Has Scotland gone yet?

David Curry

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LGC's columnist wonders whether Scotland and England have parted company.

I hadn't expected the announcement of Scottish independence to come in quite the way it did. I was in the south of France, standing under a gnarled old pine tree whose branches stretched over the waters of the Bay of Arcachon, a glass of rosé in my hand and no serious thought in my head beyond selecting the best moment to put the sardines on the barbecue when my French niece Ondine glided over.

Now when Ondine glides over you pay attention. Tall and blonde, if she were to glide across the Place Garibaldi in Bordeaux it would cause gridlock. Ondine looked at me and pronounced: "Uncle David, I see that Scotland is about to become independent."

To have such an agreeable piece of news conveyed by such a charming messenger made it seem churlish to suggest that the Glasgow East by-election might not have quite the portentous consequences imagined by my niece. Yet over the past couple of weeks I have begun to wonder whether Ondine isn't closer to the mark than many British commentators.

British newspapers, especially the Conservative trade press like The Telegraph , have been full of gloriously gossipy stories about the Labour leadership, especially the words or — even more significant, it appears — the silences of David Miliband and his co-conspirator and fellow north-east MP Alan Milburn .

Yet the real question to emerge from the Glasgow result is whether it really matters at all, other than in the very immediate short term, who is Labour leader . Is the Scottish Nationalist Party going to do to Labour in Britain what the Flemish nationalists did to traditional politics in Belgium, and the Northern League have done in Italy?

If Labour's Scottish heartlands cease to provide it with the hard core of its vote and its seats, what hope has it of future power as a UK government?

And will the Scottish National Party/Labour battle in Scotland make it even harder for the Tories to recover any ground in Scotland, other than through the courtesies of the list of candidates for the Scottish Parliament?

The arithmetic shows that Labour really needs its (heavily over-represented) Scottish base. At the last general election, when the Tories ran on a pretty narrow manifesto, they won the majority of the popular vote in England. The continued erosion of Labour's 'southern comfort' — its Blairite success in winning southern English middle-class votes — is causing panic among its MPs as David Cameron 's new Tory caravanserai pitches its tents right across the home counties and its raiding parties begin to find receptive natives in the north.
 
With the Liberal Democrats failing to find a distinctive voice in the face of the Tory advance — even the civil liberties battle cry is echoed by the Conservatives, and David Davis ' little adventure might help to keep it that way — Labour could be heading for some very meagre years indeed.

For David Cameron it is Catch 22. Alex Salmond , busy hollowing out Labour support in Scotland by appealing to old Labour philosophy, would love to face a Tory government in London. He would portray it as a government of aliens. David Cameron will be under pressure to address the infamous West Lothian question by reducing Scottish representation at Westminster, or reducing the power of Scottish MPs at it. These actions will, of course, undermine further Labour's claim to national relevance while furnishing Salmond with shed-loads of ammunition. English nationalism will certainly find no more enthusiastic champion than the Scottish first minister.

While history is full of turning points which failed to turn (and even fuller of ones which no one detected at the time) it is just possible that we are at the beginning of a fundamental re-making of British politics.

I suspect Ondine might have detected the zeitgeist under the gnarled old pine tree. Perhaps Alex should invite her for a glide through the Scottish Parliament; her prediction of Scottish independence might be premature, but she would bring the place to a stop.