We may not need indyref2 - Westminster is imploding by itself

Michael Gove told the UK Covid-19 Inquiry that the UK Government had looked at all the problems it faced during the pandemic and decided that the most important outside Covid itself was to protect the Union itself.

But if he thought the only threat to that Union came from the support for Scottish independence, this week brought a sharp wake-up call.

It’s now clear that the political situation in Northern Ireland has brought the prospect of a united Ireland closer … and Westminster can’t block progress with the same tactics it has used against the SNP. It won’t be enough to simply refuse to countenance a referendum on the issue when it has already agreed the circumstances under which such a vote must go ahead.

The Good Friday Agreement sets out that the British secretary of state for Northern Ireland must call a referendum on a united Ireland if “it appears likely” that most voters would back it.

That may not be the case right now but public opinion is moving in that direction, as evidenced by Sinn Fein’s better-than-expected victory in the Northern Ireland local elections last year and the appointment of the party’s Michelle O’Neill as First Minister last week.

READ MORE: Opinion polls are not the trigger for a referendum in Northern Ireland

We’re not talking about that referendum taking place imminently but it does rule out a repetition of the blanket refusal it employs to stop Scotland from expressing its view on independence. In June 2013, only 3.8% of voters in Northern Ireland told opinion pollsters they would be prepared to pull out of the UK. Recent polls suggest that support for unity has risen to between 30 and 40%. That is not a majority but it is a big rise and looks like a trend.

Sinn Fein certainly thinks so. The party’s president Mary Lou McDonald recently said that Irish unity was “within touching distance” and is pushing for a referendum within a decade.

Speaking to the media at Stormont last week McDonald said that O’Neill’s appointment “signals now the new Ireland emerging and the conversation around a new constitutional dispensation, ending partition, Irish unity, all of the opportunity that presents is in many ways embodied in this moment”.

The situation in Northern Ireland also undermines Westminster’s refusal to even consider a different form of Brexit in Scotland in recognition of the fact that 62% of voters north of the Border wanted to stay in Europe.

The Tories not only kicked out the SNP suggestion that Scotland retain access to the single market, they did so with disdain. Yet new arrangements for Northern Ireland fast-tracked through the Commons last week effectively remove the Irish Sea border for goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland and staying there.

SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn is still waiting for an answer to the question he asked earlier this week: Why can Northern Ireland have access to the single market and yet Scotland cannot?

You may have thought that this was a reasonable question for the mainstream media outside of The National to support. You may have thought that same media would have given at least as much coverage to Alister Jack’s admission that he deleted ALL his WhatsApp messages during the pandemic as it did to Nicola Sturgeon.

It might even have crossed your mind that Gove’s insistence on the UK Government’s prioritisation of fighting independence during the pandemic proved that he and not Sturgeon was putting his politics above the needs of Scotland.

But of course not one of these issues received anything like the coverage they deserved in our media. Instead the Covid inquiry has been used as a battering ram against the Scottish Government while Jack and Gove were hardly challenged.

Of course, Northern Ireland is not Scotland and there are different and separate issues there. The restoration of the Northern Ireland Assembly after two years is welcome and should be supported.

But it’s fair to point out that if Westminster can reach an accommodation to accept different needs there why is it so unwilling to do the same for Scotland?

It’s not as if support for independence is crashing in Scotland. In fact the most recent opinion poll by Ipsos suggests it is sitting at 53%, seemingly impervious to the much-publicised travails of the SNP and to the hugely overblown prospect of a significant Labour revival at the next General Election.

That same Ipsos poll has some bad news for those pinning their hopes on recent headlines translating into actual results in that election. It suggests the SNP would win 40 seats and Labour just 13.

OK, the loss of any seats is hardly a cause for celebration and a gain of 11 seats for Labour is certainly an improvement over recent results but it’s not a revolution. Nor is it a sign in a collapse in independence support. And there are developments which could improve the SNP’s position before the election … not least of them being clarity over the police investigation into the party’s finances which is starting to feel unsustainably long and fruitless.

But let’s face it … even an improvement in SNP electoral fortunes is hardly likely to persuade Westminster to greenlight a second independence referendum. Both possible winners, the Tories and (much more likely) Labour have set their faces against it.

READ MORE: Humza Yousaf reshuffles Scottish Government - see all the changes

Even if Labour need SNP support to form a UK government, Keir Starmer has vowed not to accept a referendum as the price of such a deal.

Whether reality will dilute such intransigence remains to be seen, but the likelihood is that a party with relatively little popular support in Scotland will over-rule a party with much higher public support.

The UK’s democratic crisis will only deepen.

With support for a united Ireland growing and a political mechanism for a referendum in place (if a little vague), support for independence in Scotland bobbing around the 50% mark, only Wales seems firmly committed to remaining in the UK long-term.

Support for independence in Wales relatively recently appeared to be on the rise.

The National’s owners even printed a weekly Welsh version in March 2021, which moved entirely online after eight months. That closed in August 2022, when a drop in subscriptions was blamed on the cost of living crisis.

Quite how the Welsh people have remained unconvinced by inspirational pro-independence speeches by the actor Michael Sheen remains a mystery but independence support dropped to its lowest level since 2019 at 18%.

However, a commission set up to investigate how the country might be better governed last month reported that independence would be a “viable option”. An earlier interim report recommended that Wales’s current form of devolution could not continue as it was not sustainable.

The drop in public support for independence in Wales has been attributed to optimism over the likelihood of an imminent UK Labour government. Starmer’s continuing shift to the right – and his dumping of his party’s green pledges – suggests that optimism is misplaced.

It’s generally believed that the rise in Sinn Fein’s popularity in Northern Ireland is down to its support for left-wing policies. Scotland’s left leanings have already boosted support for independence and Welsh left-wing ambitions are – for now – boosting Labour.

A Labour victory at the next election and the inevitable resulting disillusion with Starmer’s fixation with the right will force all the constituent parts of the UK that are not England to consider their future.

We may not need a referendum to gain independence. The UK looks like imploding all by itself.