Boris’s Scottish Visit ....a shot in the arm for Indyref 2 !

On the 10 o’clock news, I’ve just watched Boris Johnston on his visit...er charm offensive (not)? to Scotland, which he was on today. He is apparently getting worried that Nicola Sturgeon’s handling of the COVID pandemic in Scotland has so much public support, that her approval rating has gone up significantly, whilst his has taken a bit of a nose dive for his handling of it in England. This is dangerous, and alarm bells have obviously begun ringing in Downing Street, because the latest polls show that a majority of people in Scotland now want independence, a figure that has been steadily rising since the Brexit vote, when the majority north of the border voted to stay in the EU, and since the lockdown in March of this year has picked up pace.

Boris has consistently said that he will not allow Scotland to have another referendum, something which is in the gift of the U.K. PM to grant or deny, but may be unwise to insist on denying the Scots that right to vote again on self determination, because the Scots are not called “thrawn” for no reason.

Anyway, today he came to tell the Scottish people how much better they were to be part of the UK during this current crisis, because the might of the UK Treasury was able to pay to furlough Scottish workers, and they should consider themselves lucky for that, and also they should be thankful that they were still part of the great British NHS, an all U.K. institution. He also announced the distribution of British treasury largesse to Scotland in the form of some investment grants.

The BBC then interviewed some people in Perth and asked what they made of his speech, and it was evident that the answer to that was “not a lot”! One manager at a distillery said of his speech, “we pay taxes here the same as any other part of the UK so why does Boris Johnston think we need to be grateful for getting the same benefits as England, and if we were independent we wouldn’t have to send that tax money to England in the first place, so we’d have it to spend on our own needs and requirements”. I think Boris’s visit may have just boosted Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP’s ratings a bit more, and made it even more likely that the Scots’ call for another referendum will be impossible to refuse.