Sunak takes the high road with Sturgeon meeting

Courteous, technocratic and perhaps a little more reserved than his predecessors, Rishi Sunak will almost certainly enjoy a more civilised if not cordial relationship with the first minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon. The Highlands setting may provide some inspiration, too (though the teetotal Sunak won’t be taking a dram). The omens are relatively good. They can do business with one another.

The pair both prefer facts to rhetoric, rarely lapse into Latin, and are well-mannered. It’s not a political marriage made in heaven, or even Gretna Green, but it’s bound to be a little more constructive. Boris Johnson privately loathed Sturgeon – “that bloody wee Jimmy Krankie woman” he’s reported to have called her – and she hated the way he abused his position, most damagingly over Partygate.

Liz Truss famously declared in her leadership campaign she would ignore the “attention seeker” Sturgeon, which went down well with her overwhelmingly southern English party membership but was a needlessly offensive snub to a supposed equal partner in the union. Scots Tories, somewhat beleaguered, must have winced at this stereotypical English arrogance. Truss couldn’t even be bothered to call Sturgeon and only bumped into her once, at a memorial service for the Queen. She won’t be missed in Bute House.

There’ll be plenty for Sunak and Sturgeon to discuss in their first set-piece summit (the pair also met at the British-Irish Council in Blackpool in November, where they enjoyed “cordial and constructive” discussions notwithstanding “profound political disagreements”).

With a shared taste for efficiency, they will probably not waste too much time rehearsing the well-worn arguments about another official referendum on Scottish independence. Instead, the agenda will be more immediate and practical, indeed prosaic.

Yes, we’re talking about freeports, virtually guaranteed to take the heat and passion out of any conference chamber. As a “Brexit dividend” and a hobbyhorse of Sunak, they don’t recommend themselves to the SNP, but a pragmatic approach on both sides means a joint announcement from the two governments on a pair of explicitly and uniquely Scottish “green freeports” at Cromarty Firth, near Inverness, and on the Firth of Forth, near Edinburgh. As with the ones in the rest of the UK, they’ll enjoy tax breaks and looser regulation but with a sustainable edge – a nod to Sturgeon’s partners in her quasi-coalition government, the Scottish Greens.

They might also be able to behave like grown-ups and have a serious discussion about the NHS crisis, free of the usual pointless point-scoring. More contentious is the UK government’s blocking of the new Scottish law on trans rights. An emotive topic at the best of times, it is now overlaid with the national issue, and the meaning of devolution. Again, there might be some pragmatic way to resolve the issue but it’s not easy to see. The UK is entitled under Section 35 of the Scotland Act 1998 to prevent royal assent being granted to Scottish bills where they involve a UK “reserved matter”. Parts of the new bill probably don’t, but other parts, most obviously where a trans person seeks to assert a changed identity elsewhere in the UK, are arguably for the UK as a whole to make practical. Part-legal, part-political the issues will probably take some time to resolve. It’s fair to note they can also be divisive in every part of the UK. Some sort of interim view at least will need to be taken by Sunak next week. On balance, deliberately provoking a culture war and challenging Scottish prerogatives would not be electorally advantageous to Sunak; but he also has to try and make the new Scottish self-identification procedure operable as far as possible in the rest of the UK.

As Sunak has said with considerable understatement: “Teamwork, absolute focus and collective effort will be required to deal with the shared challenges faced by people across the UK.” Still, it will make a change from going around in circles over indyref2.