Last month, Scottish First Minister John Swinney claimed that Andy Burnham would be the last prime minister of the UK. On current form, the Labour leader is doing his best to bring that about.

Burnham has acquired something of a reputation for marching blindly into one constitutional minefield after another. On his visit to Scotland on Friday to upstage the SNP conference in Aberdeen, Burnham was at it again, handing propaganda gifts to the nationalists.

He gave a reprise of his favorite soundbites about “good growth in every postcode” and the need for a devolution revolution, “taking power from Westminster”. Well, bring it on, say SNP politicians, who don’t like Westminster either. We want more powers devolved over borrowing, energy policy and defense, please.

The new non-divisive politics should be about “place before party”, the PM added today. Again, he’s only talking the nationalists’ language here, which is all about putting place first: Scotland, then the UK Labour Party.

And did Burnham seriously think that the Scottish Government was going to join hands with his “mission” to diminish its powers by handing them to deprived city regions? Either way, the SNP has got there first, with Swinney currently mired in the exacting process of redrawing council boundaries and slashing the number of Scottish health boards.

It is not going well. The First Minister is aiming to cut Scotland’s 32 councils to six — or maybe 10, as he doesn’t seem very clear. He has also talked of reducing 14 regional health boards to just two, for “efficiency”. Swinney’s reasoning is opaque. Public bodies, SNP councillors and trade unions are complaining about lack of consultation. Public service reform is not easy, and Burnham has handed the SNP a very convenient diversion from the task in his own backyard.

While the PM today ruled out a second referendum on Scottish independence, he still mused about the possibility of another Brexit vote. “Mr Burnham needs to explain to the people of Scotland,” said the SNP Economy Secretary Stephen Flynn today, “why it is legitimate to reopen the democratic question of Brexit but not legitimate to reopen the democratic question of Scottish independence.”

Last month, Burnham compared Scotland’s position to that of Sinn Féin under the Good Friday Agreement. “The situation is exactly the same,” he said, as far as a repeat referendum is concerned. SNP bosses could hardly believe their ears because, of course, the GFA provides for a referendum on the border. The Nats would have been thinking: what about a border poll for us?

Burnham seems to believe there should be a repeat referendum “if there is demand for it”, but also that another Scottish referendum is “off limits”. His musings on Europe only serve to revive all the grievances about Scotland being dragged out of the European Union on “English votes”. In the 2016 referendum, 62% of Scots voted against leaving the EU. Reopening the whole Brexit imbroglio is manna for the SNP, a party that has been having difficulty generating much interest in Indyref2.

According to a YouGov poll published on the eve of this week’s SNP conference, fewer than a fifth of Scots said that an independence referendum is a political priority, though Scotland remains fairly equally divided over whether there should be one in the longer term. Reigniting the Brexit wars also fuels the SNP’s claim that the 2014 referendum was fought on a false prospectus. Leading luminaries of the Better Together campaign, such as David Cameron and former Labour chancellor Alistair Darling, claimed during the independence referendum campaign that only a No vote would keep Scotland in the EU. In fact, voting No led to Scotland’s exit from the bloc — precisely what many Unionists thought they were voting to avoid.

Now here is Burnham saying, essentially, that this whole Brexit process was a mistake and needs to be reversed. Does he not understand the resonance of his words? Does he not realize that calling for devolution from Holyrood to local authorities only fuels demands for more fiscal responsibility for the Government? Perhaps the PM should stick to rearranging the desks in No. 10 North. He clearly doesn’t understand Scotland.

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Iain Macwhirter was political commentator for The Herald between 1999 and 2022, and is the author of Disunited Kingdom: How Westminster Won a Referendum But Lost Scotland. He was Rector of the University of Edinburgh from 2009-12.

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