Like an arthritic old tree in autumn, the Scottish National party is shedding its voters. It does this almost seasonally, a shrivel followed years later by another spring. And yet the SNP’s soul and cause, independence, isn’t shedding its supporters. Backing for that stays roughly where it’s been for a decade, at just under half (occasionally just over half) the poll samples. How does that make sense?
Scotland can seem an imperturbable land. Every year, the hills change colour from russet to green, as the geese end their loud argument, rise and head north. And yet vast things have happened suddenly here. Ten thousand years ago, the climate abruptly shot up by 9C in little over a century. Glaciers melted, trees appeared; deer, human beings, wolves and bears ventured back to a cold but habitable Caledonia. Two thousand years later, the coast of Norway collapsed into the sea (the “Storegga slide”), sending a mountainous tsunami roaring across to scour eastern Scotland and its terrified hunter-gatherers. Scottish politics in our time can seem dreary, pettily fractious. But when they do change, it’s precipitate. The old landscape is scoured clean of its previous ecology.
Over the past century, Liberal, Tory and then Labour power monopolies have vanished under Storeggan mind-changes by Scottish voters. Now the deluge is racing towards the SNP – but not towards believers that Scotland should be a sovereign European nation again. Pollsters always report that independence is “a low priority”, well down the list behind NHS reform, the cost of living, bad roads and dud ferries. But this is a misunderstanding. The idea of independence lives in a different place to what the BBC (in its most English accent) calls “bread and butter issues”.
An unassessable number of Scots who would never vote SNP have moments when they find themselves thinking: “Wouldn’t it be fine if we were just a normal wee nation again, alongside all the others?” Only to dismiss the thought as absurd, “divisive” or “crazy in times like these”. It’s like a tiny blue-white pellet lodged in the back of the brain. Normally inert – but when it lights up, Scotland’s history changes.
The SNP, a neurotically law-respecting and “civic” nationalist party, has also cuddled some nicely dressed illusions. For example, that by governing devolved Scotland well, they would persuade the electorate to take the next step into independence. But even if the SNP had passed that test (which the Scottish public doesn’t concede), where is there an example of a “provincial” administration whose success convinced its people to risk a further step into secession? Come to that, what nation ever chose independence because a careful weighing of its possible impact on pensions, interest rates and the price of imported duck soup came out positive? Things just don’t happen in that logical way. Instead, independence usually falls out of the sky. It’s dropped by some external crisis: war, revolution or imperial exhaustion.
The Poles fought for 123 years to regain free nationhood – but they won it in 1918 only because three partitioning empires had folded almost simultaneously. The same was true for other post-Versailles states. Some, such as Czechoslovakia, were almost spooked to find that the Habsburg empire had abandoned them. Ireland became free through miserable bloodshed and then civil war, while civil war and revolution devastated the new-born sovereignties of Finland and Hungary.
The dissolution of the British empire is now craftily presented as Westminster’s far-sighted mission, a plan to lead all those underdeveloped natives to civilised parliamentary democracy. The truth is that it was furious protest in most of those “possessions”, sometimes leading to years of brutal repression, that persuaded an unwilling, cash-strapped and increasingly weakened Britain to back out of empire. The decencies were preserved, of course. There would be an independence day with happy crowds, fireworks, a plumed governor or perhaps a royal, and the union jack wobbling slowly down the mast at midnight …
I am holding in my hand a postcard, almost 30 years old. It shows the Scotsman’s front page on “Independence Day”. An outburst of fireworks over Edinburgh; an expectant floodlight trained on the flagpole on the battlements of Edinburgh Castle. The card proclaims: “Now’s the hour: As 300 years of the Union ends, ‘a nation again takes its place in the world’”. But it’s just a publicity item, designed for STV to go with a 1996 “independence” documentary by George Rosie and Les Wilson, which was followed by a televised debate.
