The Pointless Pursuit of Scottish Independence

Two political parties have, since the last war, won half or more of the Scots electorate in a general election. One was the Scottish National Party, in 2015, with 50 per cent of the vote. The other—and this still occasions surprise—was the Conservative Party (which took in, then, the National Liberal-Unionists): in 1955 it won 50.1 per cent. The Conservatives lost support steadily until the late 1990s, when they seemed to settle at somewhere between 15 and 17 per cent of the vote.

Scotland became a Labour-dominated nation from the late 1950s to their last Westminster win in 2010. But Labour lost power quite suddenly: in 2010, the SNP had a mere six seats to Labour’s forty-one. In 2015, the SNP took fifty-six seats, to Labour’s one—a lonely figure, the result shared by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. It was as if a resurgent nationalism had said, “Here’s a fig leaf to cover your nakedness.”

Labour had never had a majority of Westminster votes in Scotland: they were closest to it, in the high 40 per cents, in the 1960s, when a new, ferociously bright cohort of university-educated leftists were beginning to stretch their political legs—Gordon Brown, Robin Cook and the slightly younger Alistair Darling at Edinburgh, George Robertson at Dundee, John Reid at Stirling, and the slightly older Donald Dewar at Glasgow. Such was the lustre of the Scots Labour Party (and the relative weakness of an English party decimated by Trotskyite entryism) that they took almost half the seats in Tony Blair’s first cabinet in 1997. The late English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton deprecated a cabinet made up largely (an exaggeration) of Scots, and lamented that in devolving power to the small “Celtic” nations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, “England has no place”.

Scottish Nationalist leaders no longer accuse the English of pederasty, or hope the Nazis win so that Scotland could gain independence from a defeated England, as some of their predecessors did. Both Alex Salmond, First Minister in the Scots parliament from 2007 to 2014, and Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister since 2014, occasionally say they like the English, rather in the way that you might say you like spaniels. But they use a proxy for the Ugly Englishman—Westminster government, London rule, and now Boris Johnson. Educated at Eton and Oxford, with much of his career—before becoming a two-term Mayor of London (2008 to 2016)—in jaunty right-wing journalism, with a baroque sense of humour owing little to the sharp wit preferred by Scots, and no real knowledge of Scotland or Scots sensitivities, he grates on most Scottish nerves.

The SNP rose steadily through the 2000s and 2010s—with one setback, in 2017, when the Conservative Party, led by a sparky, clever young woman called Ruth Davidson, put fire in Unionist bellies, and took the party up to near 29 per cent of the vote, and up from one to thirteen Westminster seats. But, disheartened by the Brexit vote, out of sympathy with Boris Johnson and with a young child, Davidson resigned the leadership in 2019. Her successor, Douglas Ross, in his late thirties, has little time to gain recognition and stamp his authority on the party.

Brexit seems to mean more than Boris. Sir John Curtice, the don of British pollsters now based in the University of Strathclyde, points to lines on a graph which shows support for Scottish independence shooting up after the 2016 vote for Brexit. Since the late 1980s, the SNP has made a fetish of the European Union, positing it as the union to be in, out of what Salmond used to delight in calling the “declining state” of Britain. It has encouraged a sentimental view of history, which has Scotland as a Europhile nation from medieval times—blurring over its shared (with England) hostility to a state whose Catholic rulers threatened the Protestantism which emerged in the sixteenth century to become the spiritual and ideological backbone of the nation. Now, the EU is the port in a storm unleashed by the English.

And thus, on every count, the SNP should win big in the election for the Scottish parliament in May. When it does, First Minister Sturgeon has promised she will introduce legislation in the Scots parliament to allow a referendum on independence—regardless of what Westminster says. Johnson has, in interviews, repeated his refusal—on one occasion suggesting a vote on independence shouldn’t be held till the 2050s (when he, and Sturgeon, would be in their eighties, and presumably no longer in their present posts). Much opinion—not just nationalist—believes a continued refusal, in the face of a nationalist majority in May, would be untenable. With opinion polls showing a majority for independence and with Ruth Davidson’s view of Brexit and Johnson common in Scotland, it seems to many that the nationalists’ time has come—and that they will succeed in their century-long mission to break up Britain.

And yet. On the day I write this—February 1:

• Neil Mackay, a nationalist-inclined col­umnist on Glasgow’s upmarket daily, the Herald, says that the country is being led to secession by “a party rotting from the inside out”.
• An SNP member of the Westminster Parliament, Joanna Cherry, a prominent lawyer and a consistent opponent of Sturgeon, was dropped from the party’s front bench team.
• Figures published by the NHS show that Scotland is bottom of all UK regions in administering the Covid vaccine.

Is this evidence of Mackay’s “rotting inside” jibe? In part it is. The SNP is increasingly riven by combat between Sturgeon and Salmond, her predecessor and one-time mentor (whose deputy she was). It is bitter and, unlike other political feuds within parties (such as between Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher, or Tony Blair and Gordon Brown) it is more than rivalry and resentment at loss of place. Salmond accuses Sturgeon of plotting with others, including senior civil servants, to defame him: he suspects she has used complaints of sexual assault by ten women, all SNP officials or civil servants, as a means of ridding herself of a thorn in her side. If so, she failed: Salmond was found not guilty on all thirteen counts against him, including attempted rape. More materially for her, he has accused her of deliberately misleading parliament: normally, if proven, a resigning issue.

