The curious roots of Boris Johnson's unionism

With a budget of £10m and no discernible brief, Boris Johnson’s tenure as the inaugural, self-appointed, Minister for the Union has been accompanied by a strange new phase of unionist politics.

Amongst the more exotic planks of a renewed commitment to the union is the concept of a bridge to Northern Ireland—the so-called “Boris Bridge”—which the Secretary of State for Scotland later clarified was a “euphemism” for a tunnel. Like the new ministry, the project, of dubious feasibility, seemed to arrive in the headlines this February from nowhere.

The unionism of the current administration seems to consist of these often self-defeating talking points. The Prime Minister’s remarks to a group of MPs last week, which described devolution as a “disaster” and Tony Blair’s “biggest mistake” should be seen, primarily, as further dead cats draped in the union flag. Superficially, they seem to offer little more than ammunition for the SNP. The party are already confident that Johnson’s dire approval ratings north of the border may be vital to pushing cautious, wealthier voters towards independence.

But in a more profound sense, there is a long tradition within Johnson’s party of viewing self-rule in the periphery as an existential threat. During the Irish Home Rule crisis, Tory leader Andrew Bonar Law claimed in 1912 that he could “imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support them.”

This remarkable statement punctuates a strain of deep reactionary unionism that threads its way through Britain’s archaic constitutional architecture. As put forward in the Nairn-Anderson thesis, absolutism in Britain wasn’t quite abolished during the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth century. Instead, the authority of the crown became vested in parliament. Ever since, Westminster has looked on every other source of political legitimacy as potentially seditious.

Unlike that of his predecessor Bonar Law, Johnson’s unionism may only reach out to rhetorical, rather than violent, extremes. But there is a common assumption between the two: tackling “separatism” trumps respect for the boundaries staked out by constitutional reforms and negotiated political process. Speaking at the Scottish Conservative conference last week, the Prime Minister crossed another line in explaining his desire to reshape the internal governance of Scotland, a matter explicitly reserved to the devolved administration.

This is not to claim that Johnson has a route to close down Holyrood as Thatcher did the Greater London Council. But it does suggest that there was a serious message contained within Johnson’s comments  and a constituency ready to receive them.

Devolution may be consistently popular with people in Scotland, but a solid rump of opposition has also emerged, incensed at the concept. This may not lead, as in Wales, to an Abolish the Assembly party, but one of the puzzles of Scottish politics is that, despite its popularity, turnout at Holyrood elections has never broken 60 per cent.

But Johnson’s remarks came with a rider. It’s not the institution of Holyrood itself that’s the issue; it’s the people who run it.

“Disaster” does not describe the lived experience of Scotland under the SNP. But the implicit threat that divergent political traditions pose is disastrous for the majoritarian strain of Toryism. Because it pertains to places far away from London, devolution or “home rule” has often been cast by the party as marginal. But devolution is precisely the centrifugal force that has consistently upended old political certainties.

It was opposition to Irish Home Rule that broke Liberal hegemony in Scotland—a country where many venerated Gladstone as a secular saint. Its successor, the Unionist Party (for which Bonar Law sat) held sway into the post-war era. Later, Labour would take up the mantle. Finally, the SNP perfected the art of embodying “the party of Scotland.”

Devolution has embedded this trend. Scotland is a polity based on a clearly bounded historic nation, containing the multitudes of a complex modern society. Yet it continues to function like a single safe seat in relation to the rest of the UK, with long waits for generational landslides to shake things up.

There are many reasons for differentiating between loyalty to the union of 1800 with Ireland and loyalty to the earlier incorporation of Scotland in 1707. The gun does not have a route into Scottish politics as it did on the island of Ireland in 1913, and there is no loyalist enclave to be carved out.

However, it is illustrative, and often overlooked, that it took the best part of a century for some form of Scottish self-government to move through the Houses of Parliament and on to the statute books. In addition to interrupting the Irish Home Rule crisis, the First World War stalled the first Scottish Home Rule Bill at its second reading in 1913. The British state’s early failure to evolve through such reforms has left it one of the most centralised in the world.

There is much about Johnson’s government that unionists of the Bonar Law variety would recognise: the bullish pursuit of naval supremacy, an imperial attitude towards international trade, and hostility to home rule. Yet since its inception, the most successful advocates of the Anglo-Scottish union have understood that it fares better when presented as a negotiation rather than an ideological creed: something that Johnson, like Thatcher before him, seems incapable of comprehending.

Irish Home Rule was derided on many counts, but it was most consistently condemned as a backdoor to “Rome Rule” and the subversion of Ulster Protestantism. In place of that anti-Catholic bigotry, today another European threat stalks unionism—the overwhelming majority of members at Holyrood support Scotland’s place in Europe. In this sense Johnson is correct. Devolution, in its very form, posits loyalties and identities that bypass London. With the economic hit of Brexit on the horizon, the most consistent claims of union—to stability and prosperity—could be damaged beyond repair. This would indeed be disastrous for Johnson’s premiership and the party that he leads.