Scotland — a short generation?
Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland, declared in 2014 that the referendum on Scotland’s independence — which her Scottish National Party (SNP) demanded and lost later that year — would be “once in a generation.” What a short generation.
As soon as the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in 2016 — a referendum in which the English voted “Leave” but the Scots voted “Remain” — she claimed that circumstances had changed enough to justify another independence referendum in Scotland. This time, she hoped, Scots would vote to leave the U.K., and rejoin the EU.
The right response from London would have been, “OK, best two out of three, then,” but Sturgeon would never have agreed. Independence is a one-way gate. No independence movement has ever promised that if people vote yes, and then later change their minds, they can have another referendum and go back to the previous arrangement.
Besides, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is only in office because he won the Brexit referendum in 2016. He fought tooth and nail to prevent a second referendum on leaving the EU (which opinion polls from mid2017 onwards consistently suggested would have gone against Brexit). He wouldn’t agree to such a thing for Scotland now.
Sturgeon described the SNP’S modest success in last week’s local elections (which included parliamentary elections in the quasi-federal “devolved”
countries of Scotland and Wales) as a “historic and extraordinary” event that justified a second referendum, but it only won one more seat than last time.
The SNP still falls short of a majority. It will again form a coalition or a voting alliance with the pro-independence Green Party in the Scottish parliament to form government. Johnson has declared his opposition to a second independence referendum and has the law on his side. Schedule 5, Part 1 of the Scotland Act, says only the entire U.K. parliament can decide to change the way the country is run.
The biggest obstacle to Sturgeon, however, is Scottish voters themselves. Recent opinion polls and last week’s vote all tell the same story: they are divided 50-50 on independence. That’s a modest improvement on the 55-45 split against independence in 2014, but hardly enough to justify another referendum
now.
Impending events are likely to make Scottish voters more doubtful about independence. The new “border” between the U.K. and the EU — drawn down the middle of the Irish Sea to avoid a land border between Northern Ireland (part of the U.K.) and the Republic of Ireland (member of the EU) — is making even Scottish nationalists think twice.
The circumstances are different; there hasn’t been a war on the Scottish-english border since 1547. But rejoining the EU is part of the package offered by the SNP, and the Irish border troubles serve to remind the Scots that there would be a “hard” border between Scotland and England in that case.
There’s no getting round that fact. Johnson’s government chose the hardest Brexit imaginable, so Scotland as an EU member would face customs duties, immigration controls and all sorts of other nuisances at the English border. It would also lose the $2,700 per capita subsidy for Scottish residents currently paid by the U.K. government.
An independent Scotland would be a perfectly viable country, about the size and population of Denmark. There’s just no burning sense of outrage that makes independence necessary. It sounds nice, but most people calculate how much upheaval and cost would be involved in leaving.
Sturgeon knows that. The smart money says she’ll find another reason to postpone it, because a second referendum defeat would be the death of the idea for a generation. A real generation, that is.
Like what happened in Canada in 1995 after the second independence referendum failed in Quebec.