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Last week’s UK local and national election results revealed a country that was radically, and perhaps irreparably, divided.
Labor retained power in Wales; Boris Johnson’s Conservatives achieved tremendous victories throughout England; and in Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish National Independentist Party (SNP), won a fourth term in office.
Including the Scottish Greens, the separatists are once again promising the majority of seats in Holyrood, a national legislature left by Scotland in Edinburgh. Both parties – the SNP and the Greens – support a new referendum on Britain’s break-up.
According to former Scottish Prime Minister Sturgeon, it will happen at some point in the next five years – it is a matter of “when not” he told Johnson, who is opposed to the poll, while Johnson is being called. weekend.
The head of the SNP may be right. From Thatcherism to Brexit, from Iraq to austerity, the roots of British disunity are deep – and there is no clear solution on the horizon.
Scottish complaints are mostly democratic. The Conservative Party has been in power in Westminster for the past 71 years 47. However, the Conservatives have not won a general election in Scotland since 1955. The Scots voted overwhelmingly against Britain’s withdrawal from the EU in 2016, however, they lost their European citizenship rights on 1 January like everyone else.
The UK is now on the path to a constitutional crisis.
Aware of the ongoing blockade in Spain over attempts to separate Catalonia, Sturgeon’s desire is to be interrogated beyond the legal courts in the UK courts. He says a referendum called “savage” in London without permission is out of the table.
But in Britain Westminster is sovereign, the constitution formally “reserved” for the House of Commons. That means Johnson will stone Sturgeon’s demands to re-run the 2014 plebiscite – which the Scots voted ten points to be part of the UK – and effectively block Scotland within the Union, whether it wants to be there or not.
Despite efforts to reduce the likelihood of a legal battle, the Anglo-Scottish difference can easily remain before the UK Supreme Court.
Obstructionism could be a dangerous strategy for Johnson, however. The Prime Minister – a Brexiteer bow – is no longer very popular in Scotland.
Since taking over the Tory party in 2019, it has launched four separate initiatives aimed at “saving” the Union from the threat of Scottish separatism. The last of these came to a halt earlier this year when Oliver Lewis, the head of a special anti-independence working group on Downing Street, abruptly resigned after clashing with a colleague in his cabinet. Lewis had been in office for 14 days.
Johnson’s next move will be to love the “bomb” with Scotland’s infrastructure spending – at the same time trying to push the debate over independence back into political power. That won’t happen – not while the SNP continues to dominate Holyrood.
The unionist parties in Scotland are confused. In the face of Scotland’s vast left-wing European electorate, the Tories are anchored in 23% of the vote.
The work, on the other hand, continues the division of the constitutional at sea; it cannot oppose the traditional British anti-independence, nor does it have any power to prevent young working-class Scots from moving radically away from the Union.
Unionists, therefore, are tied in: the more Johnson resists Scottish self-determination, the tighter the SNP clings to the Scottish political landscape. (After 14 years in power, Sturgeon on Thursday lacked a single seat for the entire SNP majority).
Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who wrote in The Guardian on May 10, argued that the Scots were not, in fact, all interested in independence. What they really wanted, he said, was better cooperation with the rest of the UK.
But England’s decision to withdraw from the EU has directly jeopardized Scotland’s democratic autonomy. With Labor on both sides of the Anglo-Scottish border without a rudder, the chances of a major constitutional reform in Westminster feel far away.
Last week’s results do not indicate an immediate end to the UK. However, what they illustrate is how quickly the political map of Britain is unfolding. The future of the country is almost certain to be decided by Scotland – perhaps in the courts, but preferably in the polls.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the attitude of the Al Jazeera editorial.
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