A couple of reflections on this tweet by Joanna, which seems to me to distil two key planks of the nationalist case. https://twitter.com/joannaccherry/status/1299217064725487617

The central point made in the article is that there are many prosperous small nations in Europe and elsewhere with a population in the order of 5m. Why shouldn’t Scotland be one?

Similarly, Brexiters could point to prosperous countries both in Europe* and outside that are not in the EU. Why couldn’t the U.K. be one?

(*Yes of course I know about and ’s complex relationships with the EU - but that’s detail.)

In both cases, the intuition is powerful.

In the end, the complex economic arguments against the intuition in each case do often appear to boil down to “I wouldn’t start from here”*.

(*and yes, I know about and accept the basic economics of free trade and the single market - but they bounce off the observable reality that countries outside the EU can be prosperous.)

And no matter how much you play (and even win) games of “gotcha” with issues such as “what currency” or deficits or tariffs, they bounce off the intuition that “Country X seems prosperous. I can’t believe that Scotland (with all its talents and resources) couldn’t be the same.”

It seems to me that if unionists are going to win this argument, they have to win the political argument: the economic one (which will, given the intuition, be read as “it’ll all be a bit of a pain: but we can get through it”) can’t be enough.

That brings me to the second key point made by Joanna: that Scotland is tied into a Brexit Britain over which it has no control.

The power of that argument is that it harnesses the ingrained preference for the status quo: if Brexit Britain is a runaway train, getting off it, not staying in it, is the status quo.

And that is where the current Government’s Brexit policy has been so disastrous: no discernible attempt to win over Scotland or to adapt its policy to what is a consensus position in Scotland.

Add to that the increasingly frequent override of Holyrood objections to Brexit legislation: taking the velvet glove off the iron fist of unconstrained Westminster supremacy.

And finally the internal market white paper: which as I argued here, forces to join a game in which the UK govt is the strongest player, the umpire, and rules committee. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/white-paper-scotland-westminster-devolution-internal-market-eu

The “runaway train” argument therefore looks strong. What could be done by unionists to deal with it?

Fudges won’t work. The “Vow” (enhanced devolution) has gone as far as it can, and doesn’t address the root cause of the problem: unfettered Westminster sovereignty.

What is needed is a plan for a new constitutional settlement placed beyond the reach of Westminster.

But the current government is a mix of Tory distrust of constitutional change and a rather non-Tory hostility to any checks on its executive power and to accountability to Parliament or the courts.

So it is, I think, simply incapable of understanding, let alone taking, the radical constitutional steps needed to climb out of the hole the unionist argument is in: instead, the white paper and the Brexit policy suggest a government determined to keep digging.