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“The Union is a fantastically strong institution — it’s helped our country through thick and thin,” he mentioned. “I think what people really want to do is see our whole country coming back strongly together, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
Together, maybe, however not with Scotland’s chief. For his first journey to Scotland this yr, Johnson selected a sparsely populated group of islands a whole lot of miles from the seat of Scottish political energy in Edinburgh; he didn’t meet with Scotland’s prime elected official, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.
Divergent method
One of the various classes from the pandemic within the UK has been the starkly totally different governing kinds of the nation’s political leaders.
Sturgeon was not impressed. “I don’t know what ‘stay alert’ means,” Sturgeon mentioned on the time, including that she had requested the British authorities not to deploy that slogan in Scotland.
When Johnson’s authorities launched new guidelines that allowed residents to go to sure nations with out quarantining on return, Sturgeon referred to as the decision-making course of “shambolic.” Unlike Downing Street, she refused to permit unrestricted journey from Spain.
Another space of divergence has been over the difficulty of face coverings — Sturgeon made them necessary in retailers right here a full two weeks earlier than Downing Street adopted go well with with a related ordinance for England. Sturgeon’s tartan face masks has turn out to be a sartorial signature.
Johnson has not resisted masks with the zeal of US President Donald Trump, however he’s extra usually seen with out a face protecting, even indoors, than with one. His go to to Orkney drew a small protest; one man heckled, “Where’s your mask, Boris?”
Perception of energy
To an outsider (and in truth to many Brits), the division of energy within the UK will be complicated. Boris Johnson is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, however for the reason that late 1990s, a lot energy has been transferred to the UK’s constituent nations — a course of generally known as devolution.
This means many coverage choices regarding well being, schooling, and transportation for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are taken not in London, however in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. It has not been uncommon to see a grand coverage announcement emanating from Downing Street, solely to discover a postscript explaining that the rule solely applies to England.
“This is really the most significant time where devolution has been the most obvious to the ordinary citizens,” the pro-independence pollster Mark Diffley mentioned on a sometimes wet summer time day in Edinburgh.
That notion is obvious on the streets of Scotland’s capital. “London is too choppy, too changing its mind all the time, can’t make out what it wants to do,” mentioned Karen Miele, 58, from Edinburgh. “Does it want to help people? Does it want to put the economy first? Or does it just not care? Doesn’t know what it’s doing.”
Andrew MacDonald, 21 from Linlithgow, mentioned that his view of Sturgeon has “definitely gone up” over the course of the pandemic. “I think Nicola has done the right thing in trying to keep the politics out of it, and go with the science first and foremost throughout the whole thing,” he mentioned.
Despite this perceived divergence in method, Covid-19 outcomes — to date, at the least — haven’t been so dissimilar. In reality, the dying price in Scotland has truly been worse than in England. For each 100,000 folks, 77 in Scotland have died and had Covid-19 listed on their dying certificates, versus 72 in England.
“There are important differences in the approach, and also important differences in the public perception of the approach,” mentioned Linda Bauld, professor of public well being on the University of Edinburgh.
Boost for independence
The query for Sturgeon — and the worry for Johnson — is whether or not this constructive regard for her stewardship of the pandemic will switch into political help for the reason for Scottish independence, which stays the bedrock purpose of her Scottish National Party.
The final time Scots formally voted on independence, in 2014, “no” gained out by greater than 10 proportion factors. Much has since modified. In the 2015 UK normal election, the SNP went from six seats on the House of Commons in Westminster to 56 — taking all however three Scottish constituencies. Scots voted closely in opposition to Brexit in 2016.
The famend pollster John Curtice, of the University of Strathclyde, instructed the BBC on Thursday that help for independence has been surging for about and a yr, and is now going up even amongst these Scots who voted for Brexit.
The newest polling, Diffley mentioned, “would suggest that support for independence is higher than it has been for actually a really, really long time.”
That’s a drawback for Johnson, chief of a get together whose full title is the Conservative and Unionist Party. By visiting Scotland, Johnson hoped to underline the advantages to Scots of the 300-year-old union with England — he was eager to level out that it was the Treasury in London that saved 1000’s of Scottish jobs with its beneficiant furlough scheme, for instance.
The SNP had promised a new referendum on independence earlier than subsequent yr’s Scottish parliamentary elections. That’s now been put on maintain, due to the pandemic.
For SNP members of parliament like Tommy Sheppard, who represents Edinburgh East, it’s only a matter of time. “Those who wish to see Scotland become an independent country welcome as many trips as possible by Boris Johnson to Scotland, because every time he sets foot in Scotland, support for independence increases,” he mentioned.
The pandemic response, he believes, has opened many skeptical Scottish eyes to the actual variations between Scotland and England.
“They’re aware of that in the way they never were before. And they are perhaps open to the possibility of what an independent Scotland could do if it had the political power to act.”
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