Since then, devolution, the return of a Scottish parliament and the 2014 independence referendum have laid out a new constitutional landscape. The “No” side narrowly won the 2014 referendum. But the “Yes” campaign, though it lost, turned out to have blown a transforming wind through Scotland’s grassroots; excited thousands gathered to hope, argue and demand (“Scotland Yes! But what sort of Scotland?”). One outcome was to lift independence from dream status to a practical, serious option for Scotland’s future. Another, following the “Yes” defeat, was an unexpected stampede to join the SNP. By 2019, the party had 125,000 members. Today, the leaves are falling; that total is about 70,000. Some have just given up on “politicians” and the SNP’s “failure to deliver”. Many others are shifting to Scottish Labour – but often carrying their faith in independence with them. They form a growing, unreliable crowd of nationalist squatters inside a leaky unionist building.
It’s very possible that the next Holyrood election (due in 2026, if not earlier) will end the SNP’s 17-year hegemony. The Scottish parliament could have a narrow unionist majority. Even if Humza Yousaf’s successor survived in government, his or her prospects would be bleak. The SNP leaders still believe that the Scottish public wants them to play by the rules. So they will keep on demanding London’s permission for another referendum, while any foreseeable British government will keep on refusing that permission. So stalemate … unless a far more impatient and radical nationalist formation emerges, pushing the SNP aside as Sinn Féin pushed the old Irish Home Rulers aside in 1918.
There’s no sign of that yet. Nevertheless, if a hard-line SNP leadership with a strong majority did emerge in the future, there are several ways in which it might provoke a head-on collision with London, a showdown that could rally public sympathy. Let’s call these strategies “As if” and (in parliamo Glesca) “Gonny no dae that!”.
“As if” means acting as if Scotland were already independent. It means marching ahead with legislation officially reserved to Westminster under the Scotland Acts and daring the UK government to intervene. The second strategy – Glaswegian defiance – would mean simply refusing to execute UK laws or orders that Holyrood thought morally or practically wrong for Scotland. Examples: refusing police protection for Home Office snatch vans driving from England to seize asylum seekers for deportation (see previous crowd actions in Glasgow and Edinburgh to block the vans and free their prisoners).
Another: to refuse to apply anti-trade union measures from the UK government, such as the strike-breaking Minimum Service Levels Act. Both these are already popular causes. Flat-out and sustained confrontation with the UK government over such laws could end in sanctions against Holyrood or even the suspension of the Scottish parliament; a provoked crisis, but one that could shift Scottish opinion irrevocably towards ending the union. However, there’s not the slightest sign in the SNP of the fearlessness such “illegal’’ behaviour would require. So the wish for independence will survive, even though the vehicle to carry it sits on the hard shoulder with flat tyres.
Why wish for it, anyway? There’s an enduring pull and an enduring push. The pull is that only with full powers to make law, negotiate and borrow can Scotland do the heavy lifting needed to tackle the legacies of intractable ill-health and a century of staggering underinvestment in all kinds of infrastructure. Independence within the EU could nerve a Scottish state to block the haemorrhage of economic control to London or to US hedge funds. That government might even dare to dismantle the toppling stacks of flabby, often pointless quangos and “authorities” which now suffocate effective decision-making in Scotland.
And the push? It’s the steady veering away of the UK – Tory or Labour – from standards valued in Scotland. Above all, it’s the integrity of the public sector, whether that is health, care, water or transport, which matters to this “statist” nation. It’s the gathering damage of Brexit, punishing a country that voted against it and which desperately needs European immigration to help its labour shortage and ageing demography. There’s a democratic problem, too. Ironically, by introducing democracy into the antique 1707 union, devolution showed why it no longer works. “Partnership” in a democratised union where 85% of the citizens belong to one member, England, can only be a fiction.
Then there’s the matter of England. London media imagine Scotnats hugging their hatred of the English. The truth is more wounding. The preoccupied Scots seldom think about the English at all. But they should. Whatever happens when independence floats back to the agenda, Scotland’s leaders must accept one basic fact: the relationship with England has and always will have a special and supreme intimacy. It will overshadow Scottish choices even if Scotland becomes a free republic inside the EU with a seat at the UN.
It’s true that England has its own identity crisis, now a spreading infection of authoritarian nativism and performative xenophobia. But English politics could be steadied by the shock and example of Scotland’s withdrawal from the union. It’s a narrow path. But a more genuine partnership waits at the end of it.
