Scottish independence: Boris Johnson should heed Joe Biden's words on democracy amid calls for second referendum – Joyce McMillan

On Wednesday morning, just after 9am Washington time, the then President-Elect Joe Biden sent a tweet to his 25 million followers.

Joe Biden quoted poet Seamus Heaney to make the point that democracy can be delayed but never permanently denied (Picture: Reuters)

“It’s a new day in America,” he said; and although it wasn’t an original thought – it carries echoes, for example, of Ronald Reagan’s famous “morning in America” slogan of 1980 – on this occasion it seemed to carry a ring of truth.

All day, the social media timelines were full of people weeping with relief and happiness, as, with the sun coming out on cue over the Capitol, the Biden inauguration – masked, distanced and crowdless – proceeded in all its ultra-American detail, cheesy and glorious, and unlike anything else on Earth in its ambition, its importance, and its Herculean effort to restore the democratic and inclusive vision at the heart of the modern American project, after the events of recent weeks.

That the United States often fails to live up to that vision goes without saying, and was widely acknowledged during Wednesday’s ceremony; but as Barack Obama pointed out on Twitter, even Martin Luther King never gave up on his country and its central project, only praying that it would one day “rise up, and live out the meaning of its creed”.

Whether this sense of a moment of renewal in America is real, or will soon be crushed by the realities of the mounting crises Biden identified in his inaugural address, is hard to guess; it may be that Biden, and his impressive Vice-President Kamala Harris, will try to push their mantra of unity and reconciliation too far, in dealing with far-right forces that are beyond negotiation.

Yet the sense of catharsis is palpable, though; and it provokes some thought about the condition of Britain, as we watch America shake off the grim legacy of 2016, and move on.

One of Donald Trump’s last acts as President was to grant a pardon to Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist who was facing charges of fraud and money-laundering; and this final moment of cronyism came as a sharp reminder that while the United States has succeeded for now in purging its administration of the influence of Bannon and his international network of right-wingers, the UK is only just beginning to experience in full the profound negative consequences of our 2016 vote, conducted with advice from Bannon and some of his associates, to leave the European Union. Because that vote took place in a referendum, rather than an election, the wafer-thin majority achieved on that day was framed as the permanent “will of the people”; and in order to “get Brexit done”, UK voters have now given an unassailable parliamentary majority, until the end of 2024, to the very players who brought us the slow-burning disaster through which we are now living.

Worse, those players have a political agenda which clearly involves weakening all those elements of the British state that might be able to provide checks and balances to the unlimited executive power bestowed by their majority, from the judiciary to the UK’s three devolved administrations.

Under Britain’s “unwritten constitution”, there is relatively little anyone can do to oppose them; and somehow, in these circumstances, the sight of Dominic Cummings leaving Downing Street with his belongings in a box doesn’t quite compete with the Biden inauguration as a moment of cleansing and renewal.

For even when the next general election finally arrives, the tragedy of Brexit is that the big lie on which the project is founded – that leaving the EU will not damage Britain, and will offer the country a bright future – has now seeped deep into the texture of UK political life, requiring a “patriotic” acceptance of the Brexit project even from opposition parties, and having a chilling effect on open public debate about the extent of the harm the UK has inflicted on itself, not only through Brexit, but also through its poor and indecisive handling of the Covid pandemic.

All of which creates an outlook for the UK that is measurably gloomier even than the prospect facing Biden across the Atlantic. As an incoming Democratic President tackling huge economic problems, he has the support of historic examples that range back to Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal, and of a constitution that actively aspires both to a decent separation of powers, and to values of equality, democracy and citizenship.

In Britain under a Tory government, by contrast, the toolbox is bare; apart from the much-loved NHS, a legacy of a past age of social democracy which many Tories are on the record as wishing to dismantle, there is nothing there but empty Union Jack rhetoric, reactionary appeals to past greatness, and bombastic and deeply corrosive attempts to defend a Brexit decision which is already proving indefensible.

Small wonder, in other words, that our Union now seems closer to breaking-point than any time since 1707. This week, in an exceptionally clear-sighted piece in the Standard, the former Chancellor George Osborne acknowledged as much, and also pointed out the role of Brexit in effectively driving Northern Ireland out of the Union, and in compelling Scots to turn towards independence; his view was that to avoid “losing Scotland”, Boris Johnson’s best option is simply to ignore the wishes of the Scottish people, and deny a referendum in perpetuity.

When a supposedly democratic state reaches that kind of crisis, though, it is already all but acknowledging that the game is over. As Joe Biden said yesterday, quoting Seamus Heaney, democracy can be delayed, but never permanently defeated; and if the people of Scotland have finally decided to leave the Brexit state, and the culture of reactionary delusion on which it is founded, then sooner or later, they will have their way.

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