England never gets Scotland right. Last week the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, repeated Downing Street’s familiar gloat over another reverse for Scottish home rule. London’s supreme court dismissed the Scottish National party’s bid for an “advisory” plebiscite on whether to hold another independence referendum. Just go home, said Sunak, and run Scotland better. He seemed to think the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon would apologise for wasting his time. He merely reinforced her party’s antipathy to London and all its doings.
The court’s decision was legally robust but politically inept. Sturgeon’s poll would have been purely advisory. The court appeared to be saying that independence was a forbidden subject to Scottish opinion, lending force to her claim that “the notion of the UK as a voluntary partnership of nations … is no longer a reality”. In the unlikely event of the Scots “advising” another referendum, then real questions might be asked as to what independence involved.
