Tearing apart the union

THIS ill-tempered, promiscuously focused election should be about the economy—and if the Conservatives pull off the win that their ratings on the issue seem to warrant, it may yet be. But future historians may prefer to recall the existential questions that accumulated in the campaign, little-noticed, like toxic mercury in a dolphin’s liver. Who wants to be British? What is Britain for? They will certainly marvel at a massacre of Scottish unionist MPs at the hands of the separatist Scottish National Party (SNP) which, assuming the polls are even half-right, is about to leave Britain’s 300-year-old, once swaggeringly successful, union of nations looking desperately enfeebled.

Politicians on all sides are talking on that theme but, a week before a general election, with such fevered partiality that the real issue of Britain’s future is being warped or ignored. The Conservatives, discreetly revelling in Schadenfreude, warn that Labour will be able to form a government only with support from a party dedicated to dismembering Britain. That is probably true. The SNP looks likely to become Britain’s third biggest party, with over 40 seats. And that would not be, as some in Labour mystifyingly imply, somehow the Tories’ fault for fulminating on the issue, thus driving Scots into the nationalists’ embrace. Yet nor, as Labour counters, would it make Scots much likelier to hive off than they were last September, when they voted by 55% to 45% to keep the union. And it would not in any way be “illegitimate”, as Theresa May, a senior Tory, argued this week, for Labour to use the SNP’s support to sustain a government.