SNP: Referendum: At long last a Plan B for independence

The Sunday Times carries its own analysis of what has led us to this point where the future of the Union seems to be in much greater jeopardy than it was in those febrile weeks immediately prior to the 2014 referendum. It suggests that perceptions of the character and substance of Boris Johnson are largely to blame; that in the person of the Prime Minister all of the negative aspects of big Englishness are to be found and very few of its positives.

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There may be an element of truth in this but it’s surely unfair that one man must bear the burden of guilt for a process that’s been under way for decades. Mr Johnson is no more to blame for the imperilled state of the Union than Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.

It was in Mrs Thatcher’s 13-year reign as Prime Minister that Scottish working-class voters, who had never previously considered independence as a viable option, began to view the physical border separating Scotland and England as one that also seemed to define the boundaries separating entitled affluence and persistent deprivation. At a moment when Britain’s wealth and resources were never more apparent it seemed that the will to address multi-generational inequality had never been less evident.

This laissez-faire approach actually became more perceptible in the reign of Tony Blair, the leader of a party that was entrusted always to tilt the balance in favour of the many and away from the few. Mr Blair became Prime Minister with a three-term majority and thus armed with a popular mandate of which previous Labour leaders could only fantasise. That he squandered it on illegal wars and seeking favour with Labour’s old corporate enemies and the Murdoch newspaper empire while failing to reverse the Tories’ anti-trade union laws were more iniquitous than anything undertaken by Mrs Thatcher.

During the 2015 UK election I encountered dozens of traditional Labour voters who were in the process of transferring their allegiances to the SNP. None of them – and this can’t be over-stated – were particularly in favour of independence, but all of them felt betrayed by the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown for failing significantly to reverse the monetarism and neo-liberalism of the Thatcher era. They didn’t regard independence as a sacred declaration of Scotland’s destiny; merely an opportunity to build a fairer society. This should be a warning to Nationalist supporters exulting in the weekend’s numbers. For many, the growth in support for Yes has been in spite of the SNP, not because of it.

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The last six years have been characterised by a growth in the concept of muscular and ethnically superior Englishness, both of which fuelled a Brexit campaign conducted in the most disorderly and insidious way.

This saw the emergence of a brutish class of Conservatives whose loyalty to ideas of English exceptionalism rather than any innate ability to govern was sufficient to occupy all the main offices of state. Thus, when the coronavirus pandemic began to rage Britons found, too late, that their mortal fate now lay in the hands of a political end-of-the-pier act headed by a circus clown.

In these 10 Covid months they have failed to communicate properly and failed to institute an adequate system of track-and-trace. The signature look on every Tory cabinet minister whose turn it is to walk the plank has been a silent scream of pure panic. In this time their only success has been to enrich friends, relatives and party donors with massive and unregulated PPE contracts.

From a Scottish nationalist perspective the wonder of all of this isn’t that there is consistent polling in favour of independence but that it isn’t much, much higher than the 51%-54% margin. The pro-Union campaign has been curiously quiet of late in Scotland apart from Gordon Brown’s increasingly bizarre interventions. This will change in the heat of a second referendum campaign whether or not it’s endorsed by Westminster.

Independence supporters while welcoming the SNP’s late, late endorsement of a Plan B might also ask why it’s taken more than six years to get here. And during this period why also did they insist on discrediting Chris McEleny and Angus McNeill who have been campaigning for a Plan B strategy that differs little than the SNP’s? The party at last agreed with Mr McEleny and Mr McNeill that simply asking Boris Johnson to grant a Section 30, knowing he’d refuse, simply wasn’t good enough. And that a Yes majority in May on a clear referendum pledge at least gave them a mandate to test Holyrood’s rights in the courts prior to holding a unilateral vote.

In those crucial six years the SNP has done little to advance the cause of independence and much to discredit it. John Swinney’s betrayal of an entire generation of schoolchildren during last summer’s exams fiasco went unpunished. The reputation of Scotland’s Crown Prosecution service now lies in ruins following revelations that the legal establishment tried to send two innocent men to jail and must now foot a bill in excess of £25 million for doing so.

The civil service is headed by a group of people whose manifest incompetence throughout the Alex Salmond affair (we’ll leave it at that for the time-being) has also come at a heavy cost to tax-payers and has brought their departments into disrepute. There is a growing perception that the Scottish Government is actively seeking to obstruct justice in that inquiry and has been neglectful of its duty of truth to Parliament.

Such is the generational ineptitude of Labour and the Tories at Holyrood that the SNP will easily re-gain their majority in May. But under the inexorable scrutiny of a referendum campaign, free from party loyalties, this series of SNP own goals may yet play a significant role.

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