Rallying to Union

AFTER manning the barricades alone for so long, it seems Scotland’s Unionists will finally be getting reinforcements.

Michael Gove is reportedly assembling a new team at Westminster to push back against the SNP’s relentless obsession with breaking up the Union.

Meanwhile Scottish Secretary Alister Jack insists Boris Johnson’s government intends to ‘play the long game’.

These are welcome and reassuring interventions. The Nationalists are ahead in the polls, in part because the opposition is divided and in part because BBC Scotland continues to afford Nicola Sturgeon her own live daily broadcast to the nation.

Preventing the dissolution of the United Kingdom, not least in the middle of a global pandemic, should be among the Prime Minister’s chief priorities. This is a perilous world and will only get more so. Now is not the time to have one-fifth of the permanent UN Security Council preoccupied with its own dismantling. Independence is not merely a financially ruinous proposition, it is a thoroughly dangerous one, too.

Downing Street must not limit itself to the economic case against secession.

The Nationalists are making an argument based on emotion, culture and identity and, as uncomfortable as those aspects might make some Unionists, they are proving successful for Miss Sturgeon.

Mr Johnson will have to find a way to convince Scots that the UK is a shared success story, not the millstone the SNP casts it as.