So-called muscular unionism is a sign of Westminster’s fragility
Speymouth
The Labour party has responded to the leak of a memo from Starmer to cabinet ministers in which he tells them not to be “deferential” to the devolved governments and not to hesitate to override them even on devolved matters. Starmer was questioned about the memo by SNP MP Stephen Gethins at Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons on Wednesday, to which Starmer gave his usual snide non-answer, treating the question as an opportunity to get in one of his dubious digs at the Scottish Government and completely dodging the substance of the issue.
The Scottish branch office also gave a response, although not from the branch manager himself, who was still in hiding in case anyone asked him about his “old friend” Peter Mandelson. It was left to Labour’s constitution spokesman, the hapless Neil Bibby, to claim, unconvincingly, that the SNP’s suggestion that his party was overruling devolution was “bizarre” and “desperate”. So we didn’t really read in that memo what we did in fact read, thanks for clearing that up Neil. Like his big boss in London, Neil did not address the substance of the issue, how could he, when it was explicitly spelled out in black and white from Starmer himself that he expects his ministers to overrule the Scottish and Welsh Governments. Instead he treated us to a rehash of one of the branch office’s usual tropes, boasting about how much cash Westminster has “given” to Scotland. You know, out of the goodness of its heart.
BBC Scotland was also doing its level best to ignore the story, which has the potential to be very damaging to the political darlings of Pacific Quay in May’s Scottish election. While the story was prominently covered by BBC Wales, BBC Scotland buried it away deep down in the bowels of its digital news site where readers had to search to find it. If it was covered on BBC Scotland’s broadcast news on TV, it must have been one of those blink and you’d miss it affairs, because I don’t recall seeing it. Pacific Quay must have been thrilled that a Glasgow vape shop went on fire, burning down a historic and much loved building in the heart of the city, closed down the adjacent Glasgow Central Station, the largest and busiest train station in the country, and threw transport links throughout the west of Scotland and beyond into chaos. It was all a very convenient distraction from a story which is deeply embarrassing to the Labour party and which would otherwise have enjoyed much greater prominence.
Labour’s enthusiastic adoption of the so-called “muscular unionism” must become a central issue in the Scottish elections in May. “Muscular unionism” is simply a polite euphemism for the practice of undemocratically squashing decisions of the Scottish and Welsh parliaments which Westminster doesn’t like. When the people of Scotland and Wales go to the polls to elect their devolved parliaments, they do so on the understanding that those parliaments will have free rein to make and implement their own policies and spending decisions on devolved matters, not that the Scottish Government is only allowed to make decisions on devolved matters if the Westminster government consents to them. Yet that is where we effectively are with this so-called “muscular unionism”. Despite what Neil Bibby had to say, Labour is very much overruling and undermining the devolution settlement. Bibby hopes that we won’t remember that the devolution which Labour sold to Scotland following the devolution referendum of 1997 was very much on the basis that it would give the devolved parliaments the power to make their own decisions in devolved matters, crucially including decisions which the party in power in Westminster didn’t like. Devolution wasn’t supposed to mean “the Scottish Parliament will be free to make its own decisions on devolved matters as long as those decisions are OK with the Labour party”.
None of the major anti-independence parties can now be trusted to respect the devolution settlement as it currently stands, far less to implement the ever increasing range and depth of devolved powers which were promised during the 2014 independence referendum campaign as part of Better Together’s mendacious bid to prevent Scotland voting for independence. It seems that devolution was an event after all, and not a process. The Tories and Reform UK are hostile to the very idea of devolution and given half a chance would double down on the neutering of Holyrood and the Senedd if not abolish them entirely.
Westminster and the British media are sleepwalking into a constitutional crisis for which they are as utterly unprepared as they were for Brexit. It is highly likely that following May’s elections, all three of the devolved governments will be in the hands of parties seeking to end Westminster rule, while after next year’s Northern Irish election a Sinn Féin victory will increase the pressure for a referendum on Irish reunification, a referendum which could prove to be the first snag leading to the rapid unravelling of a Westminster rule which is under pressure from three directions all while far right English nationalists look poised to sweep to power in Westminster following the next UK general election. This election could also witness the rise of an entirely new factor in British politics. The English and Welsh Greens could make an electoral breakthrough meaning for the first time ever one of the main British political parties would be in favour of Scottish and Welsh independence.
The muscular unionism of Labour and the Tories before them is not a sign of a strong and confident British state, it’s a sign that devolution is dead and a symptom of a state which is trying to compensate for its own fragility. Westminster is much weaker than it appears. Only independence can offer the people of Scotland and Wales a constitutional framework in which their democratic choices are respected.
Meanwhile Independent Voices on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/indyvoices.bsky.social has carried out a valuable analysis of the reliability of the different polling companies on the subject of Scottish independence. You can read his analysis here
https://indyvoices.info/rating-the-pollsters
To summarise, he ranked the polling companies on three metrics, Demographics: how well does their sample compare to the age profile of Scotland? Turnout weighting: to what extent does their approach to turnout mirror the reality of the last referendum? And finally use of 2014 weighting: whether or not the samples were weighted to reflect the near 12-year-old Independence Referendum.
These metrics enabled him to create a league table of pollster reliability on the Scottish independence issue. The least reliable are YouGov, Opinium, and More in Common. When we remove these three companies from independence polling, there has not been a poll showing a lead for No for almost a year. Scotland is well on its way into independence being the settled will of the people, just as we head into a constitutional crisis of legitimacy for Westminster rule.
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