'Support for independence has never been a sustained demand'

I arrived back in the early hours to find all was well. So we joined the party. A highlight was when the result from the Western Isles, where I live, was announced in Gaelic and there was a seven per cent lead for not breaking up the state in which I live. It was a quiet vote for unity not “unionism”.

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This kept us within the consensus of modern Europe. There are dozens of nationalist movements which want to separate from states which history brought together. Few are offered the chance to put their ambition to the test, in the way Scotland was. Having gone to the brink and peeked over the precipice, we collectively decided not to jump. So let’s move on.

In an ideal world, a dignified line would have been drawn but that is not the nature of the nationalist beast. Within months, “once in a generation” had been consigned to re-written history, a second referendum was tediously demanded and every aspect of devolved government was again subordinated to manoeuvring for that improbable outcome.

By then, Scottish politics had been polarised around the constitutional question to a deeply unhealthy extent. The 44.6 per cent was not enough to win a referendum but when it held together as an electoral force, it was pretty much guaranteed to prevail over an opposition divided by differing priorities and ideologies. The SNP had the ball at their feet with an open goal. They could have done so much – and delivered so little.

Instead, Scotland entered a depressing, divisive and unproductive decade of introversion and recrimination. Once upon a time, political activism produced great reforms which drove forward the living standards and rights of working people. It conquered disease, cleared slums, opened up pathways to education and tipped balances between oppressors and oppressed.

Now poor old Scotland, land of the Enlightenment, was embarked upon the decade of bile and baby boxes with everything reduced to the lowest common denominators of constitutional manoeuvring and glib self-glorification. This was the age of Sturgeon when strong men trembled under her glare and John Swinney performed the heroic feat of seeing nothing amiss, in party or government.

Unionist campaigners show their delight after Scots voted to remain in the Union (Image: Jeff J Mitchell)

It is now fashionable to recognise the extent to which the SNP blew it in this period. All they had to do was govern creatively and well, using the very substantial resources which the devolution settlement bequeathed them. Then who knows? Yet with a huge base to build on, a Tory government in power and Brexit to exploit, they still preferred the cul-de-sacs of grievance to the highway of delivery.

Their biggest problem was - and remains - that so few of them care, really care, about anything other than independence and certainly not enough to drive a vision for Scotland that could leave the audience calling for more. I suppose I should be relieved about that but life is short.

When I survey the poverty gaps that have not closed, the public services which have crumbled, the vast sums squandered and the feebleness of legislation on distinctively Scottish matters that demand understanding and empathy, I feel nothing but contempt for how Scotland has been conned, in pursuit of a solitary abstract objective. The fact that the objective itself is now deep in the long grass is insufficient compensation.

There is nothing new in all this. Alex Salmond spins a line about the SNP having been a “fringe party of romantics” until he led them towards destiny. I doubt if Winnie Ewing or Margo Macdonald would have been flattered by that portrayal. They were effective politicians precisely because there was more to them than any of the current one-dimensional breed.

Back in the 1970s, the SNP was claiming 100,000 members and reached dizzy heights in the polls. An independence referendum then would have had at least as much chance of succeeding as in 2014. Then the SNP voted with Mrs Thatcher to bring down the Labour government and it all pretty much evaporated. In other words, support for independence had been a spasm rather than a sustained demand.

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Scotland cannot be dominated by the constant pursuit of another spasm which might, if the stars align, coincide with the date of the second, third or fourth independence referendum. If there is ever a clear mood in favour, it will be tangible and possibly even irresistible. But meanwhile, the downward spiral will continue if this search for a holy grail continues to define Scottish politics.

Devolution could have gone one of two ways. Holyrood might have become a stable forum for better government, closer to the people and sensitive to distinctively Scottish needs. Few, either friend or foe, would claim it has worked out that way. The alternative was that it would become a platform for division, grievance and the constant demand for more with a scapegoat always available for failings. That sounds more accurate.

We have lived through 14 years of that grim option and the shine has well and truly gone off it, though its base remains substantial. If we drift on in the same way after 2026, it will not lead to independence – just more of the same. Change will not come with guarantees but devolution would get another chance to prove its potential while liberating us from constitutional exhaustion.

Brian Wilson is a former Labour Party politician. He was MP for Cunninghame North from 1987 until 2005 and served as a Minister of State from 1997 to 2003.