Controlling Our Borders

The Home Secretary's blithe admission that the Home Office had failed to control our borders ought to have resulted in her resignation, along with those of the rest of her Ministerial team and of all of her Department's senior civil servants. But Suella Braverman is untouchable, as the darling of what is in fact only a Hard Right rump, too small to defeat the Government even in alliance with a united Opposition that would itself be most unlikely.

Yet a stroke of this ridiculous person's pen is enough to revoke the British citizenship of anyone whom she thought ought to be eligible for another nationality. If Scotland were to become independent, then five million people born there but living elsewhere in the United Kingdom would find themselves in that position, along with many, many millions of us who were of Scottish descent without ever having lived there.

What if Scotland were to introduce something like the American requirement to file a tax return in order to retain citizenship while living abroad? Andrew Robertson has captained the Scottish national football team 38 times since 2014, most recently last Wednesday. He plays for Liverpool. He would have no vote in a referendum on Scottish independence, yet a Yes vote might place him under a fiscal obligation.

The big electoral losers from Scottish independence would be the Conservatives. This is not new. Mostly on sectarian grounds, Scotland was regarded as "a Tory heartland" until the 1960s, and the Conservatives controlled Glasgow City Council into the 1970s. On 1950s Election Nights, Labour activists assumed that they had won, "But then the results came in from Scotland."

In 1979, it was the SNP that tabled a Motion of No Confidence in the Labour Government of the day. That passed by one vote, resulting in the General Election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power with an overall majority of 43, including 22 MPs from Scotland. Scotland provided Thatcher's majority precisely, at an Election that had effectively been called by the SNP, whereas no Labour Government has ever depended on Scotland for its majority.

In 1992 and in 2017, only Scotland recorded a net gain in Conservative seats, and in 2017 that was a very large net gain, when the Conservatives took 12 seats from the SNP, thereby enabling Theresa May to remain Prime Minister, as would not otherwise have been arithmetically possible even with the support of the DUP. Thank or blame Scotland for that fact that Thatcher became Prime Minister, and thank or blame Scotland for that fact that Jeremy Corbyn never did.

The Conservatives lost seven of those seats back to the SNP in 2019, but by tiny margins. And they retained five, plus the one that they had already had, giving them more seats than the Scottish Liberal Democrats and the remnant Scottish Labour Party put together. The only constituency in Scotland with a Labour MP is the one with Morningside in it, and that MP had been all ready to join Change UK until the very last moment. There are a lot of excellent arguments against Scottish independence. But "no Labour Governments ever" is not one of them, even if you particularly wanted a Labour Government. Nor is "everlasting Tory Government".

Brexit is in the process of being reversed specifically in order to suit the South of England. Singapore-on-Thames was tried for a few weeks, but even that was longer than anyone could possibly have endured it. There is more chance of Singapore-on-Leith, what with the SNP's leaked plan to charge wealthy people to use the NHS. Try suggesting that in South West Surrey. It would go down as well as Brexit did. That is why Brexit has never fully happened, and is now being reversed. The Conservatives are desperately trying to fight off the Liberal Democrats in the South by planning to re-join the Single Market and the Customs Union, and to join the Schengen Area into the bargain, but the scheme has leaked, so they are going to have to find a subtler way of going about it. They will, though. The South has risen, and this is the result.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.