ALREADY the nights are longer than the days, and so a new political year looms – it is hard to see it, however, as an opportunity for some renovation in the mangled British body politic. Of course, we might conceivably be just a short distance from a fresh but workable relationship with our former European partners. But nothing being said or done on the UK side of the negotiations provides much hope this is so. The best we can do is note how serious comment echoes only from the other side of the Channel, and is profoundly pessimistic.

Our present rulers are poor in quality compared to earlier generations at Westminster. The final quarter of the last century was an era of particular distinction, with both right and left open to fresh ideas and capable of expressing them with force. Now all we have is hypocrisy and platitude.

It is in this context that the UK Parliament tries to come to terms with a Scotland that has markedly moved up the agenda, after a Scottish and then a European referendum allowed the SNP delegation at Westminster to shine.

As English politicians make their condescending response, they either preserve ignorance in their own country or feed grievance in this one. That is a shame, because Unionism had been a perfectly respectable position in UK politics since the constitutional crisis of 1886, when the question of Home Rule for Ireland cut across existing party lines in the same way as Europe does today.

This kind of Unionism continued as a minority element among the Tories till half-a-century ago, by which time nobody really remembered why it existed. It took Northern Ireland’s Troubles to remind us. Now it is about time to revive the memory again, because a void has opened up on the right between the cynics and the reactionaries. There, a novel, improved Unionist ideology could well sit, yet we hear nothing of any substance in the circles that might espouse it. The uncompromising, London-centric spirit left dominant by default in the governing party is, like its leader, uninterested in ideas and so bereft of them.

This distaste for detail could itself contribute to the breaking up the UK. It rehearses in an uncanny way the story before 1886, when the originally modest aspirations of the greater part of the Irish people set off the chain of events that led at length to an independent Irish republic, in a movement largely driven along by Unionists.

Yet Labour are just as bad. In the 107 pages of their last election manifesto, they managed to omit all mention of the UK. Since the Second World War, the party has been Unionist in an almost Tory sense, ridded in its practice of centralism – and this in the name of democratic socialism! Its hardliners have stuck without apparent misgivings to their line, even as it wiped the party out in some of its historic heartlands.

The same must be said for the LibDems, sadly reduced after so disliking the one experience of government they are ever gain likely to get. Now they are even moving towards a sterner sort of Unionism under their new leader Edward Davey. An MP for a London suburb, he perhaps could not be expected to show as much enthusiasm for exotic models of federalism as colleagues from the Celtic fringe do. But his aversion seems to go further than that, and to embrace open hostility to the Scots in the role as a driving force for reform.

Even Scotland’s governing party is not perfectly consistent either. Although electorally secure at Holyrood and Westminster this is not in itself taken as a mandate for independence as would have been the case in the early days of the SNP. The key instrument of constitutional change today is rather the referendum – which actually makes things not easier but harder for the nationalists.

The next referendum does in any event need to be won, yet there is nothing in the practices favoured at Westminster to make the principle of a simple majority especially safe. This is what went wrong in 1979, of course.

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THE fact that it now seems historically disreputable has not stopped various public figures proposing that something like it should happen in 2021 and beyond – with, for example, everybody who had been born in Scotland getting a vote. It may seem preposterous, but always remember Boris is in charge.

If the referendum has opened up as the main instrument of independence, then other contrary possibilities may occur to such an ingenious and unscrupulous Prime Minister, especially if foreign experience is drawn on.

The 2017 referendum in Catalonia was in effect nullified because the opposition parties boycotted it. It had been easy enough to motivate the Catalan-speaking part of the population to vote yes. But in the absence of an opposition, nobody could say if they were a majority. There are other European countries that contain secessionist minorities. They would never have accepted a new member of the EU where the vote was not absolutely unassailable.

Some people might think – and some senior party members do think – that opting for a referendum shows a certain lack of absolute commitment to Scottish independence simply because so much can go wrong. I would guess Nicola Sturgeon is one of those people, which would underline her caution and love of the conditional.

It is true she has recently set the summer of 2021 as the time to announce the question that will be put on the ballot paper. But these details in themselves do nothing for the chances of victory for independence. She used, after all, to say that she would look for a consistent forecast of 60% of voters saying Yes before she would contemplate the referendum. That point appears to be nearer, but we are not there yet.

My advice to the First Minister in these circumstances is the same as ever. Despite what appears in this newspaper, written by most of its columnists, Scotland is not a socialist country and has never voted in the majority for the body of dead doctrine we owe to Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, let alone to John MacLean and Tommy Sheridan.

What is more, a nationalist party should in principle seek to appeal to people of all stations in life, both to those who have done well and to those who have done not so well.

Most citizens of the new state will want harmony and co-operation after the struggle for independence, not social rancour and class warfare. Equality and mutual respect are important values but so are freedom and diversity.

England’s social and economic crisis seems to me to have undermined the qualities which would once have allowed its people to tackle those aspects of national decay that dismay them. I am no longer sure that is true.

A Scotland intent on renewing itself appears to me to have a far greater chance of succeeding. But we do need to try harder than we have so far.