THE UNEASY REVOLUTION
Scotland is in turmoil after the referendum struggle. Only one thing is now sure – no one, not even Nicola Sturgeon, knows if the Union is safe or finished
THE kaleidoscope has been shaken, the pieces are in flux… let us reorder this world around us. This was Tony Blair in 2001, summing up the post-9/11 world in his speech to the Labour conference a month after the Twin Towers had fallen.
Those sentiments also provide an apt description of the condition of Britain and its component parts today – shaken, in flux, in desperate need of reordering. A year on from the event that for many Scots will be the defining political moment of their lives, everything has changed – and yet nothing has.
Nothing? Well, Scotland remains the chippy chappie of the UK, the evolution of devolution continues on its languorous route and a Tory is in Downing Street. Everything? The Scottish Labour Party is destroyed, replaced after decades as the Establishment with sudden democratic brutality by its mortal enemy; we live with a heightened and sustained level of support for independence and an argument that refuses to go away; and there is a woman in Bute House who stands a real chance of delivering separation within the decade.
It is clear now that the extraordinary tartan fiesta that was the Yes campaign merely presaged a broader uprising across Britain. The forces that powered it – a deep sense of disenchantment with politics as usual, a determination to wrest power from the boys in the bubble, a justified resentment of the inequalities in our wealthy society – are the same that have just seen Labour’s grassroots elect as party leader a man who stands as much chance of becoming Prime Minister in 2020 as I do. You see the same aggression and intolerance of alternative views, the same humourlessness, the same fixation on a set of ideals that cannot survive contact with reality. The people are revolting.
Despite the bluster and blather from the increasingly eccentric Alex Salmond, we are nowhere near an understanding of where all this is taking us, where the journey might end. We can state the obvious: Labour’s destruction in Scotland and hara kiri at Westminster have probably handed the keys of No 10 to the Tories for a generation; this is likely to play into Nicola Sturgeon’s hands and allow her to call a second referendum shortly after the 2021 Holyrood election. We Unionists – we unfashionable squares, with our tiresome insistence on an evidence-based approach over fact-free rhetoric – have a hell of a fight on our hands against opponents who are energised, monomaniacally obsessive, immune to doubt and seemingly impervious to logic.
But this is to view the future as having a sort of linear certainty – that all must unfold along the most obvious and predictable path. A brief glance at history shows us this is not how the future tends to work. Stuff gets in the way.
What about the things we know we don’t know? Within a few short years, the Scottish Government will be given control over the levers of income tax, which is intended to have a transformative impact on the relationship between the public and Holyrood.
WHEN ministers – Nationalist minist ers – become responsible not just for spending money but for raising it, too, will they be held to account by voters with the same gimleteyed, unforgiving rigour applied to Westminster administrations? Will ministers use those tax powers to effect difference? And if not, what was the point in demanding them, in demanding yet more? Will the SNP still find it as easy to blame every travail and crisis on London?
For how long can the SNP and Nicola Sturgeon defy gravity? She is a remarkable politician, a fine figurehead for the nation, with a folksy appeal, an impressive temperament and a sharp wit that could only come from an ordinary upbringing in the West of Scotland. If we must be governed by separatists, let it be this separatist.
But nothing lasts for ever. Miss Sturgeon’s party has been in power for the past eight years and she at the most senior levels of government throughout that period. If she now serves two full terms – and given she is only 45, there is no reason she shouldn’t – she will have been First Minister or Deputy First Minister for almost two decades, a span and eminence that verges on the Putinesque.
Her track record, if she does not do something radical to change it, will be a shameful lack of improvement to schools and hospitals. It will be a legacy of shirking difficult decisions and failing to confront vested interests for fear of fracturing the unity of the pro-independence movement. It will mean yet more generations of underprivileged kids let down by a Scottish parliament that, like one of those grotesquely pumped- up bodybuilders, prefers to spend its time oiling its muscles and gazing appreciatively in the mirror as the latest dose of steroids takes effect.
To her credit, I believe Miss Sturgeon knows this. She is starting to make interesting noises on the policy front, particularly around education, where she has highlighted the astonishing success of the London Challenge in transforming the performance of pupils in some of the city’s roughest areas. Encouragingly, some of the architects of that programme recently travelled north to spend time with Scottish civil servants and ministers.
Privately, she accepts that, after a year in the job, the Nicola Show has to be about something more than just standing in the spotlight taking the applause. There is method in this: Nationalism i s changing because Nationalism has to. The old religion, the testosterone frenzy and Celtic roar that drove the Yes movement, was never going to carry majority appeal and maxed out at 45 per cent.
