Conservatives as much as anybody – as the politics of a xenophobic rabble which must at all costs be kept on the fringes.”

This is a difficult concept for many Scots independentistas to get their heads around, but it’s worth trying and is all part of the very different world we are fighting the next referendum in.

So much has changed since 2014, when the idea of an independent Scotland seemed distant and romantic. Now it seems probable, if not inevitable.

A campaign starting tomorrow would begin with a 10-point lead and look across at Unionist opponents whose arguments have been debunked, exposed, shattered and disproved. Britain as a source of strength and stability has gone. Britain as a source of international credibility and respect has been replaced by a country that is a laughing stock.

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In 2014 the image of Mo Farah winning the final of the 10,000m to take the gold medal in the Olympic Stadium at the London 2012 Olympics Games was still in the mind’s eye. The notion of a progressive, ambitious and multicultural Britain could be laid out and, even if some of us found it unconvincing, others didn’t.

In 2020 the image is replaced by Priti Patel and Nigel Farage, a sort of snarling revanchism cloaked only by a colonial paternalism, Alister Jack like the slightly confused attache at an imperial outpost.

Britain has changed from something you might have to cling on to in difficult times to something you know you have to swim away from: David Cameron’s smooth confidence was replaced by Theresa May’s terrifying fragility and now Johnson’s bombastic chaos.

Scotland must be liberated from this chaos, but so too must England. As Ascherson writes: “Britain dreams of becoming a heavily armed, swaggering pirate power, defying international rules; England is a minor, sceptical nation with a taste for satire and democracy ... End the timed-out Union, and allow England to encounter itself at last.”

We must at long last come out of lockdown and get back to normal.