John McTernan’s latest Telegraph column has an entertainingly provocative headline –Tell the Truth: Scotland has been indulged for far too long – but is, in fact, less a blast against Alex Salmond’s monstrous regiment than an assault upon Mr McTernan’s colleagues in the Scottish Labour party.
This attack is disguised by John’s observation – scarcely controversial and, anyway, being addressed, in part, by the Scotland Bill – that the Barnett Formula is no longer working as originally intended. He’s right that much of Scotland has prospered since Margaret Thatcher came to power; it’s also the case that the Labour party, above all others, has persistently denied this.
As John must appreciate, the Labour party embraced the cause of Home Rule for two reasons: to thwart Scottish nationalism and to prevent reform. Thatcherism and New Labour each threatened the comfortable, though oppressive, Scottish consensus. Each had to be resisted. Indeed:
[T]he fault here lies as much in Westminster as Holyrood. Ministers in London have been transfixed by Scotland for the past quarter of a century, terrified of getting it wrong. Tory governments mollycoddled the Scots, out of fear of unpopularity. Labour, all too aware of where its electoral support came from, did the same. This wasn’t leading, but following. The normal rules of politics, of making a case or challenging your opponents’ arguments, were suspended. Instead, what Scotland wanted, it eventually got.
The result is the situation that we have today, where Scottish politicians take almost a perverse pride in claiming – in the face of any evidence to the contrary – that their nation is not just poor, but hard done by. And this debilitating strain of victimhood has not only survived devolution, but has thrived.
Much of this is accurate. Yet it is Labour, for so long the establishment party north of the border, that is most responsible for this sorry reality. If Tory Unionism has in large part been built on sentiment, Labour’s Unionist rhetoric has often been wrapped in the language of benefits and subsidy, forever warning that an independent Scotland would be a place of kale and oats and not much more than that. Poor Scotland! Small Scotland! Sorry Scotland!
This has rarely been uplifting and, in any case, has made for a rum kind of self-refuting Unionism. If it were true that an independent Scotland must be a miserable, impoverished place then, crivvens, that’s a gloomy commentary on the fruits of 300 years of Union. It requires us to believe that the Union must be preserved because it has failed. That’s one reason why the Unionist case should be based on culture and custom, not Treasury statistics. It should say that Sure an independent Scotland would, after some period of adjustment, be a perfectly viable enterprise but why should it be thought necessary?
John says that Scotland combines a “model 21st-century economy with a corporatist public sector straight out of the mid-seventies” and, again, it is hard to disagree. Scotland is not poor, merely poorly-served. The quiet sorrow of our present politics is that the SNP is reluctant to challenge this particular aspect of the status quo and that the opposition, with the occasional and partial exception of the Conservatives, is equally timorous. Too much attention is given to inputs and not nearly enough to outcomes. The idea that money is the root of all progress has never been challenged by Labour.
Implied in John’s argument is the idea that Scotland, though often doing well, could and should be doing better. This too is true and is also, of course, the SNP’s argument. And this then is where Mr McTernan finds himself making a pretty nationalist argument, albeit one founded upon impeccable Unionist principles. Perhaps that seems paradoxical but I don’t think it really is. The better kind of Unionism – the confident type – can accept nationalist tools (Home Rule, greater fiscal responsibility) while putting them to Unionist ends (rendering independence unecessary).
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