GLOBAL upheavals in recent years have a curious tendency of uniting influential Unionist and SNP opinion. Last week in the New Statesman, Andrew Marr, the former presenter of the BBC’s Sunday Politics, suggested that the war in Ukraine had effectively voided the SNP’s pledge to hold a second referendum on independence before the end of 2023.

In the same week, Angus Robertson, the SNP’s cabinet secretary for the constitution, blamed “global events” and the cost-of-living crisis for the low census completion rate in Scotland. The Scottish Government have had ten years to manage a process that seemed straightforward enough for previous Scottish administrations. In England and Wales last year 97% of households completed the form when the coronavirus pandemic was at its height.

If the Scottish Government genuinely believes that “global events” in which they have precisely zero involvement causes them insurmountable difficulties in persuading people to complete a simple questionnaire then a full-scale referendum will surely cause them to melt. These “global events” won’t be untangling any time soon. Liz Truss, the UK Foreign Secretary, predicted that the war in Ukraine will probably last for another five to ten years.

Ms Truss also seemed deliberately to escalate the UK’s belligerent rhetoric in the crisis by saying that it won’t be over until Russia is expelled from the entire region, including Crimea. As Iain Macwhirter wrote in yesterday’s Herald, the UK is effectively now involved in a proxy war against Russia.

And so, even if you did accept the SNP’s sincerity in seeking a referendum by the end of next year these global events will continue to come in handy as excuses to delay it further. In England, even Conservative voices are suggesting that the longer the Ukraine war proceeds the better Boris Johnson’s of escaping the consequences of his personal conduct and his party’s corruption during the Covid lockdown. In Scotland, the Ukraine card is already being played by the SNP to avoid the referendum, support for which has kept them in power for 15 years.

Mr Marr’s analysis of how war in Ukraine is affecting the independence movement was simplistic in the extreme. He declared that “anti-Trident, left-of-centre Scottish nationalists” were out of step with public mood. In England, which has managed to avoid the pleasure of hosting weapons of mass destruction on its territory, it’s perhaps easier to take a remote view of such matters. In Scotland, where the campaign against these weapons has been one of the dominant features of Scottish politics since the end of the Cold War, the “public mood” is different. It’s also informed by the small matter of being forced to host nuclear submarines close to our most populous regions – at an annual cost of almost £200m – contrary to the wishes of generations of Scottish voters.

Following a lengthy repetition of what we already know – that the SNP are opposed to having the nuclear deterrent 40 miles from Glasgow – Mr Marr finally got to the point: that such a policy could make “winning an independence referendum impossible” and that the SNP being opposed to mass killing weapons – especially in the hands of this trigger-happy UK Government – has somehow handed Boris Johnson the moral “high ground”. You wonder what the low ground might be.

In the absence of any reliable indicator of Scottish public opinion about hosting weapons of mass destruction on behalf of Boris Johnson it may be reasonable for Unionists to peddle these lines. Yet, they can also be turned on their head and used to reinforce a contrary view: that moral opposition to these ruinously expensive weapons will play in favour of the SNP as it has done at every election in which they’ve stood since 2007.

The absurdly aggressive stance of Liz Truss throughout the Ukraine crisis epitomises the absurd Boy Scout, Little Englander theme of the Tory hard-right which prevailed during the Brexit campaign. Agincourt, Trafalgar and Waterloo were all pressed into service to indicate historic English military glory and convey a sense that the world could come ahead if it thinks it’s hard enough. Gavin Williamson as Foreign Secretary wanted to send gunboats to the South China Sea to show Beijing who's boss. It’s on the order of these characters that Scotland is forced to host nuclear weapons. It’s like organising a firework display at a petrol station.

UK Government rhetoric around Ukraine has not, of course, been matched by any degree of enthusiasm about hosting Ukrainian refugees. In any future referendum Scotland’s willingness to accept those fleeing terror will also feature, just as it’s done at all recent elections. Scotland views its relationship with the world as one characterised by friendship and peaceful co-existence. The UK Tories see it only in terms of isolation drugged-up on military superiority and xenophobia. In times of global sensitivity and geo-political upheaval you might have a view on which administration offers the greater sense of security.

And yet, Unionists must also know that while the SNP continues to track the UK’s wider military strategy in being subservient to NATO the party’s strict anti-nuclear policy can be undermined far more effectively than Andrew Marr’s speculative “public mood” argument.

Nowhere in the UK’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine has there been any debate about NATO’s historic role in contributing to the fragility in this region. Nor has there been any serious analysis of the almost total failure of western diplomacy across the last three decades under NATO’s direction. Even more alarmingly, there has been no scrutiny of widespread human rights abuses in pre-war Ukraine, as highlighted by Amnesty, and little on how to deal with Russia in the post-Putin era.

Inexplicably, the social media timelines of senior SNP politicians – whose primary raison d’etre is Scottish independence – have revealed some of them to be operating more like NATO fan-boys, jetting off here and there at tax-payers’ expense to dress up as international statesmen while “flying the flag” for Scotland. In truth, they’ve become transfixed by their own importance, the limits of which ought to be pointed out to them and with something approaching belligerence.

There’s a lot riding on this war, but don’t kid yourself that the fate of the Ukrainian people is paramount.

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