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Scots Wha Hae From The Tories Fled

Mr Maude’s officials have been secretly drawing up the outline of a ‘velvet divorce’ with the Scottish Conservatives, which would give the Scottish Tories a new name, a distinct identity, and make the Conservatives officially as well as in practice a party exclusively devoted to seeking power in England and Wales. However benignly it was […]

Mr Maude’s officials have been secretly drawing up the outline of a ‘velvet divorce’ with the Scottish Conservatives, which would give the Scottish Tories a new name, a distinct identity, and make the Conservatives officially as well as in practice a party exclusively devoted to seeking power in England and Wales. However benignly it was presented, such a split would, in effect, mean the final Tory retreat from Scotland, a historic fissure in British Conservatism, and the death of a party defined in many minds by its One Nation Unionism. ~Fraser Nelson

Viewed another way, this is the sane recognition of the futility of One Nation Unionism in a part of the UK that increasingly doesn’t believe itself to be part of One Nation (a phrase, incidentally, that has radically different connotations in Australia!).  What is more significant about this is that it might finally free the Tories to embrace the English nationalist identity that has become the logical thing for it to take on, as Mr. Nelson describes later in the article.  (Not that I expect the Cameroons, in their New Age, Mandela-worshipping trendiness, to understand this.)  So long as the Tories felt compelled to keep flogging the lost cause of the Union, they were to some degree prevented from effectively combatting the idiocy of “Cool Britannia” or the tiresome Europhilia of the ‘modernisers’ with a decisive appeal to English identity.  Political realities being what they are, the Tories already are effectively not much more than an Anglo-Welsh party right now–mostly Anglo and southern Anglo at that.  If Scotland should ever become independent, it will no longer matter whether there are many Tories beyond the Firth of Forth anyway.  If Scotland remains in the Union (this is the year of the rather unremarked tricentennial of that particular misfortune), whatever happens to the Scottish Tories will not be much worse than what has already been happening and might be better.

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