What should Liz Truss do about Scotland?

What should Liz Truss do about Scotland? To ask the question is to illuminate its limitations. Scotland is no more Truss’s to manage than it was her predecessor’s plaything. Truss may call herself a ‘child of the Union’ but a few years in a Paisley primary school are not enough to justify such a claim – there is, in any case, no obvious sense that Truss exhibits the kind of conflicted subtlety that’s mother’s milk to any true ‘child of the Union’. For this is a Janus-faced business and everything we know about Truss suggests she favours the clean lines of simplicity – and directness – over the contradictions and ironies of reality.

Hitherto she has done well by speaking directly to those people – north and south of the border – who feel in their bones that devolution was either a mistake or has become an impertinence which no reasonable person can put up with. That is a view, albeit a niche one. There is no great enthusiasm in Scotland for the notion that devolution, having ‘evolved’, should now ‘un-evolve’.

Fewer than one in five Scots believe in a unitary, exclusionary, Unionism. The idea that there is only one nation and it is a British one is not only unpopular in Scotland, it contradicts the view of themselves held by most Scottish people. This is not just because one third of Scots, independence supporters mostly, refuse to acknowledge the existence of a British nation at all. That is wishful thinking too, in my view, and not just because – to use a fashionable term – it denies the ‘lived experience’ of most Scots.

Still, Scotland is not a Queensland or even a Quebec. Nor is it a Catalonia, having significantly greater claims to nationhood than any of these. Talk of a Canadian-style ‘Clarity Act’ or some such constitutional jiggery-pokery is the stuff of which SNP dreams are made.

Fail to understand that and you fail to understand the realities of the United Kingdom. And since Conservatives are supposed to bargain with reality in all its crooked stubbornness it might be best for Truss and her team to recognise this.

It is easy to pander to the paranoid Unionist fringe but doing so will do nothing to secure the longer-term objectives Unionism notionally prizes. Dishing the Nats is a psychologically satisfying thing but will be ineffective unless accompanied by an attitude which appeals to, rather than repels, middle Scotland.

In any case, this is an autumn of difficulty for Sturgeon and her followers. The first minister is leading the nationalist movement down a constitutional cul de sac from which there may be no obvious means of escape. This being the case, prudent Unionism should allow her to carry on undisturbed.

Few people believe the Supreme Court will agree with the Scottish government’s argument that Holyrood possesses the unilateral right to legislate for an independence referendum. Crucially, voters evince little enthusiasm for a plebiscite next year. There are other, more pressing, matters that demand attention. Sturgeon is pushing against public opinion, not flowing with it.

But since she has spent six years confidently announcing that a referendum is just around the corner, Sturgeon has run out of road. She must do something, for otherwise even the denser parts of the nationalist movement might recognise she has been writing cheques she cannot cash all this time.

Matters might be different if the people accepted a fresh referendum was both appropriate and unavoidable. Since they do not, it is Sturgeon who risks looking obsessed and unreasonable. There is no need for the prime minister or the British government to put Sturgeon in a box when the first minister has done so herself.

Assuming the Supreme Court rules that a referendum is beyond Holyrood’s competence, Sturgeon will be forced to fall back upon a cockamamie Plan B: treating the next general election as a ‘proxy’ or ‘de facto’ referendum on independence. Once again, there is no evidence to suggest the people actually approve of this constitutional chicanery. ‘Party like Sinn Fein in 1918’ is not something liable to stir the masses.

This, however, has all the potential to be a career-ending blunder. Sturgeon accepts that ‘winning’ her fake referendum would require the SNP (or, perhaps, the SNP and the Greens) to take 50 per cent of the votes cast in Scotland. This, it is suggested, would carry some moral force that would force the British government to act. There is no obvious, let alone any constitutional, reason why this would be the case.

But what if the SNP failed to win 50 per cent of the vote? At that point, Prime Minister Starmer would be entitled to note that the nationalists had enjoyed a referendum – as they saw it anyway – and lost it. Granted, there would be some cheek to this, since Labour, the Conservatives, and the Lib Dems would have spent the election campaign denying it was any kind of proxy plebiscite but there you have it: u-turn when it is expedient to do so.

At that point – conjecture, admittedly, but not implausible – Sturgeon’s race would likely be run. What more could she do? Where else could she go? This, then, is the trap she has laid for herself. There is no need to interrupt or divert her from this foolishness.

The nationalists would love few things better than a British government determined to in some strange sense ‘put Scotland in its place’. Nothing could further or more fully demonstrate the SNP’s belief that Scotland and Britain are no longer compatible entities. This is not in fact the case but a sensible British government would go out of its way to avoid any and every suggestion of a ‘Britain vs Scotland’ kind of conflict. If that means putting up with endless SNP provocations then so be it.

Contrary to what some seem to think, this is not ‘appeasement’ unless that term now means a frowning disapproval of reality. The United Kingdom is real but also amorphous; those who seek it will typically discover that it eludes them. Nor is the current constitutional settlement disagreeable. Quite the contrary, for it quite neatly maps the nation’s psychic geography. Taking the long view – and as I have noted before – it should be appreciated that the short twentieth century is the exceptional period in British history, not the norm. Scotland is both a full part of the Union and a semi-detached entity. This has always been the case and it is the tensions within this which make it interesting.

A sensitive and nimble British government would be expansive enough to recognise this just as it will accept that a Unionism which forces – or is felt to force – a choice between Britishness and Scottishness is one which guarantees the former will be defeated.

So, again and for the benefit of slow learners and those too stubborn to listen, the answer to the question ‘What should Liz Truss do about Scotland’ is both simple and difficult. For the answer is ‘Nothing’. Fix Britain – a tough enough challenge in itself – and Scotland may look after itself.