“The Union is a fantastically strong institution, it has helped our country through thick and thin,” he said. “I think what people really want to do is see our whole country come back in force, and that is what we are going to do.”
Together, perhaps, but not with the Scottish leader. For his first trip to Scotland this year, Johnson chose a sparsely populated group of islands hundreds of miles from the seat of Scottish political power in Edinburgh; he did not meet with Scotland’s top elected official, Prime Minister Nicola Sturgeon.
Divergent approach
One of the many lessons from the pandemic in the UK has been the marked style of government of the country’s political leaders.
Sturgeon was not impressed. “I don’t know what it means to ‘be vigilant,'” Sturgeon said at the time, adding that he had asked the British government not to roll out that slogan in Scotland.
When the Johnson government introduced new rules that allowed residents to visit certain countries without quarantining them on their return, Sturgeon called the decision-making process “shady.” Unlike Downing Street, she refused to allow unrestricted travel from Spain.
Another area of divergence has been on the issue of facial coatings: Sturgeon made them mandatory in stores here two weeks before Downing Street did the same with a similar ordinance for England. The Sturgeon tartan face mask has become a clothing signature.
Johnson has not resisted the masks with the zeal of the President of the United States, Donald Trump, but is seen more often without a covered face, even indoors, than with one. His visit to Orkney sparked a small protest; a man interrupted: “Where’s your mask, Boris?”
Perception of power
To a stranger (and indeed to many Britons), the division of power in the UK can be confusing. Boris Johnson is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but since the late 1990s, much power has been transferred to the constituent nations of the United Kingdom, a process known as devolution.
This means that many policy decisions on health, education and transport for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are not made in London, but in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. It was not uncommon to see a large policy announcement emanating from Downing Street, only to find a postscript explaining that the rule only applies to England.
“This is really the most significant time when the return has been the most obvious to ordinary citizens,” said pro-independence pollster Mark Diffley on a typically rainy summer day in Edinburgh.
That perception is evident on the streets of Scotland’s capital. “London is too hectic, you change your mind all the time, you can’t understand what you want to do,” said Karen Miele, 58, of Edinburgh. “Do you want to help people? Do you want to put the economy first? Or do you just not care? You don’t know what you’re doing.”
Andrew MacDonald, 21, of Linlithgow, said his view of Sturgeon “has definitely gone up” over the course of the pandemic. “I think Nicola has done the right thing by trying to keep politics on the sidelines, and going with science first throughout the process,” he said.
Despite this perceived divergence in approach, the Covid-19 results, at least so far, have not been so different. In fact, the death rate in Scotland has been really worse than in England. For every 100,000 people, 77 in Scotland have died and Covid-19 is listed on their death certificate, up from 72 in England.
“There are important differences in approach, and there are also important differences in public perception of the approach,” said Linda Bauld, professor of public health at the University of Edinburgh.
Boost for independence
The question for Sturgeon, and fear for Johnson, is whether this positive regard for his administration of the pandemic will carry over to political support for the cause of Scottish independence, which remains the primary objective of his Scottish National Party.
The last time the Scots formally voted for independence, in 2014, “no” earned more than 10 percentage points. A lot has changed since then. In the 2015 UK general election, the SNP went from six seats in the House of Commons in Westminster to 56, occupying all but three Scottish constituencies. The Scots voted against Brexit in 2016.
Renowned pollster John Curtice of Strathclyde University told the BBC on Thursday that support for independence has been increasing for about a year, and is now increasing even among Scots who voted for Brexit.
The latest poll, Diffley said, “would suggest that support for independence is greater than it actually has been for a long, long time.”
That’s a problem for Johnson, the leader of a party whose full name is the Conservative and Unionist Party. By visiting Scotland, Johnson hoped to underline the benefits to Scots of the 300-year union with England: He was eager to point out that it was the London Treasury that saved thousands of Scottish jobs with its generous leave plan, for example.
The SNP had promised a new referendum on independence ahead of next year’s Scottish parliamentary elections. It has now been suspended due to the pandemic.
For SNP MPs like Tommy Sheppard, who represents East Edinburgh, it’s only a matter of time. “Those who want to see Scotland become an independent country welcome as many trips as possible from Boris Johnson to Scotland, because every time he sets foot in Scotland, support for independence increases,” he said.
He believes that the pandemic response has opened many Scottish skeptical eyes to the real differences between Scotland and England.
“They are aware of that the way they never were before. And perhaps they are open to the possibility of what an independent Scotland could do if it had the political power to act.”
.