The combat has spread through the party, with different groups backing Sturgeon or Salmond. The First Minister retains the advantage—both of office and of a public opinion of her efficiency which no amount of evidence has yet affected. But her grip on the party and her steady refusal to admit any wrong now show the Scots government as one determined to hide all traces of malfeasance. It is the arrogance of untrammelled power.

The most audacious instance of this is in the committee, headed by a senior SNP member of the Scottish parliament, appointed to shed light on the Salmond–Sturgeon feud. It has sat for some months, and still has to speak to the two principles. In a scathing attack on its work, the former law professor Alistair Bonnington—who taught Sturgeon when she was studying law at Glasgow University—accused the committee of deliberately failing to examine key evidence and of sitting only one afternoon a week in order to slow the process. His former student has, he writes, “made herculean efforts to frustrate the inquiry at every turn”. He continues, “I can’t help noticing that the present Scottish government seem to be very good at appointing ‘inquiries’, all of which reach the conclusion that the government has behaved splendidly throughout.”

Bonnington gives the example of an inquiry it made into the spread of Covid in Scottish care homes by a release of Covid-infected patients back to the homes—widely seen as a fatal disaster for many of the aged residents, and worse than the situation in English homes, which was bad enough. He writes that “the inquiry concluded that it was impossible to say that these patients were the cause of the spread of Covid within these homes. So it must all have been a coincidence. Who would have thought that? The Scottish government off the hook yet again.”

Bonnington believes that the senior civil servants who advise Sturgeon, and who, when called by the committee, claimed lack of memory on the details, showed “that people in very senior positions are advancing at best amnesia and at worst idiocy as explanations for their failure to tell the whole truth”, which “makes one wonder if we have in Scotland a ‘team of total diddies’ at the top”. By the beginning of February, the issue descended into farce: Peter Murrell, chief executive of the SNP and Sturgeon’s husband, was called back by the committee of inquiry, but refused to come, pleading work commitments. The Labour Party representative on the SNP-dominated committee, Jackie Baillie, asked for an investigation into Murrell’s previous evidence, and whether he had perjured himself. The Conservative representative, Murdo Fraser, said Murrell’s evidence had been “littered with contradictory statements”. Murrell has made one thing clear, however: his refusal to appear again is a message from the top—we don’t care.

The parliamentary committees of the Scots parliament are notorious for their lack of interest in questioning ministers. The Deputy First Minister, John Swinney, who is also the education minister, presides over a woefully underperforming public education service—this was obvious long before the pandemic struck—but counters criticism by accusing his critics of running down hard-working Scots teachers. He remains education minister.

Sturgeon, in having Joanna Cherry sacked, has transformed a critic into an open enemy. Cherry’s influence, coupled with a new intake of radical left-wingers on the party’s National Executive Committee (on which she also sits), was enough to force the party leadership to issue a statement that it will legislate to hold a referendum if it returns to power after the May vote.

This has given rise to a debate, of the kind Edinburgh’s legal establishment—who style themselves “WS”, for “Writers to the Signet”, a surviving medieval designation for those lawyers, then “writers”, licensed to invoke the authority of the monarch’s seal on documents—relish. The power to allow a referendum remains “reserved” to the UK government: but opinions can reasonably differ on whether or not a law passed in the Scottish parliament to enable a referendum is also reserved. However, there is some consensus on the referendum itself: whatever the courts may decide on a referendum bill, Westminster retains the right to allow, or forbid, the vote itself.

Little of all this has, as yet, changed the level of support for the SNP—though there is still three months before the election. Sturgeon has achieved a semi-mystical status: in focus groups organised by the pro-union group “These Islands”, the First Minister emerged as She Who Must Be Believed. When challenged by the focus groups’ convenor to consider the economic problems which a range of economists agree would arise if the country were to go independent, most of the focus group participants dismissed them as unionist propaganda or, if admitted, as problems to which “Nicola” would have the solution. On this evidence, support has mutated into faith.

Faith is increasingly the issue. Scotland is not Greece seeking independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s (with the Scots aristocrat Byron in support) or Ireland seeking independence from the British Empire in the 1920s (with the Ulster Scots in adamantine opposition). It is a modern, relatively rich nation, whose culture has survived, whose law, education and religion are in Scots hands and have been for over three centuries and which is the object of worried wooing by Westminster governments which give it an annual subsidy allowing it to offer a range of services—including university education—at no charge. To have Scots nationality and British citizenship has always seemed to me a remarkable bargain. The SNP has always described it as intolerable oppression: and in this faith seems to have secured a majority. For what remains of winter, and for all of spring, this clash of convictions will be tested.

John Lloyd, a Scot, has been a political journalist in Britain since the 1970s. He is the author of several books, most recently Should Auld Alliance Be Forgot: The Great Mistake of Scottish Independence (2020).