Scottish nationalists can sometimes be heard to say the United Kingdom is not a normal country. As evidence, they point to the unelected head of state, absence of a codified constitution and what they see as the dominance of one nation over other, smaller nations within the state. This analysis only underscores the very cultural overlap the SNP tries to downplay — for in their splendid ignorance of the political character of much of the democratic world they echo uncannily those London and university town progressives who delude themselves that the UK’s immigration debate is an insular outlier in an open and tolerant Europe.
It is not normal, in sum, for a sovereign state to facilitate and finance a process intended to separate it from part of its territory.
The UK is an outlier, all right, but not in the sense Scottish nationalists have in mind. Take the current spat between the UK government and Holyrood over the Scottish government’s use of public money to pursue and promote independence. This includes assigning civil servants to research and prepare pro-independence planning and propaganda, using official meetings with representatives of foreign governments to promote the break-up of the UK and appointing a minister for independence. Simon Case, head of the UK civil service, is currently investigating the matter and expected to issue new guidance to Holyrood civil servants. (It is no great secret that some opposition and civil society figures have concerns about the political independence of Scottish government civil servants under the SNP.)
This is where the UK is not a normal country. It is not normal that a public body in a sovereign state is allowed to use its offices to plot secession from that state. It is not normal, regardless of whether that body is called a government or has a parliament attached to it. It is not normal, even if the political party controlling that government is explicitly secessionist or makes its intentions clear in an election manifesto. It is not normal, no matter how shriekingly the secessionists demand this right or how many columnists warn central government that its failure to concede the point would be Not A Good Look. It is not normal, in sum, for a sovereign state to facilitate and finance a process intended to separate it from part of its territory.
The Scottish government maintains that it is lawful for ministers to instruct civil servants to undertake activities related to independence. I’m not a lawyer and have no idea whether that’s true, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Maybe one day Scotland will free itself from the absurd cult of Donald Dewar, the ‘founding father’ of devolution, and then we’ll be able to admit just how many hostages to nationalist fortune lie in his arrogant and foolhardy Scotland Act.
Wherever the law stands in the UK, it’s worth recording where it stands elsewhere. In the Civil War case Texas v. White, the US Supreme Court ruled that when a state or territory becomes part of the United States it has ‘entered into an indissoluble relation’ and cannot secede ‘except through revolution, or through consent of the states’. In 2017, the German Federal Constitutional Court rejected a legal challenge from Bavarian nationalists trying to secure a referendum on independence. The court stated: ‘There is no room under the constitution for individual states to attempt to secede. This violates the constitutional order.’ The United States and Germany are not alone. A 2019 study found that 82 per cent of countries worldwide have indivisibility clauses in their constitutions either forbidding or erecting hurdles to secession.
The UK is abnormal in being so politically indulgent of secessionism. Not only did it respond to autonomist sentiment by devolving a wide array of powers to a Scottish legislature in 1999, the UK parliament allowed that legislature to hold a referendum on independence and, when secession was rejected at the ballot box, devolved even more powers as a sort of constitutional consolation prize. Contrary to the prating of process-worshipping political scientists (I’m talking about you, UCL Constitution Unit) and London-brained think tanks (that’s you, Institute for Government), the UK is not wanting for decentralisation when it comes to Scotland. Westminster has already delegated so much political authority to Holyrood that it’s hard to think what more is left to hand over, though I’m confident Gordon Brown will come up with something.
The conversation in Scotland — ‘debate’ would be overselling it — mostly takes place within nationalist and hyper-devolutionist parameters. More powers is the answer to most problems, including problems that stem from the last bout of ‘more powers’ tinkering. Westminster undermines the Union by not doing enough for Scotland and by interfering too much, and it undermines devolution by upholding the terms of the settlement and by not altering its terms to please the Holyrood clamour factory. Ministers despair of this situation but, much as I understand their frustration, it’s not terribly easy to sympathise. Not only were Labour and the Tories co-culprits in the establishment, expansion and entrenchment of devolution, neither indicates the necessary appetite or, plainly, the guts for the sort of devolution reform necessary to make the policy consistent with the political interests of the United Kingdom. Since 2016, a peculiar mindset among the UK’s governing class has come to see any number of political developments in apocalyptic terms while regarding the break-up of the country itself as a mundane policy question. UK ministers, parliamentarians and civil servants have, to paraphrase Robert Frost, become too broadminded to take their own side in a quarrel.
Since 2007, and until recent difficulties, the SNP has gone electorally from strength to strength in Scotland. The party’s prospering is a testament to the health of British democracy. Not bad for a rainy fascist island. But Scottish nationalism does not require quite as much help from the British state as it currently enjoys. If ministers do plan to limit the use of Holyrood-assigned civil servants to advance independence, all well and good, but what a pitiful vision for the constitutional future of the UK. For more than a decade now, the SNP has been using UK institutions to push secession from the UK, and now Whitehall might — might — issue a civil service directive about it. The Scottish government, for all its policy failings, has boundless self-belief. The UK government should try acquiring some of that.
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