Boris Johnson says devolution has been a ‘disaster’. This has the rare quality for a Boris statement of being true but he, or rather the Scottish Tories, will be made to pay a political price for it. Barely had the contents of the Prime Minister’s remarks in a Zoom chat with northern MPs been reported than Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross was at the Twitter barricades:
Far from subduing the forces of nationalism, devolution built the separatists their own command centre at the foot of the Royal Mile
The division of labour here is this: Boris is right intellectually, Ross is right politically. Devolution has been a disaster. We know this even before turning to the statistics on education and health outcomes because devolution was, in the words of one of its chief architects, intended to ‘kill nationalism stone dead’.
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