Anonymous asked: Now that Nicola Sturgeon has resigned as First Minister what are your thoughts on the prospects for Scottish Independence?
Not entirely unlike the passing of another Queen in Scotland, the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon changes everything, but it also changes nothing. Nicola Sturgeon may have exited the stage, but the threat of Scottish independence has not.
Like many people, I was taken by surprise by her shock resignation. But downing a dram of a 35 year old Dalmore single malt whisky, that should be drunk on special ocassions, really helped me wash down my disbelief and my joy. Whilst I didn’t personally disike her, I found her politics personally divisive and even detestable towards the end of her reign.
But whatever the triumphalism in London over the First Minister’s resignation, the idea that the secession crisis has ended is naive as it is short sighted. For the time being, the grim truth is that neither Scottish nationalism nor British unionism is strong enough to triumph - not because of some cult personality problem as Sturgeon cultivated or the debacle and fall out over the Gender Reform Bill, but because of deep, structural weaknesses on both sides.
Today, both secessionism and unionism feed off the other’s incoherence. Sturgeon’s press conference in Edinburgh compellingly proved this: she described her decision in ways that made it sound as if she were some kind of martyr. Under her leadership, she said, the cause of Scottish nationalism had suffered because it had become caught up in the irrational partisanship of her opponents, who had grown to dislike her so much that they could no longer judge Scottish independence on its own merits. She was, she intimated, sacrificing herself in the hope that a new leader would be able to bring more people into the tent of Scottish nationalism.
I think she was re-writing history to cloak the cause of Scottish nationalism as well as varnish over her political humiliation over the fall out of the badly received gender form bill. But nevertheless Unionists should not be complacent about this prospect - she may actually be correct - but the structural problem for Scottish nationalism is not the prejudice of its opponents, but the failings of its own offer.
Although the First Minister’s iron grip over her party has been rusting for some time, there is no question that the SNP has lost a considerable asset. Like Margaret Thatcher, she remained highly popular even whilst she was widely hated. The times were kind to her too: the sense of unease spread by withdrawal from the EU and the Covid pandemic favoured her matriarchal style.
This made for a contrast with the leadership of Boris Johnson, but only to a point. English liberals, amongst some of whom she became a strangely romantic figure after 2016, rarely saw that her politics were not those of a technocratic British Merkel. Nicola Sturgeon’s nationalism was febrile, and it carried all other concerns before it. Both Brexit and the pandemic were ruthlessly exploited to breathe life into the separatist ideal, at times when rudimentary questions about the future of basic services were far more pressing.
The delicate balancing of technocracy and nationalism is not unusual in the politics of modern Western democracies - it may, in fact, be the norm. Sturgeon mastered it. Unfortunately, it was a dead end. The rip-tide of pro-indy sentiment never came. The idea of a separate Scottish state is no more popular today than the day she became First Minister. Against the backdrop of Brexit, Covid, Partygate and Trussonomics, this is an astonishing political failure.
The Scottish people - even those who still call “Yes” - never really took the plan to heart. Polling by the think tank Our Scottish Future last year found that majorities of pro-independence voters supported the continuation of common UK healthcare, welfare and security systems, as well as common UK pensions, a common UK currency and even a common UK passport. The idea of the United Kingdom as the ultimate insurance policy against the world’s ills survived - in surprisingly rude health.
Meanwhile there was paralysis, as constitutional wrangling edged the real business of government off the political agenda. By the end of 2022, NHS Scotland leaders were openly discussing the need to introduce charges for healthcare. A range of experts now agreed that the Scottish education system (the envy of the world not long ago) has foundered - although the SNP’s decision to withdraw from most internationally-recognised performance measures makes it hard to specify the extent of this decline. Neither was there any hope of tackling the unintended consequences of devolution, like the balkanised state of NHS drug procurement and the rising costs associated with it, despite the British government’s growing enthusiasm for sensible cooperation and the new committees designed to facilitate it.
A combination of circumstances and Nicola Sturgeon’s political sagacity kept these problems in the shade. Her successor will struggle to do so. There was no question, watching the First Minister’s resignation conference, that here was a politician of formidable talents. I didn’t like her politics but I will give her her due as a skilful communicator and a street savvy politician.
Ultimately though her political skills let her down with her strategic miscalculation to go into government with the Greens. I’m surprised this has been little commented in most of the press media out there.
Historians will likely regard Nicola Sturgeon’s alliance with the Scottish Green Party as a fatal mistake for the nationalist cause. Patrick Harvie, the Green co-leader, insisted on gender reform being part of the coalition agreement back in 2021. It is and remains the Greens’ ‘red line’. The first minister accepted self-ID in prisons because of her adherence to the Stonewall dogma that ‘transwomen are women’. No buts, no qualifications. As her Green Party coalition partners put it, denying that transwomen are women is the ‘definition of transphobia’. So when the Scottish Prison Service was instructed to follow this dogma it started to house offenders according to the ‘social identity’ they presented.
Many of her supporters tried to downplay the role of her gender policies. Yet, in her final few months, self-ID became the defining policy of her administration.
She used up much of her political capital forcing the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill through the Scottish parliament before Christmas, after facing down the biggest parliamentary rebellion the SNP has experienced since it entered government 15 years ago. The legislation, which would allow children as young as 16 to change their legal sex, on demand, without any medical intervention, has been hugely unpopular in Scotland and remains opposed by a margin of more than two to one.
