Michael Gove has attacked plans for a fresh Scottish independence referendum as a “momentous distraction” from the critical work of recovering from the coronavirus crisis facing all the UK’s governments. The Cabinet Office minister said the Scottish and UK governments should be working collectively to rebuild the economy and revitalise schools, as he sought to soften the Conservatives’ tarnished image in Scotland. “We want to be part of a cooperative effort across the whole of the UK and critically we also want to be part of that effort to make sure we can protect jobs and livelihoods,” Gove told reporters during a visit to Glasgow. “We’ve been clear that the most important thing is to concentrate on our health recovery and our economic recovery. It seems to me talk of an independence referendum at the moment is just a momentous distraction from that.”
Gove revealed, however, that a manifesto promise in late 2019 to launch a UK-wide commission on the constitution and human rights, which would have considered further reform of the House of Lords, had been indefinitely postponed. The Tories told voters it would be launched last year, a pledge derailed by the Covid pandemic. Gove indicated there was currently little appetite for constitutional reform in Whitehall or the Tory party. “At this stage our focus is entirely on making sure that we can build back better; our focus is on moving towards a net zero economy; levelling up economic opportunity; providing people with jobs and skills and making sure all our public services are there for people,” he said. “That is the principal focus and I think people would consider it to be irresponsible or frivolous if we weren’t focused on all of those big issues and we want to work with people across the United Kingdom to make sure those challenges are front and centre.”
Gove was in Glasgow to launch a plan to shift 1,000 UK civil service jobs from London to Scotland: 500 Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office jobs are being moved to East Kilbride, to an existing base for the old Department for International Development, with a further 500 Cabinet Office posts moving to Glasgow. He said other Whitehall outposts were being created in Darlington, Birmingham and Leeds, with ministers due to make other redeployments from London in coming months. In a marked shift in rhetoric after months of Tory attacks on the Scottish government, Gove repeatedly stressed the UK government wanted to collaborate with ministers in Edinburgh. That suggests the Tories feel pressure to respond to repeated opinion polls showing low levels of public trust in the UK government among Scottish voters, and deep antipathy towards Boris Johnson. Nicola Sturgeon’s election campaign is likely to focus heavily on the economic damage caused by Brexit and Scotland’s comparatively lower death rate from Covid-19; the SNP’s popularity has been boosted significantly by the perception Sturgeon has shown more assured and confident leadership during the pandemic. Gove’s more conciliatory stance did not stop Douglas Ross, the Scottish Tory leader who hopes to win a seat in Holyrood in May’s election, from attacking the “rotten, festering” SNP government in his speech to the Scottish party’s spring conference. Ross claimed the SNP had been beset by “scandals, the sleaze, the secrecy”, which had come to a head in the feud between Sturgeon and her former mentor Alex Salmond. He claimed, wrongly, that the SNP was committed to holding an unlawful independence referendum, as he sought to bolster the Tory vote in May.