Boris Johnson’s Policies Have Bolstered Scotland’s Nationalists

Crossing into Scotland on the A1 highway after passing the English town of Berwick-upon-Tweed is a blink-and-you’d-miss-it moment. A sign says “Welcome to Scotland” in both English and Gaelic, and a couple of blue-and-white Scottish flags flap in the wind off the North Sea. A dilapidated burger van caters to anyone who decides to stop. While the 96-mile border may be largely invisible, this is a different country, where the legal and educational systems, health service, some taxation, and—most prominently as infections spread again—the handling of coronavirus all diverge from England’s. The two nations that joined together politically in 1707 to form Great Britain feel more like a socially distant couple still cohabiting in the same household.

Divisions over the approach to the pandemic have compounded four years of acrimony over leaving the European Union, which voters in Scotland opposed. The administration in Edinburgh, run by the pro-independence and anti-Brexit Scottish National Party, is agitating for another vote on breaking away from the rest of the U.K., something British Prime Minister Boris Johnson won’t countenance.