My eyes pricked when I watched the clock face and heard Big Ben strike seven. At 6.09, the BBC had declared that ‘No’ would definitely win, so this was the first hour we knew that the United Kingdom was safe.
The bongs of the Great Bell brought it home. In defeat, the soon-to-depart Alex Salmond said how pleased he was that the campaign had “touched sections of the community who had never before been touched by politics”. He was right: the 84.5 per cent turn-out showed that.
But the elements of the community most clearly touched were the quiet unionists. Often, they had felt intimidated, and some — employed in the public sector or dependent on Scottish government contracts — had feared for their jobs if they spoke out. Many were bourgeois or rural, the sort of people who, if the Conservative Party would only serve them better, are natural Tories.
In Banff, Angus, Aberdeenshire, South Ayrshire, Dumfries and Galloway, the Borders, the Lothians, in Fife, in Edinburgh itself, with precious little help from any political organisation, they saved our country. People do vote when they see that it really matters; and, the more it matters, the more wisely they tend to vote, as we shall see if they are ever permitted to vote on the European Union.
The above are the only emotional paragraphs this column permits itself this morning, however, because I think it is worth analysing rather coolly what might happen next. After a big moment, we journalists love saying: “One thing is certain: things will never be the same again.”
I want to make the heretical suggestion that, in this case, it may not be as true as is being reported. The No campaign panicked last week. It let Gordon Brown — even though (thank goodness) he is not the prime minister — promise almost instant “devo max” on behalf of Westminster scaredy-cats of all parties. That is now the expectation.
Like most Brown promises, however, it cannot be fulfilled in the way he implied. David Cameron made sure of this when he came out of Downing Street yesterday morning and said that there must be “a balanced settlement”. There could be no change in Scotland’s powers, he explained, without at the same time addressing the wrongs done to England, and the needs of Wales and Northern Ireland.
It must be all one package. That means it will not happen as Brown’s draft clauses “promised”. First, because there is not nearly enough Parliamentary time before the May general election, and MPs are at last waking up to the horror of rushing through constitutional questions.
Second, Conservative MPs, belatedly enraged by the wrong done to England by devolution, will not permit new Scottish powers unless the question of “English votes for English laws” is settled.
Third, Labour MPs do not want English votes for English laws, because such a change could make it impossible for a Labour government to run the country.
Neither side will get what it wants, so both will have an interest in delay. This is why Cameron has put William Hague in charge of the process. Hague is leaving Parliament at the next election: he is kindly performing a holding operation rather than delivering a programme of reform. The most that could be achieved before May would be some cross-party agreement about what they would all like to do in the next Parliament. But the next Parliament is the next Parliament.
Consequences of broken promises
Luckily, we are still enough of a free country that the old Parliament cannot command the new one, which the voters will just have chosen. So all these constitutional matters will be issues at the May election. Who will benefit? The SNP, a bit, because it will shout about broken promises; but I suspect that Scottish voters, after years of constitutional controversy, will return with relief to normal issues, and refuse to get too excited.
The much greater beneficiary could be the Conservatives. By insisting on England’s rights at last, they will weaken Ukip and shore up their own base. By tying them in with more powers to Scotland, they will to some extent disarm accusations of being mere English nationalists. Besides, they have only one seat in Scotland to lose. Who will suffer? Labour.
People do not seem to have taken in quite what a shock the Scottish experience has been to the party. Labour’s leadership of the devolution issue in the Blair era was based on the flawed assumption that it would stop nationalists in their tracks and give the party Celtic redoubts against the supposed evils of Thatcherism. Instead, Labour lost control of the process.
Yesterday, Alistair Darling reminded us that his late colleague, Donald Dewar, the original First Minister of Scotland, had spoken of devolution as a “journey”. What he did not say was that the journey has led to Salmondism. It was the red heart of Labour Glasgow and Dundee which voted Yes on Thursday. In membership, ideology and, more slowly, votes, Scottish Labour is being hollowed out.
At the next election, Labour will be desperate not to promise any reduction in the huge number of Scottish seats, because it holds most of them. It will also not want to empower an English majority in Parliament. On other hand, it will fare badly in England if the Tories can make it out as the party that denies English votes for English laws.
The English are almost completely uninterested in the regional assemblies and more layers of politicians that Labour loves. They don’t even want their own parliament — all they ask is fairness in the existing one. Labour fears this, so it is trapped. The Con-Lib Coalition could probably sign up to a self-denying ordinance in which its parties’ Scottish MPs will volunteer not to vote on English questions any more, and embarrass Labour by inviting it to do the same.
Then the Tories will move on to the territory they want: leadership. As in so many other things, Cameron had a poor strategy in the Scottish referendum campaign, but when he did intervene, he showed flair and eloquence. He made a case from the heart. No party colleague upstaged him.
Poor Ed Miliband, however, came up to Scotland looking like a bewildered foreign delegate to a boring conference, and Gordon Brown made sure that everyone noticed. It is true that most of Cameron’s MPs are furious with him for pitching the country into a referendum whose details were so poorly thought through. They rightly resent the way constitutional questions that will have an effect centuries hence have been treated as a matter for spin doctors rather than Parliament.
But the size of the No margin has saved Cameron from a party coup. His MPs should acknowledge that the leader who annoys them so much can speak for England the better because everyone knows he sticks up for the Union. Am I arguing against constitutional reform, then? No. All sorts of things need doing, most notably restoring the rights of the English and reclaiming Parliament itself from the executive. The logic of devolution means that any body gaining more powers to tax must receive less central subsidy.
But one thing really has changed because of Thursday. The Union has had a strong specific endorsement at the polls in the one part of the kingdom which seriously challenged it. The tail of nationalism must no longer be allowed to wag the British bulldog. All future reform must take place in the interests of the whole. This ought not to be an original thought, but because no one in power has thought this way for so long, it is. Getting it right will take time.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2014
