Kevin McKenna: Why Independence within the UK will never be real independence

While Scotland’s constitutional future has dominated all political debate north of the Border, Scottish Labour has found itself reduced to a sideshow. The SNP has stolen its working-class credentials and re-fashioned them with a slicker marketing campaign while the Tories always look better in bespoke red, white and blue.

Mr Martin’s offering can be added to those other “I can’t believe it’s not independence” concepts such as devomax, devoplus, home rule and federalism. Once you get your head around the oxymoron tendencies of independence within the UK (you can’t help thinking veganism for carnivores) you can imagine that some aspects of his big idea will appeal to Scottish Labour strategists desperate to be free of the constitutional straitjacket. They can’t just keep saying No to a second referendum forever.

Mr Martin’s ideas come in an article for the influential website LabourList where he describes them as “a third way” for the party. Once you get past the ridiculous opening – “there is no disputing that Scottish Labour fought a positive election campaign” – it offers some intriguing suggestions. It’s also refreshingly free of the stentorian propaganda favoured by Gordon Brown and his Union Jack fetishists.

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“Scotland would become a completely sovereign nation with total power over its domestic laws, services and taxation,” according to Mr Martin. "There would be no border for goods, services, capital or Labour.

"Defence would remain a UK-wide function with Scotland making a contribution to this and other common services. The UK now representing more than one sovereign state would continue to hold the seat in the UN and on its security council.”

And, get this, Scotland could aspire to be like Taiwan and gather to itself a few of those bells and whistles of international diplomacy designed to make a country feel all sovereign, “just as Taiwan does not have a seat at the UN but is a member of a plethora of international bodies". Yep, that’ll do the trick.

“It probably wouldn’t be feasible for Scotland to re-join the EU,” says Mr Martin, “but it would open the door for its participation in such things as the Erasmus programme." So, no actual membership of the EU but re-admittance to its Club 18-30 for private school gap-year students swithering about joining mummy or daddy’s law practice or a doctoral thesis on climate change. That’ll go down well in Possilpark and Easterhouse: “Still no jobs, but the Erasmus programme is back on. Three large Cointreaus, big man.”

Mr Martin’s 34 years in Brussels have bred a sunny and optimistic outlook, bless him: "Such an arrangement would require goodwill on both sides, a robust institutional structure and constant dialogue – but it could work.”

Of course “it could work”. But only if that half of the Scottish population who have voted for parties of independence in 10 UK, Scottish, council and European elections somehow think that having your fiscal policy set by the Bank of England and your defence policy directed by the British Army somehow equates to sovereign self-determination.

Yet, close observers of the machinations within the SNP might conclude that Mr Martin’s direction of travel could appeal to the main party of independence. Nothing in their election manifesto or their initial plans for government indicated that it has spent any meaningful time since the first referendum fashioning a post-independence border policy. The Growth Commission has been cheerfully cast aside because of "the Covid", this being the new catch-all to justify any problematic excess or deficit throughout the next decade. If there’s been any work on the currency of an independent Scotland then it’s a closely-guarded secret.

David Martin

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Nicola Sturgeon’s new cabinet, unveiled last week, offers not the slightest hint of anything other than a glacial, softly-softly route to an unspecified sort of independence at a date far in the future once “the Covid” has receded.

Ms Sturgeon’s cabinet secretaries are the very embodiment of Scotland as a nation of floor managers. They all have the obligatory degree and all but one come from a middle-class background. Glasgow and Lanarkshire, home to most of our most disadvantaged communities, gave birth to two of them, one of whom attended a private school. Don’t look for any radical solutions here. Any hint of independent thought has been expunged. There is no imagination and nothing that suggests creative solutions, as Glasgow is discovering right now. It’s government by well-worn template rewarding unquestioning and blind loyalty.

Mr Martin has at least accorded Scottish independence a measure of respect by seeking a route out of the current state of quiescence, even though it remains within a Unionist framework. Within the SNP those who want to start a creative process are marginalised.

This is what Joanne Cherry wrote last week in her column in The National: “During the election campaign, the First Minister indicated that the Growth Commission report needs revisited and, that following on Brexit and the pandemic, there is work to be done on the economic case for independence, the timetable for Scotland’s accession to the EU and how we handle cross-border trade with the rest of the UK. I look forward to hearing who the FM will put in charge of getting this work done before the next independence referendum campaign starts and I hope to be able to make a useful contribution.” Yet, if Ms Sturgeon’s most malevolent supporters within the party continue to be indulged, Ms Cherry will remain an outcast.

Those communities who will suffer grievously from the long-term effects of the pandemic have no voice in this cabinet and few in the Holyrood chamber. David Martin, at least, is trying to reclaim them. The SNP continues to play them.

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