The campaign for Scottish independence is at an impasse. Humza Yousaf used the SNP’s conference in Dundee to set out his party’s latest strategy for achieving statehood for Scotland. That strategy isn’t all that different from what the party faithful has heard before: keep winning elections, keep up the pressure on Westminster, and sooner or later something will happen.
The problem with this tartan Micawberism is that something has been going to happen for rather a long time. Here is a list, by no means exhaustive, of events that were supposed to shift the dial on independence: the SNP’s commanding wins in the 2015 and 2019 general elections; its victories at Holyrood in 2016 and 2021; the UK’s vote for Brexit; the arrival of Boris Johnson in No. 10; the pandemic; partygate; the cost-of-living crisis; the decision to block SNP gender reforms.
Because UK Labour has very little to say to Scotland, it fills the silence with vague talk about further devolution of powers or other political jiggery-pokery
Certainly, the polling has fluctuated over time. In the first year of the pandemic, Yes held a consistent lead in the polls but fell back in 2021 and has struggled to re-establish majority support ever since. Even so, public support for secession remains just shy of 50 per cent and only one poll in the last 12 months has put the Yes vote on less than the 45 per cent it recorded in the 2014 referendum. After the worst six months since the SNP came to power at Holyrood 16 years ago, its principal policy enjoys the backing of almost half of Scottish voters.
The problem is Westminster. So far, it has proved a stubborn bulwark against Scottish separatism. Last November, the Supreme Court confirmed that Holyrood could not lawfully hold an independence referendum without Westminster’s permission. Since then, the UK government has flexed its political muscles, denying Royal Assent to Nicola Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill, refusing to play ball with Holyrood’s deposit return scheme, and banning SNP ministers from meeting foreign officials without a UK civil servant present. The Times reports that the latter policy has caused the European Commission to shoot down Yousaf’s plans to appoint a Scottish envoy to negotiate EU membership for a future independent Scotland.
I’ve written my Scottish Daily Mail column this week on why Unionists shouldn’t become too complacent about this situation. Political, cultural and demographic trends pose serious challenges to the constitutional status quo. But the flip side is that, even if the independence question isn’t as settled as Unionists tell themselves, the SNP has to show that it is capable of moving its cause forward. That might seem unfair given the UK state’s refusal to budge but a) politics isn’t fair and b) the point of a nationalist party is to make the UK state budge. You can’t be the ‘vote here for independence’ party if supporters keep voting here but you make no progress on independence.
Yousaf’s strategy — win elections, ramp up pressure, make preparations — may be insufficient but it’s not wrong as far as it goes. These are all necessary components; they just don’t get the national cause beyond the point where Sturgeon left it. As I’ve noted before, demographics, cultural shifts and changing attitudes all stack up on the pro-independence side. Again, though, if you’re observing trends and waiting to see their electoral impact, you’re a political scientist, not a political leader. Yousaf needs to identify opportunities and exploit them.
An obvious one, to my mind, is the next general election. On current polling, we are heading for a Labour government. The conventional wisdom is that this is bad for the SNP because it lessens the urgency of independence and pulls undecideds and soft Noes back from the brink of voting Yes. There is probably some truth to this but politics is about more than public opinion, it’s also about power and institutions and how you use them. The SNP has demonstrated this amply since 2007, when it took a devolved parliament intended to lock in Labour’s Scottish fiefdom and turned it into a command centre for redrawing the electoral map and advancing the cause of independence.
Almost immediately after coming to power, the SNP unilaterally renamed the Scottish executive ‘the Scottish government’, elevating the apparatus of legislative devolution to a rival seat of power to that in Westminster. So effective was this rebranding exercise that the Tory government changed the law to retroactively approve the new name. This was the template and reuse yielded measurable gains for the SNP as it turned the political settlement Labour had intended to ‘kill nationalism stone dead’ into a proto-state waging constitutional battle against Westminster. By pushing the perimeters of the devolution settlement — and sometimes going further still — the Scottish government has been able to project itself as a sovereign-state-in-waiting. The confidence this telegraphs not only makes independence appear less risky and more straightforward than it would be, it probably encourages a certain national confidence in the electorate.
To achieve independence, the SNP needs to enhance devolution. The Tories have spent half of the last 13 years finding yet more Westminster powers to hand to the SNP but have seemingly come to a realisation that strengthening your enemy is very unwise, actually. Labour, however, remains devoted to the religion of devolutionism. Almost every senior Labour figure at Westminster speaks about Scotland primarily in constitutional terms, another example of the SNP’s success in reframing the terms of the debate.
Because UK Labour has very little to say to Scotland, it fills the silence with vague talk about further devolution of powers or other political jiggery-pokery. Whispering in Sir Keir Starmer’s ear on these matters is Gordon Brown, a man whose drive for constitutional experimentation is invincible to all evidence of its abject failure. As for Scottish Labour, ever-expanding devolution is the closest thing the party has to an unshakeable creed.
If it handles these circumstances carefully, the SNP can turn them to its advantage. The readiest means of doing so would be a strategy of constitutional bifurcation, dividing its agenda into long- and short-term goals. The long-term goal is obviously independence and it should still be pursued but the party should do so quietly, focusing its efforts on establishing a common, united position on all the key issues. The short-term goal should be to acquire more powers for the Scottish parliament and Scottish government.
This would represent not so much a reinvention of the SNP as a re-emphasis, leading the charge for more devolution in such a way that Labour would have no choice but to give its backing. The SNP could demand the right for the Scottish government to enter into international agreements and join international bodies. It could call for devolution of the job centre network and a right to be consulted on the UK minimum wage. It could urge a consultation on raising the limits on Holyrood’s capital borrowing. Labour could not be seen to oppose any of these measures, not least because all of them are lifted from Gordon Brown’s Commission on the UK’s Future.
The more powers it gains for Holyrood, the greater the opportunities for the SNP to use its institution — and, at this point, Holyrood is its institution — to further the cause of independence. A strategy of two SNPs, one that speaks about independence to itself and devolution to the public, could get the party around its current impasse.
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