Burns night, and after
Adam Fergusson
Burns Night last week was a stirring time to be in the House of Commons. The Government was defeated three times in a row, making four in the week; and the Scotland Bill was left clinging to the ropes hardly less groggily than the Lord President himself. Consequently, the indignation voiced by devolutionist newspapers north of the Border ('Rigged referendum', proclaimed the Scotsman, and the Daily Record called Mr George Cunningham a Cockney) was palpably less synthetic and correspondingly more spoilt-childish than usual.
That frustrated fury, so very hard to discover outside a few newspaper offices and Party headquarters, no doubt explains why the new, rather attractive coinage, the `Burns Night Plot', refers to the combination of backbenchers on both sides of the House to place a not very high threshold on the proposed referendum, rather than to a much more reprehensible occurrence: the fact that government ministers, in the second case with the help of the SNP, had been Caught trying to cheat on the guillotine twice on the same day.
• Altogether, the morning after was an Inauspicious time for Lord Kilbrandon — he of the Report — to abandon his former, supposed judicial impartiality on these matters and launch a Vote Yes campaign (with the SNP present) in Edinburgh. Yet it wasn't Just the Thursday morning newspapers Which brought bad news to him. The same afternoon, the result of a reputable public Opinion poll (Fieldwork Scotland, employing standard quota sampling, embracing 1,000 adults in forty areas) was made Public, and it contained three remarkable findings.
The first was that, in a continuing trend since February, last year, those in Scotland Who would now vote Yes in a referendum have fallen from 55 per cent to 38, while those who would vote No have risen from 28 to 36 (the Don't Knows fluctuating accordingly). In other words, the gap between those with an opinion has closed to two points.
The second finding was that the number of Scots who want that essential objective of SNP policy, the break-upof the Union, has fallen from 28 per cent to 19, which is exactly half the number of the Yesses. About the third finding, which incidentally strongly confirms that the hard-core separatists would indeed vote Yes for the Bill along with the devolvers, I shall have something to say presently.
No one pretends that the antidevolutionaries are all No voters for the same reasons: their motives are as mixed as those on the other side, but not, it can be argued, `ulterior' in the sense that the SNP want the Assembly, openly confident that it will lead on to separation. Since any Yes vote will certainly embrace all who want, not limited devolution, but separation, the genuine devolutionaries, pious hopers and federalists alike, start with a vast in-built advantage.
Nor does one good poll make a summer. Yet a good trend helps enormously; and the real point is that the Noes now outnumber the genuine devolvers, as they outnumber the separatists, by almost two to one. If equity demands the subtraction of the separatist vote from the devolution vote — but since practicality dictates that a threeway choice of status quo, Bill or independence will not be offered — it looks as though the 40 per cent threshold, dead men and all, is if anything too moderate to meet the case.
The proponents of devolution — even those who occupy, or have occupied, the Opposition Front Bench — love telling us, especially the non-Scottish ones, about the overwhelming number of Scotsmen who want a greater say in their own affairs but don't want independence. Mr Russell Johnston, the MP for Inverness, rested on such a proposition the burden of that astonishing Second Reading speech in which he explained why none of the Liberal Party's former demands, from PR to taxing powers for the Assembly, no longer stood in the way of `the pact'. 'The great majority of Scots want self-government without separation from the United Kingdom,' he declared, `but if they are denied any change the frustration will be enormous'. But the poll suggests quite plainly that less than 20 per cent of the Scottish electorate admit to wanting 'self-government without separation'. Mr Russell Johnston's great majority over the Noes is already down to minus 17 per cent.
With that we can turn to the argument usually deployed by that scourge of nationalism, Mr Norman Buchan, MP for Renfrewshire West, to the effect that to deny Scotland her referendum will be to invite the same frustration which Mr Russell Johnston has anticipated. Mr Buchan admits he was wrong about that reaction last February, when he supported the guillotine that failed, but still fears to let Parliament do the job. Here is where the third notable finding of the new poll comes in.
All who said they would vote Yes —38 per cent — were then asked: 'If the Assembly is not set up, would you prefer a separate Scottish state or the present united parliament?' Among the 90 per cent with a view, 46 were in favour of the Union and 44 against — from which may be fairly deduced that the yes vote was split almost exactly in
half, again 19 per cent either way. That is
one answer to those who say, as the Scotsman threatened on Monday, that if devolu tin were to be taken away. ..some who presently support devolution or federalism I would be converted to belief in independence. There is no such evidence.
The jokers in the pack, the Don't Knows, remain. How the Bill should best die is debatable, and much debated. Should it fail in one or other House of Parliament, or somewhere in the Central Lobby? Or should it really be left to an electorate which is bored to tears by the subject and cannot possibly be expected to exercise an informed judgment on matters which the House of Commons itself has left largely unconsidered?
But the evidence is that, if the Assembly fails to materialise, four out of every five Scotsmen who have made up their minds on devolution would prefer to have the Union continue as before. This might at least per suade'the fainter hearts in the Commons that to dismiss the Bill at Third Reading would be both honourable and safe.
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