Andy Burnham's constitutional confusion has raised nationalist hopes in the devolved nations

The cause of Irish unification got an unexpected boost recently when Donald Trump said he’d “love to see it” during a trip to Dublin. “It’s gonna happen eventually – might as well happen now,” the US president said, albeit recognising the UK Government was not necessarily on the same page.

While not quite Joe Biden mixing up the Black and Tans with the All Blacks as he did on a trip to Ireland in 2023, Trump’s comments are an embarrassment for Downing Street which has worked hard to build diplomatic bridges with the White House. Trump repeated them on a visit to a golf tournament in Doonbeg later the same weekend but sidestepped a question on Scottish independence, saying he’d “save that for another day”. 

Trump, whose mother hailed from Lewis, may not be the celebrity endorsement John Swinney and the SNP are after right now, but constitutional change is certainly having a moment since the arrival of Andy Burnham in Number 10 with his talk of “rewiring Britain”.

Earlier this week, the SNP leader travelled to Cardiff to meet his Plaid Cymru counterpart Rhun ap Iorwerth and Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill to sign a memorandum of understanding about closer working relationships and to put Burnham on notice that “Westminster’s time is coming to an end”. 

The three nationalist parties said the UK Government should “prepare for, plan and facilitate constitutional change in each jurisdiction”. That’s despite Sinn Féin currently sharing power with the staunchly Unionist DUP and support for independence in Wales running at about 25 per cent.

Despite Swinney’s rhetoric about the former Manchester mayor being the “last prime minister of the United Kingdom”, the event was essentially an act of political theatre designed to put pressure on the PM ahead of a meeting with the three first ministers next month.

Burnham had done a good job of that himself last week when he got into a constitutional conundrum following a question from the SNP’s Chris Law about the Good Friday Agreement. Under the 1998 agreement, there’s a provision for a border poll if it appears the majority of people in Northern Ireland are in favour of Irish unification. When Law suggested Scotland would benefit from a similar arrangement, Burnham appeared to agree. 

In a week where Swinney and his government should have been talking about Scottish education and the latest Pisa study, which showed a continuing decline in reading and maths among school pupils, Burnham’s comments gave the first minister an opportunity to change the narrative and pivot to his favourite subject. He wrote to Burnham calling for an “understandable mechanism” so that both sides of the independence debate could “move forward constructively”. 

It was just a few months ago that Swinney went into the Holyrood election saying a majority for his party would give it a democratic mandate for a second referendum. When the SNP fell short of the goal it had set itself, the party’s leader seamlessly shifted his position to begin talking about a majority of independence-supporting MSPs as if that had been the true bellwether for constitutional change all along. 

We perhaps shouldn’t concern ourselves too much with Swinney’s preferred referendum date of 2031 seeing as he and his party miss almost every goal they set for themselves. But amid the deterioration of educational standards in Scotland’s schools, the worrying rise in violent and sexual crime, the limited progress in cutting NHS waiting times and a looming £5bn budget black hole, there should be more than enough to occupy the FM in the here and now.

But simply refusing the SNP the referendum it claims to want and telling it to get on with the day job hasn’t worked. That was Keir Starmer’s shtick at PMQs every time an inquiring SNP MP asked about the prospect of indyref2, and we all know how Labour fared at May’s Holyrood election. 

Burnham’s comments at PMQs initially appeared to be a break with what had gone before. They raised hopes not only in the SNP but in some sections of Scottish Labour that the government was adopting a more considered position, hopes that were dashed when the prime minister furiously backpedalled, writing to Swinney to let him know that “independence and a referendum are off limits” as they would distract from concerns such as growing the economy and tackling the cost of living. 

That fallback to the old Starmer position is a shame because while no one – probably not even John Swinney – believes a referendum will take place in the next five years, it would be helpful for us all to know there is a democratic principle in place for triggering another vote. Perhaps only then – and this may very well be wishful thinking – will we be able to move on to more pressing matters.