On Scottish independence, the answer is always gradualism

And so it was this weekend. As Evgeniy Prigozhin’s Wagner PMC forces first captured Rostov-on-Don and then marched on Moscow, the SNP met in Dundee’s Caird Hall for its Convention on Independence, a talking shop intended to shape a consensus around the strategy by which the SNP will seek to realise Scottish independence.

In the end, Prigozhin backed down. A deal brokered by the Belarussian dictator and Putin lackey Aleksander Lukashenko – the detail and longevity of which is not clear as I write – put an end to the emerging coup d’état.

Humza Yousaf and his party, on the other hand, are in no mood to back down.

It was an energising convention. After a difficult four months following the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon, as she and other senior SNP figures have been investigated by Police Scotland in connection with the party’s finances, SNP members had the opportunity to focus on their party’s raison d’être.

No votes were had, no straw polls conducted, and no decisions made. But independence was on the agenda in a serious way and that, in and of itself, will have lifted spirits within the party.

In the week of Winnie Ewing’s death, minds were focused. The SNP membership, and their leaders, were coming off the back of a huge reminder of just where they had come from. When Ewing won the iconic 1967 Hamilton by-election, declaring “stop the world, Scotland wants to get on”, she became only the second ever SNP MP.

Between her 1967 victory and the reconvening of the Scottish Parliament, the SNP won just 37 times in Westminster elections and by-elections. When they won 35 seats in 2017 it was considered disappointing.

They have come a long way as a party. But today they stand at a crossroads – the political challenges facing the independence movement are serious and it remains unclear, despite all the speeches delivered on Saturday, how exactly it will meet those challenges.

The SNP continues to struggle to convince a majority of Scots to back independence. Despite the odd temporary spike in support for independence, most notably at the end of 2020 during the pandemic, the Yes vote has remained broadly static for years. And it is still unclear by what mechanisms independence can be won even if most Scots can be won over.

These challenges are interrelated, of course. The lack of a clear pathway to independence has eroded the sense among voters that it is achievable and therefore a real alternative to a status quo most Scots are deeply disenchanted with, in turn prompting them to look elsewhere – including to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.

That puts the SNP on the back foot, making it that much harder to make the argument for secession.

It’s easy to make a leap from that logic to concluding that the independence movement and the SNP, therefore, need to start with an answer to the question of process, assuming that a clear pathway to independence would reinvigorate their base and provide the basis on which to begin persuading Scots to back secession.

But that focus on process, which has sat at the heart of the independence movement’s internal wrangling and ruptures since at least 2019, is misguided and has produced no implementable or practical new thinking or strategic innovation.

Take the legal opinion produced by Professor Robert McCorquodale commissioned by Alex Salmond’s Alba Party. McCorquodale’s argument that the UK Supreme Court wrongly interpreted international law pertaining to the right to self-determination will provide scant comfort for independence supporters given that it changes nothing about the reality of political power in the UK. The levers by which independence could be achieved lie in London, and pro-independence politicians will never control those levers.

The supposed routes to independence presented on Saturday do not address that problem of political power, either. They get the SNP and the Yes movement up to the point of proposing negotiations over independence based on one kind of electoral test or another, but the question of how to force the UK government to the table remains unanswered.

And that question remains unanswered precisely because there is no straightforward mechanism by which it can be done. It simply does not exist.

More importantly, this merry-go-round is a distraction from the much more important question of how to build majority support for independence. Even if there was a lever that the SNP could pull to deliver independence, it would not have the support of the Scottish people in doing so.

Focusing on process amounts to putting the horse before a non-existent cart. It’s also easier than confronting the challenge the SNP and the independence movement face in trying to build a majority for secession.

Scotland is polarised on the constitutional question. Again and again, research by the Scottish Election Study and others has shown that most Scots place themselves solidly on either one end of the sliding scale from complete support for independence or complete opposition to it. There are very few “soft Yes” or “soft No” voters to be swung.

That means that a solid majority for independence will have to be built by changing the minds of people otherwise quite committed against it. That will not happen overnight but through the slow and difficult process of engagement and persuasion.

And once the SNP get there, if they get there, they may find that that majority for independence is the very key they need to unlock the constitutional impasse. Denying an electoral test of support for independence is much harder when it can be shown that independence is what a people want.

The SNP left Dundee energised, with independence back at the forefront of their minds. But they achieved little else. Fantastical political mechanisms won’t achieve independence, winning over the people will. Until that is truly accepted, the independence movement will remain stuck on the merry-go-round – moving but going nowhere.