In the final days of the campaign, Mr Salmond, perhaps believing rumours of his own divinity, behaved with such arrogance and disrespect towards those Scots who didn’t share his constitutional object i ve t hat he undoubtedly pushed a healthy chunk of switherers towards the No camp. His odd obsession with The Vow and its impact on the final result – word to the wise, Alex, none whatsoever – has in reality been an attempt to distract attention from his own culpability in losing the referendum. His erstwhile colleagues now refer to him and his style as being ‘a bit last year’.
SO Nationalism has to change. It has to find a psychology and l anguage of frankness that was missing from the Yes campaign, with its voodoo economics and grievance - bleating. It has to face the world as it is and show what can be done with what we already have. The voters who might be won over to the independence cause in future took a look at what was offered last year and judged it literally incredible, a menu of cant, faux-positivity and misdirection served up by a charlatan.
The brighter Nats know this and are thinking hard about what comes next, about how to reframe the argument in a way
that is both hard-headed and optimistic, that stands a better chance of convincing the sceptic and that can earn them the broader permission they need.
At Westminster, under the canny tutelage of Angus Robertson, the SNP is looking to make a mark beyond just ‘Scottish issues’ – as can be seen from recent PMQ interventions on welfare reform and the Srebrenica genocide anniversary. In part, this displays to voters back home that the 56 MPs can make an impact – for example, they have played their part in derailing Tory policy on the Human Rights Act, the foxhunting ban, English Votes for English Laws and the desire to have the EU referendum on the same day as next May’s Holyrood election.
Shortly before the summer recess, Mr Robertson asked his MPs to mount a charm offensive south of the Border in order to find issues of common interest, such as between Scotland and Northern England on high- speed rail. The aim is to soften the English view of the SNP in order that when the next referendum comes around, it receives a fairer hearing.
These Nats are not going away, you know. Unionists must be aware that the existence of their country remains at great risk. I increasingly sense that the future threat will come from Scotland’s middle classes who, were they to jump ship, would certainly bring about the end of the UK.
Since the referendum, I have heard many professional types who voted No say they might consider a Yes next time. They were put off by Salmond’s bullying and the woeful economic case he advanced, but are susceptible to a more realistic argument – that while the early years of a separate Scotland would be economically bumpy and diplomatically tricky, the prize of self- determination is worth it and, in time, all would be well. That is not an ignoble position.
Set against this is the possibility that last year was the best chance the SNP will ever have to win independence. Since then, the oil price has gone into freefall. The North Sea, already a shadow of what it once was, may never recover – its best days are certainly long behind it. The hole this puts in the prospective budget of an independent Scotland is huge and is potentially an insurmountable obstacle to persuading cautious Middle Scotland that separation would be in i ts interests.
I suppose I can admit to myself that I no longer find the idea of independence, or something close to it, as abhorrent or unthinkable as I once did. To be clear, if there were another referendum tomorrow, I would vote No. But the fluidity of the political situation in the UK raises significant questions about the long-term coherence of our nation state.
The unitary tax system that was created by Pitt the Younger to fund the Napoleonic Wars is now being picked apart. Northern Ireland is being given power over corporation tax, while Scotland gets income tax. The Northern Powerhouse programme is devolving all sorts of bells and whistles to the great cities of the North of England.
ALL of this is surely only the start. We are, in fairly typical British style, rewriting our constitution in an ad hoc and not especially joinedup way. Who knows what damage the ludicrous Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell might do before they are deposed? What if we are forced out of the EU by an English majority against Scotland’s wishes? What will Britain look like by 2020 and will we –I – still feel it is worth defending?
These are the questions that float through my mind a year on from the almighty scrap that was the 2014 referendum. I didn’t enjoy the Better Together campaign and its insidious negativity. While I understand the short-term political thinking behind it – as one senior figure put it to me this week, ‘You don’t criticise Jose Mourinho for playing defensively if he manages a 1-0 win’ – it has done what I always feared it would, leaving a legacy of bitterness and resentment on the other side and a bad taste in the mouths of many pro-Union people.
One asks oneself, if we can’t make the case for the United Kingdom in an upbeat and inspiring way – or don’t have the confidence to do so – what is the inference to be drawn? Who, given the issues of identity and selfhood at stake, can be satisfied with a grim, slim, ground- out, Mourinho- style victory – especially if it turns out only to have been the first leg?
The SNP’s greatest triumph over the past year has not been its defenestration of Scottish Labour from Westminster; nor will it be the similar job it will likely do at Holyrood next May. Instead, its singular achievement has been to establish as fact in the electorate’s mind that a second referendum is inevitable, that it will be along in fairly short order and that this is reasonable.
Where Better Together shut its doors on September 19, the separatists barrelled on. They always will; it is the very point of them. Remember, they only have to get lucky once.