Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Boris must correct the mistakes of Scottish devolution

(Credit: Getty images)

Boris Johnson’s refusal to grant a second independence referendum is a source of relief rather than joy for Scottish unionists. Unionists won decisively in 2014 but their opponents’ failure to accept the referendum result has held Scotland in constitutional limbo ever since. Five years on a permanent campaign has been as healthy for the body politic as one might imagine, and while the discord over Brexit last year was unfortunate, it was hard to watch as a Scot without channelling Crocodile Dundee: That’s not bitter constitutional division. This is bitter constitutional division.

Nicola Sturgeon has held Scotland hostage in pursuit of her constitutional agenda and allowed its health service and education system to deteriorate through neglect. It should be no surprise that unionists take satisfaction in a setback for the woman who has largely had her own way until now. The Prime Minister got her telt, as we say up here. Though in truth, Boris has only clamped the nationalist juggernaut; the grievance machine will be back on the road soon enough. Any other central government faced with an active secessionist movement would take meaningful steps to minimise the threat. The UK Government, through a mixture of apprehension and apathy, prefers benign neglect even though the results thus far have been far from benign.

If this is the reforming, disruptor government we keep hearing about, should it not be breaking with the failed strategies of the past and trying something new? Devolution was sold by Labour as a policy to ‘kill nationalism stone dead’. Twenty years into the experiment, the SNP is in its 13th uninterrupted year in power and support for independence hovers perilously close to 50 per cent. All devolution has killed is Labour’s diet nationalism of the 1980s and 1990s, which cast Scotland as a near slave state under the jackboot of Tory totalitarianism.

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