Tag Archives: Ruth Davidson

Can muscular unionism save the Union?

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Several UK politicians have been described as embracing a ‘muscular’ form of unionism, which includes taking a hard line against the possibility of constituent parts of the UK leaving the Union. As Iain McLean warns, muscular unionism can look like ‘know your place unionism’ and history has shown that such a muscular approach can backfire and hasten the very secession it seeks to prevent.

The phrase ‘muscular unionism’ is new but the concept is not. As Prime Minister, Boris Johnson called Scottish devolution ‘a disaster north of the border’. Liz Truss said while campaigning for the Conservative leadership that she would ‘ignore’ the ‘attention seeker’, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. She was true to her word, never contacting Sturgeon or Mark Drakeford, First Minister of Wales, during her premiership. Lord (David) Frost, who served as a member of Johnson’s Cabinet, recently wrote:

The Scottish “government” is not the government of a state in confederation with England. It is a subordinate entity within the UK, with powers granted to it by the UK government and Parliament, and ultimately subject to the supremacy of that Parliament.

It does indeed sound muscular, but it ended in tears and self-contradiction last time, and there is no reason to expect differently this time. The UK government would be well advised to become a little weedier than PMs Johnson or Truss. Rishi Sunak contacted Sturgeon and Drakeford on his first full day in office as Prime Minister. Is this a hopeful sign?

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The last Prime Minister of the Union?

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Last week, Boris Johnson was elected leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party, but concerns have been voiced about the potential consequences of his premiership for the Union. Michael Kenny assesses the validity of those concerns and how they might be alleviated.  

‘The last Prime Minister of the United Kingdom’. This damning, but also hopeful, judgement of the implications of a Boris Johnson premiership from the SNP’s Westminster leader Ian Blackford, expresses a sentiment that is widely held in UK politics, and is not confined to Scottish nationalist circles.

In fact, this particular outcome is very unlikely given how long – as we are currently learning – it takes countries to leave unions of which they are members. But it is undoubtedly true that his tenure in office will have a very significant impact upon the increasingly strained internal politics of the union, and could well ignite major political crises about the constitutional positions of Scotland and Northern Ireland. It is highly unlikely that Johnson will be the PM who oversees the break-up of Britain; but he may well go down in history as the catalyst for its dissolution.

So what does Johnson have to do to make sure that he does not become the leader who sends the UK to the brink?

In his election campaign he joined some of the other contenders in signalling his awareness of the need for the Union to be given a much higher priority in the thinking and policies emanating from Whitehall and Westminster. And this is certainly not a bad place from which to start. But there is a real risk that the kind of ‘hyper-unionism’ which, as our research shows, has emerged in official and political circles as an assertive response to heightened anxieties about the prospects of the UK, could well — if done without strategy or sensitivity — rebound on its author, deepening an ingrained scepticism about UK politicians and the central state in the outer parts of the UK. Continue reading →

‘Nationalism should not be confused with patriotism’ – Ruth Davidson delivers the Orwell Prize Shortlist Lecture

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On 15 May Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson delivered this year’s Orwell Prize Shortlist Lecture, co-hosted by the Constitution Unit. In the lecture Davidson set out a distinction between ‘patriotism’ and ‘nationalism’, arguing that although many political movements try to ensure that they get confused the two are profoundly different from one another. Thomas Romano reports.

The Orwell Prize is Britain’s most prestigious prize for political writing, awarded every year since 1994 in three categories: one for the best political book, the others for journalism and for ‘Exposing Britain’s Social Evils’. The Prize is awarded to the authors who come closest to Orwell’s ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’. On 15 May the shortlists for the 2017 Prize were announced, the last step before the proclamation of the winners on June 15. The event for the shortlist announcement was co-hosted by the Constitution Unit and the Orwell Foundation with the annual Shortlist Lecture given by Scottish Conservative Leader Ruth Davidson.

The choice of Davidson was in some ways surprising. As she herself noted in her speech, Orwell was ‘a man of the left’. As a matter of fact, Davidson was the first Conservative politician to give the shortlist lecture. Joking, she said that she did not expect him to agree on the choice.

In her speech, however, Davidson chose to draw inspiration from one of Orwell’s works that she could relate to. She drew inspiration from an essay written by Orwell in May 1945, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, called Notes on Nationalism. Here, Orwell speculates on some of the driving forces behind the nationalisms, and describes some features of what Davidson named the ‘politics of identity’. As leader of the Scottish Conservative Party, Davidson campaigned for Scotland to stay in the UK in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, and her party has more generally been a historic supporter of the Unionist case in Scotland. This has placed her in sharp contrast with Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party.

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