THE FIRST OF MAY beheld the three-hundredth anniversary of Great Britain but the Scottish National Party are planning to ensure the United Kingdom’s days are numbered. Labour politicians across the country are fearful these days, but that fear is most palpable to the north of the Tweed, where on May 3, two days after the anniversary, voters made the SNP the largest single party in the Scottish parliament; just one seat more than Labour. The result: control of the Scottish Executive hangs in the balance while the five parties now represented in the parliament squabble over who will sit in Bute House, the official residence of Scotland’s First Minister. One could be forgiven for thinking that the church bells of Edinburgh toll for Britain.

Many Englishmen find the position of the SNP mystifying. Scotland holds a somewhat privileged position within Great Britain. The Scottish Parliament has the final say over some vital devolved matters, such as education, health, agriculture, and the administration of justice. In England however, these matters remain the business of the Parliament at Westminster. This has led to the anomaly known as the West Lothian Question, first posed by Tom Dalyell, whereby Scottish MPs have the right to vote on purely English matters.

For example, Scottish Labour MPs provided the Government’s margin of victory in the passage of the Higher Education Bill in 2004. Along with their Welsh Labour colleagues, they were also largely responsible for seeing the Government home on the foundation hospitals vote in 2003. The remarkable sight of the Government making law in England, contrary to the wishes of a majority of English MPs, was hardly likely to convince the neutral observer that it is the Scots who are “oppressed”.

Far from being the disenfranchised serfs to an English super-majority, the Scots and the Welsh are political kingmakers in Britain. Michael Howard’s Conservatives won a slight lead of 60,000 more votes in the popular vote in England over the Labour Party at the last general election in 2005. The results were far more one-sided in Scotland and Wales — out of 99 Parliamentary seats in Scotland and Wales, the two countries sent 70 Labour MPs to Westminster. If there is a Labour Government in Britain today, it is because the Scots and the Welsh wanted one.

By and large, the Scots have been rewarded for their loyalty to Labour. The retention of the Barnett formula, a mechanism which automatically adjusts some areas of British public spending, directs more public money per capita to Scotland than to England. The direct result of this is that the Scottish Parliament has been able to introduce free personal and nursing care for elderly people living in residential homes, while no such provision exists for the elderly in England or Wales.

Under such favourable circumstances relative to the English, it seems difficult to understand why so many Scots have signalled their intentions to vote for a party whose stated reason for existence is to engineer the United Kingdom’s demise. Two polls in the last fortnight, courtesy of YouGov and Populus, place the projected Nationalist share of the vote at 37% and 34%, respectively. If the SNP does win a little over a third of the vote that would represent a startling increase over the 23.8% won in the last set of Scottish Parliament elections in 2003. Long standing issues such as the true ownership of the revenues of the North Sea oil fields, for example, hardly seem likely to account for the renaissance of Scottish nationalism.

The Scottish National Party has fought an energetic campaign, under the capable stewardship of Alex Salmond. The party has cleverly given on-the-fence voters (many of whom may vote SNP merely as a vehicle for kicking Labour out of government) the reassurance that a referendum on Scottish independence would not be the first item on the agenda once the SNP are in power. On the other hand, Mr. Salmond has once again reassured the core of the Nationalist movement of his commitment to the dissolution of Britain by insisting that a referendum does take place.

The continuing inability of the Conservatives to mount any sort of substantial recovery in Scotland has left Mr. Salmond with ample room to manoeuvre in order to woo voters disaffected with Jack McConnell’s Labour coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Useful endorsements from prominent Scottish businessmen such as Sir Tom Farmer, founder of the Kwik-fit car maintenance company, and former Royal Bank of Scotland chairman, Sir George Mathewson, have been doubly effective in presenting a moderate image thanks to abject Tory weakness. Even prominent social conservatives, such as millionaire Brian Souter, have abandoned the Tories and signed up as backers of the traditionally centre-left SNP. Souter, who led the unsuccessful campaign fighting the repeal of Section 28, the law prohibiting the promotion of homosexuality in schools, recently donated £500,000 to the party coffers.

But perhaps most importantly, the party has tried hard to demonstrate credibility as a party of the centre left in the post-devolution environment. In the light of Labour’s moves towards privatisation of some areas of the public services, the highly unpopular military intervention in Iraq, and widespread allegations of corruption reaching all the way up to Downing Street itself, the SNP has responded to the public’s desire for a purer left-leaning party in Scotland. It is no coincidence that the SNP received its first donation from a trade union this month. Other unions will surely follow the Fire Brigades’ Union in dissolving their historic ties with Labour, in a slow but damning repudiation of Blairism north of the border.

It is certainly more cheery to conclude that the resurgence of the Scottish Nationalists can be attributed to justified disillusion with Mr. Blair rather than with Great Britain. Nobody would blame the Scots for wanting to give Labour a good kicking. However, Britannia cannot rest easy while the SNP continues riding high in the polls. There is a certain danger that the loud voice of Scottish Nationalism might wake the large beast of English nationalism–a prospect which should keep Britannia up at night for fear of her survival.