The price of the SNP’s Brexit strategy

Nicola Sturgeon’s indication that SNP MPs will back a second vote on Brexit might be clever politics but it is likely to stir up further animosity among English voters towards the Scots. Consider the Future of England survey, which shows that 88 per cent of English Leave voters (and 52 per cent of all English voters) would accept the break-up of the UK so long as England leaves the EU. Some might suggest that the poll is further evidence of the Little Englander mentality that will ineluctably drive the Scots to secede from the Union. But does it instead reveal something else? Perhaps, it would seem, English voters are getting as tired as most Scots are of the SNP’s constitutional wrangling.

The 2014 independence referendum ended in defeat for the nationalists, but it was a close-run thing. The Scottish Labour-dominated Better Together campaign, unwilling to mobilise such bourgeois constructs as Flag and Family, foolishly concentrated almost exclusively on finance: you won’t have a currency, you won’t be in the EU any more, your economy will collapse.