On the face of it, Thursday’s elections were grim news for the Union. With the nationalists emerging as the largest party in Wales for the first time ever, all three devolved parliaments in Edinburgh, Belfast and now Cardiff are in the grip of separatists – politicians whose primary purpose is to break up the United Kingdom.
Michelle O’Neill was among the first to appreciate its significance. She’s First Minister of Northern Ireland, where she’s also vice-president of Sinn Fein, once the political wing of the IRA, still committed to ripping the six counties out of Britain to create a United Ireland.
‘Historic change is happening,’ she claimed in a congratulatory message to the Welsh and Scottish nationalists. She welcomed ‘three nationalist, pro-independence First Ministers across these islands’ for the first time ever, a sign that ‘the demand for independence is growing’. The Union, she concluded, ‘was cracking at the seams’.
Well, maybe. Or maybe O’Neill just needs all the new separatist allies she can muster. After all, Sinn Fein has been the largest party in the Northern Ireland assembly since 2022. She’s been First Minister since 2024. Since when, the cause of a United Ireland has gone precisely nowhere.
Sinn Fein still goes through the motions of calling for it. But you get the impression its heart is not quite in it. Northern Ireland polls still show roughly a 60:40 split against a United Ireland, which is where public opinion was when I was a young Belfast correspondent during the height of the Troubles in the early 1970s. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Nor are separatist successes on Thursday quite the harbinger of the break-up of the UK she would have us believe. In neither Scotland nor Wales did the nationalists win an overall majority, either in terms of share of the vote or seats in the devolved parliaments.
The SNP, in power since 2007, did win a remarkable fifth term in power. But it was hardly a rousing cry for independence, though the SNP will claim it to be so.
The figures don’t bear that out. The SNP won only 33 per cent of the vote, down 11 points from the last Scottish Parliament elections in 2021. Far short of the plus-50 per cent the Nats would need to win a second independence referendum.
SNP leader John Swinney has reiterated calls for Scottish independence after his party won a fifth term in power
Plaid Cymru leader Rhun ap Iorwerth with newly elected members of the Senedd, which they now control for the first time in their history
Even if you add in the vote share of the hard-Left, pro-independence Greens, the separatist vote comes to only 41 per cent, down nine points on 2021. So it’s hard to argue there’s anything like a growing momentum behind independence.
Yes, that combined 41 per cent share gives the SNP and the Greens a combined 57 per cent of the seats in the Scottish Parliament. The Scottish voting system is meant to be proportional but clearly isn’t. But even former first minister Nicola Sturgeon admitted years ago that an SNP-Green majority of seats was not a strong enough basis for demanding another referendum. Westminster will have no trouble batting such demands away when, inevitably, they emanate from Edinburgh.
There is even less prospect of a referendum on Welsh independence. The nationalists in Cardiff are six seats short of an overall majority. They will either have to form a minority government or a coalition with the despised Welsh Labour Party, which went down in historic flames on Thursday. Neither is a firm enough foundation to promote separation, which probably explains why the Welsh nationalists don’t talk about it much.
Nor do the Welsh or Scottish people, despite the obsessions of their dominant nationalist nomenklatura. Every poll in Scotland showing the separatists in with a shout in a second referendum is touted to the hills. What is almost never discussed is the mood of the people.
A YouGov poll in the run-up to Thursday’s elections showed that a mere 14 per cent of Scots regarded independence as the most important issue versus 55 per cent for the economy (which is languishing), 45 per cent for the NHS (waiting lists are even longer north of the border), 33 per cent for immigration (even though not many migrants want to go to Scotland) and 20 per cent each for housing and education (the SNP’s record in both is appalling).
Another poll found that even among those likely to vote SNP on Thursday, independence was ranked only fourth in importance. It doesn’t rank at all in Wales.
YouGov recently asked Welsh voters to list the issues the next Welsh government should prioritise. Independence didn’t even appear on it. Even among Welsh nationalist voters, only 15 per cent said it was their main priority.
So perhaps the Union is rather more secure than its detractors would have us believe, those eagerly writing its obituaries somewhat premature.
There remains the mystery of why, given the lack of enthusiasm for independence and its miserable record in power, Scots keep returning an SNP government.
Part of the reason is that the pro-Union vote is split across four parties (Labour, Tory, Lib Dem and Reform) whereas the pro-separatist vote is concentrated on the SNP, with the Greens having a walk-on part.
The rise of Reform in Scotland has made that worse. Stephen Flynn, the leader of the SNP in Westminster, is now also a member of the Scottish Parliament for Aberdeen Deeside and North Kincardine because Reform split the anti-SNP vote – otherwise the Tories would have won the seat and he would have gone down to embarrassing defeat.
But that’s not the whole story. The Scottish nationalists (like the Welsh nationalists) capitalise on the Leftist, collectivist mindset that dominates the local political culture. No amount of failure or misery can seem to shake the people from its grip. No party espousing pro-market, pro-enterprise, pro-wealth creation policies can seem to capture their attention.
Scotland has the highest taxes in the UK, the state accounts for over 50 per cent of GDP, public spending is 20 per cent higher per capita than the UK average – socialism in action, you might say – yet it endures some of the poorest public services and is scarred by some of the worst urban squalor in Europe. The same is even truer of Wales.
Devolution has done neither Scotland nor Wales any favours. The Union endures but the high-tech dynamism of the 21st century is passing both by. Both are condemned to further social decline and economic irrelevance.
At some stage in the future a desperate minority Labour government in Westminster might agree to a second referendum as it tries to spatchcock together a Left-wing coalition that requires SNP support. But, for now, that is a far-fetched possibility.
Westminster will safely ignore calls for a second Scottish referendum and pay no political penalty. The Union will endure. But so will the decline of Scotland and Wales.
That, of course, is not the fault of the Union, which keeps both afloat with massive subsidies. It is the fault of the people themselves who keep on voting for parties guaranteed to deepen their social and economic misery.
Nothing will really change – Union or no Union – until that mindset is broken.
