Independence: Support for independence has changed the face of unionism

Most of us will see this as one side beating the other. Me? I suspect it might also be that one side is eating the other.

Scottish nationalism – for want of a better term – has long been consuming Scottish unionism, survey by survey, election by election, bite by bite.

As Yes grows it is not just taking the votes of people who once backed the union; it is absorbing and reflecting some of their values and stances too.

The new majority “nationalist” offer is, therefore, far from the same as the old minority one.

Like many of its new supporters, it is looking to cede and share sovereignty with a union, the European one. So nationalism is more, well, unionist.

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Equally, as No shrinks, it is changing too. Minority unionism feels very different from the old worldview which once dominated Scottish politics, of a United Kingdom with was somehow both a nation in itself and a family of nations. Unionism has become, as political scientists have been saying for some time, more robustly nationalist; British nationalist, that is.

That is the headline theory, anyway; the top line, as we journalists say.

There are still plenty of old school Scottish nationalists who, for example, might have a vision of an autarkic independent state outside the EU and Nato with its own currency and central bank.

And there remains a strong cohort of classical mainstream unionists who buy in to Britain as a multi-national state which, despite Brexit, can still be a global team player.

But polls like yesterday’s might suggest these two groups are, for now at least, losing influence in their rival camps.

Why? Because of the nature of the voters and, crucially, activists who are sloshing from one side to the other. These are, largely, people who were soft Nos in 2014 and hard Remainers in 2016.

Ailsa Henderson, professor of political science at Edinburgh University, has been tracking these shifts, especially in the three big unionist forces, Labour, Tories and Liberal Democrats.

“I tend to think of it less as the arrival of unionists into the SNP and more the departure of soft unionists from the other parties and what that has done to those parties,” she said. “You can see this in Labour's polling and the attitudes of Labour-supporting voters to the constitution.

“Having advocated a policy that was clearly more hardline than their electorate for years, Labour has shed those ambivalent to that policy, with the result that their (now much smaller) group of supporters is more opposed to indy than they used to be.

“While the absorption of a considerable number of non-nats on the SNP side might well be deemed to have removed some of the polarisation from the electorate, it's just flipped to the other side: the unionist parties are, arguably, less of a broad church than they were.”

Are the three unionist parties – all of which have historically embraced devolution to one degree or another – now chasing the votes of a smaller and more hardline unionist base? Has their rhetoric, their policy stances and attitudes to Scottish institutions changed to appeal to this new and smaller base rather than to win back those soft No Remainers “swallowed” by Yes?

It looks like it, for now.

Unionism as a minority movement often feels hostile to Holyrood and – at least on its social media extremes – even to Scottish cultures and languages. There is a reason Twitter activists with union flags in their avatars get angry about Scotland’s Gaelic minority – whereas the old majority unionism did far more than the SNP government to support that community.

Michael Keating, emeritus professor of politics at Aberdeen University, stressed that back in 2014 all three unionist parties and the wider pro-UK movement were, like pro-independence campaigners, trying to tack to the middle, aiming to lap up swing voters. So the old unionists, the ones who won, talked of more powers – famously making the Vow on the front page of the Daily Record before referendum day.

The 2014 vote was not quite Indy Lite versus Devo Max but some campaigners tried hard to make it look that way.

Brexit, Keating argues in a new book, State and Nation in the United Kingdom: Fractured Union, has changed that. “Since 2016 there has been increasing polarisation between Pro-Brexit/no referendum and pro-Europe/Yes to independence. The middle ground has therefore shrunk and the Pro-Brexit/no referendum option has a lot less support than the other one.

“The independence prospectus is even more clearly attached to EU membership and when it comes to the EU it is the nationalists (and Greens) who are most ‘pro-union' – if we can use that term. The other parties all prioritise the UK union over the European one.”

Keating has talked about neo-unionists, the most British nationalist opponents of independence. But there have always been those who felt this way. Are there more of them now – or are they just more salient as soft unionists have drifted to Yes?

The poll changes have brought an identity crisis for unionism. But as nationalism adapts and grows, it too finds itself in a civil war, usually expressed as a conflict between Nicola Sturgeon and her predecessor, Alex Salmond.

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One of the tensions laced through this internal fight is way the wider Yes side has transformed as it tried – and succeeded – to lure more unionists.

James Mitchell, professor of public policy at Edinburgh University, has long studied Scottish nationalism. “The debates and divisions in Yes might be seen in terms of some seeking to appeal to soft Nos by softening the message,” he said, citing controversial policies to keep using the pound after independence.

“If Yes decided to go for sterlingisation, to convey moderation and continuity and appeal to previous soft No voters,” Mitchell said, “that would cause difficulties within the camp. There’s certainly evidence of this.”

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