BORIS Johnson came to Scotland last week: much trailed and talked about but certain to have no lasting effect. This was the week where a once-revered Scottish institution announced it had fallen on hard times. Once popular with Edinburgh ladies of a certain age and the middle-classes who believed that they had a refined taste and lifestyle; the similarities between Jenners department store on Princes Street, Edinburgh and the Scottish Tories, are many. This illustrates the long-term collapse of the institutions of Tory Unionism which once underpinned its appeal; given sustenance by church and religious belief, deference, working-class Toryism, and the Britain of Empire. In the 1950s seven of Glasgow’s 15 Westminster seats were Tory; it lost its last Tory MP in 1982. Edinburgh took longer to change but Labour’s seizing of the council in 1984 for the first time marked a sea change in the capital’s fortunes.
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(CNN) On January 2, 2020, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted that the following 12 months would amount to a fantastic year for Britain. Instead, a global pandemic and the political turmoil of Brexit have stretched the social fabric of the United Kingdom to ripping point.
The politics and constitutional arrangements between the four nations that make up the United Kingdom are a constant source of pain to any leader trying to reconcile their substantively different political and societal priorities.
But the two biggest peacetime crises faced by Britain one anticipated, and one that came out of thin air have combined to create a perfect storm of dissatisfaction with the status quo.