Scottish nationalism and the politics of patience

PATIENCE IS A virtue underrated in politics. The business has always been full of young men and women in a hurry, who run even faster these days thanks to the 24-hour news cycle. Yet many of its giants played a long game. Disraeli did not lead the Conservative Party to victory until he was 69. Big political ideas often take time to mature. Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher both rode to greatness on the back of theories which, a generation before, had been regarded as bonkers.

The best example of the politics of patience is also the issue that has done most to shape modern British politics. The architects of the European Union paid little attention to the ebb and flow of day-to-day politics. They thought in terms of centuries rather than the daily news cycle—hence all those references to Charlemagne and Erasmus—and refused to take “no” for an answer if voters disagreed. The British Eurosceptics, ridiculed for decades by the country’s ruling class, had a similar long-term vision, seeing everything refracted through the European lens. That allowed them to ignore Brexit’s economic consequences. On a five-year time-scale, disrupting firms’ supply-chains matters. On a 500-year scale, it will fade into the mists of history.