Boris Johnson must counter SNP's baseless claims of Scottish exceptionalism –John McLellan

Boris Johnson’s trip to Scotland saw announcements of vast amounts of public cash met by SNP complaints that it wasn’t enough, but the Prime Minister knows money alone won’t save the Union, writes John McLellan
Nicola Sturgeon welcomes Boris Johnson to Bute House in Edinburgh in 2019 (Picture: Jane Barlow/PA Wire)Nicola Sturgeon welcomes Boris Johnson to Bute House in Edinburgh in 2019 (Picture: Jane Barlow/PA Wire)
Nicola Sturgeon welcomes Boris Johnson to Bute House in Edinburgh in 2019 (Picture: Jane Barlow/PA Wire)

Even someone as enthusiastically optimistic as Boris Johnson wouldn’t have expected gratitude from the SNP after yet another vast injection of public money into the Scottish Government to coincide with his venture north this week.

Accompanying the announcement of a further £1.9bn, which brought the total extra funding available to the Scottish Government to £6.5bn this year, was the Prime Minister’s message about the benefits Scotland gains from the “might” of the Union, to which First Minister Nicola Sturgeon retorted that “none of us should be crowing about the pandemic in a political sense”. £1.9bn is an expensive way to crow, and seemingly a week doesn’t go by without another shake of the UK Government’s Covid money tree cascading cash in Scotland; two weeks ago there was £800m from Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s not-so mini-budget, followed by £40m for the Falkirk Growth Deal, then £50m for the islands deal wwhich was the centrepiece of Mr Johnson’s Orkney visit.

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On top of the 900,000 Scottish jobs supported by the UK Government furlough scheme and the VAT cuts for tourism and hospitality, what isn’t being cut is much ice with the SNP, and Finance Secretary Kate Forbes wasted no time in re-stating her demand that the Scottish Government be granted the ability to borrow another £500m.

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The £100m deal for Shetland, Orkney and the Western Isles funded 50:50 by the two governments was an example of partnership, and the handover of the £100m base for the new Poseidon patrol aircraft fleet at RAF Lossiemouth was a re-statement of faith in Scotland as home for UK defence facilities, but the big bazooka came at the end of the day with the massive direct funding boost revealed by Chief Secretary for the Treasury Stephen Barclay ahead of his visit to Edinburgh yesterday.

‘No marriage of convenience’

The choreography of Mr Barclay’s spending boost was intriguing, coming after Mr Johnson was heading back south and even though the figure clearly dwarfed the figures in the earlier announcement they did not overshadow the visit. Under different circumstances such a huge cash transfer would surely have been the centrepiece of the Prime Minister’s schedule, but the subliminal message seemed to be that there was a lot more to the UK Government than Boris Johnson, and more to maintaining the Union than trying to buy off the SNP.

Given Nationalists complaining the UK Government doesn’t fund Scotland properly is part of the ritual of every spending announcement, against a background of successive polls showing that of those Scottish voters who have decided over 50 per cent now favour independence, the question is whether hosing Scotland with UK money will sway the intentions of undecided voters come May’s Holyrood elections.

With the results of internal research being presented to the Cabinet by Scottish Conservative director Lord Mark MacInnes this month, the Prime Minister will be fully aware of the situation and the difference between his poor Scottish approval ratings and the First Minister’s popularity. Whatever Mr Johnson’s shortcomings in connecting with the Scottish public may be, at least he understands that winning the argument about independence is not just about the wonga.

“Whether it’s a Scottish scientist discovering penicillin in a London lab, an English-born author churning out chapters of Harry Potter in an Edinburgh café, or Westminster and Holyrood working together to secure tens of millions of pounds for the Islands Growth Deal, the people of the UK have always achieved more as four than as one,” he wrote in Thursday’s Times.

“Being Scottish and British means so much more than ‘someone who lives in this part of the world’. Because this is no marriage of convenience — and we are there for each other in sickness and in health,” he concluded, to which First Minister Nicola Sturgeon swaggered that “in his shoes, it’s not how I would be choosing to spend my time given what we are facing right now”.

No clear basis for Sturgeon’s Covid claims?

For very different reasons I suspect more than a few English Conservatives might think the same. Independent pollster Mark Diffley, who conducts research for the Scottish Government, argues the rise of support for independence pre-dates Covid and goes back to Brexit, and this may well be so, given the Scottish Remain vote and evidence from the doorstep conversations in December’s General Election.

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With both EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier and his UK counterpart David Frost this week both acknowledging difficulties in reaching a trade deal before the September cut-off ahead of the end of transition in December, deal or no deal SNP strategists will be praying for chaos in January to push more Scottish Remainers over to the casue. That independence becomes a more difficult prospect after full Brexit is, at the moment, apparently neither here nor there.

It would be a bold person who can confidently predict public opinion in May when there are so many uncertainties, especially as towards the end of 2019 speculation about the First Minister’s future was rife and those senior Nationalists who now believe their time is coming were bracing themselves for civil war.

Part of Mr Johnson’s visit was a video rally with Scottish Conservative activists and the message was, as noted in this column last week, to concentrate on attacking the SNP’s record in government. There is certainly plenty to go at, particularly Scottish education’s spiral of decline, but not least of which is the handling of the pandemic, which brings me back to the First Minister’s accusation of political crowing against the Prime Minister. Ms Sturgeon repeatedly claims never to have used the crisis for political point-scoring, but until very recently she regularly asserted Covid prevalence in England was five times that of Scotland.

Such statistics do not appear in political presentations without checking, not least by someone as experienced as Ms Sturgeon. “How do we justify this?” she will have asked her advisers. But this week the Office of Statistics Regulation issued a statement to point out they “do not yet have evidence to support the validity of these comparisons”.

There has been no clarification or justification, so why did the First Minister choose to make such a dramatic claim about something so serious as the spread of a deadly virus when there was apparently no clear basis to do so? Surely she was not crowing about the pandemic in a political sense?

It’s hardly going to turn the tide of Scottish public opinion, but it does shine a light on the ever-growing but baseless claims of Scottish exceptionalism. As Mr Johnson appreciates, winning the independence argument is as much about the rhetoric as the money.

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