Why Labour politicians who think SNP and Reform are the same put the Union at risk – Joyce McMillan

Cast an eye around the troubled world beyond Scotland, though, and it is worth asking whether this Charlotte Square atmosphere of relative calm and continuity is entirely a bad thing, or indeed an unpopular one. Many, after all, must surely find it preferable to the current political circus at Westminster, where a Prime Minister elected with a landslide majority less than two years ago is now at high risk of being unseated by his own party, in a prolonged, painful and destabilising leadership battle.

There is, of course, little evidence that either of his current rivals – Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting – would or could do much better. A personalised battle for power, though, makes for more exciting headlines than the mere policy detail on which at least some Labour ministers have been working, these last two years; and so UK politics continues its apparently relentless journey towards the age of stupid, in which voters are encouraged to treat politics as a mere game-show, and to collude in its growing disempowerment as an actual means of restraining unaccountable power, redistributing wealth and opportunity, and guaranteeing basic protections and services.

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And unless the current Labour leadership row takes an unusually productive and thoughtful turn over the next few months, it seems increasingly likely that this descent into personality politics will lead, come 2028 or 2029, to the election of a Reform government led by Nigel Farage, a man whose very survival as a popular figure signals a major collapse of political reason and accountability in the UK, given the severe damage inflicted by his toxic Brexit project over the past decade.

And that prospect, of course, has led many supporters of the SNP – and also of the now dominant Plaid Cymru in Wales – to predict that the election of a Farage government could finally signal the end of the Union, as voters outside England rebel against being force-fed a far-right government which the vast majority of them view as damaging, dangerous or downright disgusting.

Now of course, such predictions of a traumatic break-point in the Union have been made before, and been proved wrong. In 2016, following the Brexit referendum, Nicola Sturgeon famously misjudged the public mood by trying to seize the moment as an opportunity for independence, when in fact the shock of the result made voters wary of further disruptive change; and the same might well be true of a Reform victory at Westminster. In the longer term, of course, UK political developments that fly in the face of Scottish public opinion do tend to strengthen the case for independence, and support for independence parties.

The effect, though, is not immediate; and if we also take into account the unpredictable future of support for Reform, and the equally unpredictable counter-response to Reform’s rise, then the lie of the land in, say, spring 2029 may be quite different from today. The British state does, after all, have a striking habit, when real danger threatens, of transforming itself just enough to survive, perhaps by finally forming some kind of united anti-Reform front to fight the next Westminster election.

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It’s a measure, though, of how far out of reach that positive shift currently looks that, even now, leading Labour figures – including Wes Streeting, this week – are still making speeches that equate the SNP and Plaid with Reform, as three reactionary nationalist parties whom only Labour can defeat.

Any reasonably well-informed observer of Scottish and Welsh politics could, of course, explain, to Streeting and others, how far this is from reality, and could point out that both the SNP and Plaid owe their current strong electoral position to their success, in recent years, in presenting themselves as more effective and committed centre-left parties than Labour itself.

They are not right-wing, not racist, not anti-immigration; they are also consistently internationalist and respectful of international law, not least as it applies to the current governments of Israel and Russia. They stand, in other words, slightly to the left of the current Labour party, as they have for the last 30 years, and to exclude them from any progressive alliance in these islands, simply because they believe in the sovereign self-government of their respective countries, is to demonstrate a profound misunderstanding that itself poses a long-term threat to the future of the Union.

The truth about the next five years in politics is that no one can predict what shocks await us, as the climate crisis deepens, brutal wars proliferate, and US politics seems on a rollercoaster to catastrophe. What’s increasingly clear, though, is that if the British state does succeed in adapting to survive, that process must eventually involve a massive shift, particularly in the Labour party, away from the old-fashioned unionism that reaches for the smelling salts at the very mention of Scottish or Welsh sovereignty, and seeks to ostracise all who support those movements as right-wing xenophobes.

The Green party in England and Wales has already left that kind of union politics behind, and is looking forward to new models of connection and co-operation for the nations of these islands. And unless the Labour party begins to embrace that change, and to treat the new centre-left politics of Scotland and Wales with more understanding and respect, it will find itself not only unable to lead the fightback against the far-right in these islands, but actively obstructing it, by refusing the alliances that should be at its heart.