Politics
Scotland - The Tories should ditch the Union
Published 05 March 1999
John Lloyd advises Scots Conservatives to back an independent nation of Thatcherite enterprise
There is only one way in which Scottish Conservatives can recover political leadership of Scotland. It is by embracing nationalism. What remains of unionism is now social democratic.
Donald Dewar has made that clear. In a lecture last November, he said that 300 years of union had produced "core (British) values which are common and reflect indivisible commitment to tolerance, to a sense of justice, to fairness". Those are Labour theme words. Dewar's actions have spoken even louder than his words. Like his Tory predecessors, who knew of no other way to fight the rise of nationalism, he has expressed "fairness" to Scotland through oversubsidising it.
This oversubsidisation, long denied, was finally revealed last year with the publication of the Scottish Expenditure and Revenue Report. It showed that Scotland's share of UK revenue was 8.7 per cent, and its public expenditure 10.1 per cent - £7.1 billion more than it "should" get. The present government has given no coherent rationale for this, any more than its predecessor did. The only defence, a covert one, is that it is a bribe for staying in the Union.
It was a Thatcherised Conservative Party that continued and even furthered this policy. But why should today's Tories be in thrall to that? Liberated by an election that deprived them of any seats, the Tories can start from zero. And if they are to be true to what they became in the last two decades, they should use the many elements and characters from Scotland's past that suggest a nation devoted to enterprise, openness and freedom - Tory tropes all.
The obvious objection is that they will lose those supporters who still see Conservatism as a bulwark against a final split; and that they will consign Scots Tories to an independent Scotland dominated for ever by a government of the left. There are three answers to that. One is already being given by a desperate William Hague, who relaunched the Scots Tories in January by saying it was "a truly Scottish Party which . . . chooses its own leaders . . . designs its own campaigns . . . and determines its own policy for the Scottish Parliament". David McLetchie, the new Scots Conservative leader, talked of his party as "Scotland's other national party".
Second, the Tories lost their chance to make the unionist case. They could have offered the Scots a choice: either accept that constitutional change comes when there is agreement on it throughout the UK, or vote for independence, if you dare.
The third and best answer is that a modern Conservative can make a good case for an independent Scotland. It is that small nations are under no disadvantage today - mainly because of the free trade policies championed, at least initially, by parties of the right. There would be no trade barriers between Scotland and England if the former were independent because both EU and World Trade Organisation rules forbid them. If Scotland's goods were successful, they could command growing markets in England as freely as German or Japanese goods do.
Their success would depend on a great boost to Scots entrepreneurialism, acknowledged by all Scots parties to be less evident than in England - at least as measured by new business start-ups. But Scotland and the Scots Tories have an unbeatable figure if they wish to promote not just enterprise but also (as they would have to in Scotland) its social aspects.
This figure is still without much honour, or even a monument, in his own country. But Adam Smith is ripe for exhuming and popularisation. In the Wealth of Nations, he advanced the argument that freedom of trade and services coupled with peace and "a tolerable administration of justice" would produce wonders for any state. He also, in the less-read Theory of Moral Sentiments written 17 years earlier, commended the social and the mutual impulses. It is all there (along with the great sceptical, anti-Utopian storehouse of the 18th-century philosopher David Hume) to be ransacked.
Post-unionist Conservatives could, finally, distance themselves from contemporary consumer culture more than other parties. They could propose a spiky, individualistic, Scottish refusal to be submerged in Americana; could exhume the many elements from the Scottish literary and artistic past that were distinctive; could tap into a still-existing, if ebbing, Presbyterian consciousness of sin and responsibility. This might mean being anti-EU as well as being at least culturally anti-American; but neither need be inimical to material success and security, as Switzerland continues to show.
Are there the men and women to do it? Not in this generation: that the Tories should be led by a decent Edinburgh lawyer with no public resonance and apparently little ambition to have it shows a party marking time. But there will be a younger generation, probably forming around the large Scots financial service sector, which will want to oppose the unionist corporatism of Labour and the nationalist corporatism of the SNP. I hope, as a unionist corporatist, they do not succeed. But national Thatcherism is probably the only chance they have.
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