Johnson visiting Scotland won’t help the union.

The Prime Minister remains Indy’s biggest campaigning asset.

Another day, another nagging suspicion that Boris Johnson is an SNP asset, painstakingly designed to be so awful Scotland demands independence from this place by default. I’m obviously being glib, but you see the point.

Boris Johnson visits Scotland today. Never mind “don’t travel”, never mind Nicola Sturgeon diplomatically implying she didn’t want him to come during lockdown since it quite clearly sends the wrong messages, and never mind Johnson’s ratings in Scotland make the UK-wide ratings by the end of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership look positively encouraging by comparison.

Johnson is loathed in Scotland, and if he really thinks about it, if he’s really committed to saving the union, he should realise that the more he visits the more he’ll push up demand for Scottish independence. I can’t think of a single tactic to save the union that’s worse than sending Johnson for a visit.

Is the union beyond saving? I would say, not quite, but it’s heading that way more and more. The tectonic plates of Scottish politics are shifting in a direction so irreconcilable with the politics of Westminster (and more importantly, England) that it makes the split almost seem logical.
Scotland has been treated like shit by Tory governments time and time again, and ignored at best by Labour governments time and time again, this was obviously going to happen.

Boris Johnson should stay home. But his task of saving the union is looking more and more like a fool’s errand, particularly so long as he’s in government.