The centrifuge

A FEW MONTHS ago two marquees were erected at a funfair in Irvine, on Scotland’s west coast. Over the thump-thump of a sound truck provided by the local radio station, Scotland Yes was handing out saltires and balloons and trying to convince people to vote for independence in the referendum that will be held next September. “We can run our own country,” they said. Better Together was handing out union flags and telling people that Scotland would be worse off outside the United Kingdom. “Think of the overheads,” they said. The competition seemed so straightforward that it was tempting to count flags and balloons, to get a sense of how a typical small town might vote. But that would have been useless.

Almost everybody approached by either camp proved happy to sign a mailing list and to take a balloon. Children, and not a few adults, treated the event as a flag-collecting exercise, often amassing several from each marquee. Soon prams and backpacks sprouted saltires alongside union flags. Even given people’s liking for free stuff and their natural tendency to say or sign almost anything to get canvassers to leave them alone, it was a remarkable display of ambivalence. The Scots, at least in Irvine, would apparently like to be both independent and part of the United Kingdom.

When a Labour government devolved powers over health, education and other public services to Scotland in 1999, the hope was that nationalism would (in the words of George Robertson, an MP) be killed “stone dead”. A system of proportional representation for the new parliament would make it hard for nationalists or any other party to command a majority. This worked for a few years, but then the nationalist ghost returned. In 2011 the Scottish National Party won a majority; hence the referendum.

The campaigns for and against Scottish independence have so far been less about blood and soil and more about budgets and spreadsheets, as though they were being conducted by two rival firms of accountants. Both sides are deeply conservative. One nationalist leaflet handed out in Irvine promises that “Scotland will look pretty much as it does today on the first day as an independent country.” Nationalists want to keep the pound, the existing British pensions system and even the queen. Unionists argue that the only way to ensure Scotland can keep its currency and remain in the European Union is to stick with Britain.

If Scotland votes for independence, what remains of Britain will be shaken. It will also be humiliated

A battle between two conservative positions is a battle on unionist turf and, not surprisingly, the Better Together camp is winning. Polls consistently show that about 30-40% of Scots will vote to leave next September. But the Scottish National Party recovered from a poor position in the polls to win its parliamentary majority in 2011. And the poll is unpredictable because Scots cannot vote for what a plurality of them wants: further powers short of independence, with defence and foreign affairs handled from London. The perplexing scene in Irvine is in fact an accurate representation of the public mood. “The modal Scottish voter says, ‘I’m Scottish, and we should be able to run our own affairs. But I want Westminster to deal with the foreign muck’,” explains John Curtice, a psephologist at Strathclyde University.

If Scotland votes for independence, what remains of Britain will be shaken. The state will be slimmed mathematically, as 8% of its economy and population disappears, together with 32% of its land and almost all of the North Sea oil- and gasfields. It will be diminished militarily. The Scots supply more than their fair share of uniformed men, and Britain’s nuclear-armed submarines are parked in a deep Scottish loch, with no decent alternative berth. It will also be humiliated. A country that cannot hold itself together is greatly diminished in the eyes of the world. Scottish independence would give succour to Welsh nationalists and would cause an existential crisis in Northern Ireland, where many unionists have Scottish roots.

The more you have, the more you want

If, as seems likely, Scotland votes to stay in the United Kingdom, the consequences will be less drastic but still profound. Led by Scotland, the devolved administrations have quietly become more and more powerful (see chart 7). Even in Wales, where devolution was approved in 1997 by a cigarette-paper margin of 0.3%, most people now want the Assembly to be given new powers over policing and welfare in addition to those they already have over education, health and housing. Devolution appears not just irreversible but unstoppable.

When the devolved governments were set up, it was hoped that they would experiment with new policies that could spread to other administrations, rather as ideas spread among American states. That has happened occasionally—as with Scotland’s smoking ban and Wales’s children’s commissioner. But the opposite trend is more marked.

Beginning under Labour, and accelerating under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, England has gone on a public-service-reform binge. It has introduced choice and competition to the National Health Service, cut many schools free of local-government control and shifted the burden of paying for university onto students. It has published league tables and other data for the benefit of parents and patients.

Outside England almost all of this has been resisted. No academies or free schools can be found in Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales. Hospitals remain bulwarks against the private sector. Scottish students still pay no fees in Scotland: not surprisingly, they have grown insular, with just 3% of Scottish 18-year-old university applicants seeking places in the rest of the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland has blocked the coalition government’s welfare reforms. “The overall trend is to preserve an older version of the social-democratic welfare state,” says Alan Trench, who follows the politics of devolution at the University of Ulster. Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales have diverged from England not because they have experimented but because they haven’t.

What turns this from an interesting wrinkle into a problem is that all three receive block grants from Westminster. This is not offensive in itself: most English regions, too, are net recipients of taxpayers’ money. But it becomes harder to tolerate if the devolved administrations are seen to be using English cash to avoid painful reforms.

The partial devolution of taxation powers, which will accelerate in the next few years, makes the problem bigger. Northern Ireland and Scotland want to set their own rates of corporation tax. If they cut them drastically, as Northern Ireland has said it would do, companies may be drawn away from England. Subsidising another country to take your jobs is a bit much.

Tricky constitutional questions lurk. As the devolved administrations grow stronger and their policies diverge from England’s, the issue of their MPs in Westminster becomes more pressing. By convention, Westminster does not override legislation passed in the devolved assemblies. But MPs from Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales can vote on bills that mostly affect England. A separate English parliament would solve this problem but create lots of others, and the idea has little support.

The British, and especially the English, are brilliant at muddling along. They can sustain institutions that have long seemed unsustainable; the unelected House of Lords and the Church of England spring to mind. But they can move quickly when theoretical problems turn into practical ones.

That may happen in 2015. The two likeliest outcomes in that year’s general election are a small Labour majority or a small Conservative majority (coalitions are never likely in Britain, despite what everybody in Westminster seems to believe, and even less so in 2015 because the Liberal Democrats will probably lose seats). A small Conservative majority would mean a government that has almost no MPs outside England, so lacks a remit in the Celtic fringe. A Labour government with a small overall majority would lack a majority in England and would hold on only because of its Scottish and Welsh MPs. At that point even the lackadaisical British might realise that something is up.