Everybody knows that Fairytale Of New York by the Pogues is the best Christmas pop song, but only a true pub bore can tell you that it never topped the Christmas charts. Nationwide, back in 1987, that honour went to the Pet Shop Boys, with their cover of Always On My Mind. Although in Scotland, the one we were all singing that year was Letter From America by the Proclaimers.
I thought of that song often during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. That refrain in the chorus — Lochaber no more, Sutherland no more — grew to sound like a premonition. Or a threat. Indeed, as the possibility of Scotland leaving the United Kingdom loomed, the one crumb of comfort I took was that “Lochaber No More” would be a fantastic headline for our editorial the next day. Although then, of course, it didn’t happen. Lochaber no more was no more.
Now Nicola Sturgeon is having another crack, but this time she’s being far more subtle about it. Her Christmas release could be called Fairytale of New Britain. The Scottish government’s proposals, published today, suggest that the Westminster government should support Scotland remaining in the single market, if not the EU, while the rest of the UK toddles off.
This is a well-judged approach, because it cuts right to the heart of the current Scottish political crisis. Which is not, please note, a Scottish nationalist political crisis, because they are gleefully crisis-free. As far as such people are concerned, Scotland has long been shackled to a dominant, southern neighbour with alien, right-wing politics. For them, Brexit is a thumping validation that they were right all along.
No, the crisis belongs to the rest of us, who truly thought they weren’t. Today, many Scots find themselves politically beached, as the Westminster tide swishes off in a wholly unforeseen direction. In a place where a majority voted both to remain in the UK and to remain in the EU, there’s an understandable sense of betrayal right across the political spectrum that only one of those things is happening.
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Yet, while the politics of Brexit might make independence far more desirable for many Scots, the facts of it simultaneously make it far less so. With everybody still in the EU, Scottish independence was at least only a leap into the dark. With the rest of the UK out of it, it would now be a leap off a very well-lit cliff, on to plainly visible and very spiky rocks below, involving a hard border and estrangement from the British economy. It would be an act of economic insanity.
“For Theresa May, I suspect, this will all just feel like one more Brexit headache
Nicola Sturgeon, perhaps unlike her predecessor, is wary of economic insanity. She has learnt the lesson of 2014, which is that at the ballot box, if only in Scotland, it does not sell. So her strategy is to be the sane one. This, of course, being helped in no small part by sanity being out of fashion, at least in Westminster. For a Unionist, all the old arguments of prudence, caution, and economic soundness can only work if the Scottish separatist alternative can be shown to be even more batshit doolally than the stuff British cabinet ministers come out with every other day.
Sturgeon’s plan might not be. Its details remain to be seen, and on past form it will include holes you could drive a Brexit bus through. Yet the notion of a single market settlement for Scotland alone is not inherently mad at all.
It would be theoretically possible, for example, to retain freedom of movement up north, without a big fence at Berwick-upon-Tweed. Yes, EU nationals could enter Scotland and go south, but so what? Unless we’re planning on terribly strict visa controls, tourists will be able to do that anyway. Freedom of movement isn’t really about movement, but jobs and benefits. Fudge some equivalent of the EU’s border agreement with Switzerland, and the mooted deal with Turkey, and it’s certainly conceivable. Throw in Liam Fox’s suggestion that the UK could remain in the EU customs union, and many economic objections dissolve too. If the Proclaimers could “take a look up the railtrack frae Miami tae Canada” and see a single trading area, then it shouldn’t be out of the question for the East Coast Main Line either.
Keen-eyed readers among you, however, will have noticed that Switzerland, Turkey, and indeed Canada are all independent nations. Scotland is not. The sort of constitutional devolution that would allow this kind of package would be well beyond the status quo, perhaps making Scotland about as British as Hong Kong used to be, and Sturgeon knows it. This means her plan would still be a dramatic severance, but circumstances allow it to be undersold. Between a future shackled to hard Brexit Britain, and the headlong rush into a brick wall that would be actual independence, it has the feel of a middle way. When the first minister threatens Indyref 2.0 if things don’t go her way, yes, the threat feels hollow. What, though, if this option ends up on the ballot too?
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For Theresa May, I suspect, this will all just feel like one more Brexit headache. Yet it would be a mistake to decide that the Scottish government is merely posturing, or that the Scottish problem will go away. “Maybe I didn’t love you . . .” crooned David Cameron last time, before putting the fearsome boot in. Neither option quite works any more. Sturgeon’s plan may be a fairytale, but it is a canny one. “Lochaber no more” may never fly, but “Lochaber as part of a semi-autonomous region in a fragmented quasi-federal Britain” suddenly seems alarmingly possible. Although it is quite hard to sing.