Many in the SNP would be pretty relaxed if the coalition with the Greens collapsed. The Greens are opposed to economic growth in principle and want to close down the oil and gas industry in the North Sea. Theirs is not a worldview shared by most members of the Scottish National Party. The whole point of independence is supposed to be to liberate the Scottish economy from the ‘dead hand’ of Westminster rule.
Cynics might say that the SNP has been rather successful in promoting the anti-growth agenda, since the Scottish economy has been underperforming the rest of the UK. But this is by accident rather than ideological design. The SNP leadership wants more growth not less to meet Scotland’s enduring social problems, like poverty and homelessness, and to shore up the collapsing NHS.
As for oil and gas, many nationalists, including at least two of the current leadership contenders, believe it is senseless to try to halt oil and gas production in the middle of an energy crisis when many Scots can’t heat their homes. The UK used to be self-sufficient in gas, as recently as 2003. Now it has to import gas from abroad at great cost to the environment and household energy bills. Anyway, the SNP’s economic prospectus had always regarded oil revenues as essential to balancing the books in an independent Scotland.
Nicola Sturgeon never sounded entirely convincing when, under pressure from the Greens, she opposed the development of new oil and gas fields like Cambo and Rosebank. She seemed to be going through the motions. The first minister knew anyway that the decisions on production licensing had effectively been made by the UK government. Similarly, she could curry favour with environmentalists by opposing nuclear power in Scotland because any decisions on building new reactors would be taken by the UK prime minister.
But her apparent willingness to collapse an oil and gas industry that supports more than 100,000 well-paid jobs was regarded as reckless by many nationalists, not least in the north-east of Scotland.
Nonetheless despite Sturgeon’s departure, the ‘Scottish Question’ - which is also the ‘British Question’ - will not go away. Its origins are embedded in our political system, in fact more than one system. It arises in part from the incestuous nature of Scottish politics, from the stranglehold that a small cadre of SNP leaders has been able to extend over civil society, business and the public sector. This phenomenon seems to have played no small part in les scandales curieux that accompany Sturgeon’s resignation. There is no reason to assume that ordinary partisan politics is about to materialise in its wake, however.
Brexit has made Scottish independence a far more complicated prospect than it was before. It is now possible that we will look back on the referendum in 2014 as the moment Scottish independence made the most sense.
Fair or not, Brexit means that Scotland cannot dilute the dominating reality of England simply by leaving the union and joining the rump UK in a wider EU. If anything, Brexit has made England’s hulking presence next to Scotland even more pronounced, while demanding answers from the SNP that it does not seem ready or able to provide.
What happens at the border with England? Will Scotland introduce the euro? Will Holyrood accept common European debts? Will it rejoin the Common Fisheries Policy? For the SNP, Brexit has turned out to be both the casus belli for its second push for independence and a strategic disaster. The best thing that could happen to Scottish nationalism would be for Britain to rejoin the European Union.
For unionists, however, Brexit might be an unexpected weapon in their constitutional arsenal, but it is one whose very existence is a reminder of the union’s inherent Englishness. Today, it is impossible to escape the reality that the UK has ceased to function in any meaningful sense as a unified British state; it now operates as an incoherent and imbalanced union of separate entities whose English character has not been softened by devolution, but incalculably sharpened. The fact is, the more Holyrood dominates Scotland’s national life, the more English the actual national parliament in Westminster becomes.
This is a hole in the national barrel, draining the legitimacy of parliament and in time the union itself. The irony, then, is that just as Brexit acts as both an irritant and a salve to the threat of Scottish independence, devolution itself is a prime source of the union’s instability, the unbridgeable fault line in the body politic which no-one in Westminster is prepared to confront.
Watching Sturgeon’s shock resignation, I was reminded of the late Tom Nairn, the great academic pin-up of Scottish nationalism whose book The Break-up of Britain argued that the British state was destined to collapse like the Hapsburg, Tsarist or Prussian regimes of the 19th and early 20th centuries. “It is a basically indefensible and unadaptable relic, not a modern state,” wrote Nairn. “The only useful kind of speculation has assumed a geriatric odour: a motorised wheelchair and a decent funeral seem to have become the actual horizons of the Eighties.” Nairn’s book was published in 1977 and yet the geriatric old relic endures, still supported by half of Scottish voters, despite Brexit and the political crises in Westminster that have followed.
Yet Nairn cannot be dismissed as a false prophet. As a political force, Scottish Nationalism has been transformed since 1977. The SNP is now the dominant force in Scottish politics, with independence supported by almost half the population and most of the young. As a result, Britain is easily the most fragile power in western Europe, or indeed the wider Western alliance. Almost no other country - apart from Canada or Spain - is as close to breaking apart.
Nairn was also right to argue in the 2002 edition of his book, when devolution was being hailed as a great reform which would permanently obstruct the demand for independence, that the British state remained structurally unstable. “A new tide seeking real independence is forming itself beneath the facade of Blairism,” he wrote. “It will rise into the spaces left by New Labour’s collapse, and by the increasing misfortunes of the old Union state.” Thirteen years later, the SNP expelled Labour from Scotland, winning every seat but three.
Nairn, in my view, was right to see long-term structural challenges to the British state, but wrong to believe that this made it uniquely outdated, or somehow destined to collapse. The fact that after eight years as First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon has resigned, still unable to answer how Scottish independence will be enacted, is testament to the inherent challenges of secession, not just continuity.
The truth is both sides of the British Unionism and Scottish secessionism divide are making it up as they go along. None of us have been here, everything is new, and nothing is destined. Unionism has yet to offer coherent answers to the problems posed by devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland but not England; Brexiteers have yet to offer coherent answers to the problem of Northern Ireland and its border with the Republic; and Scottish nationalists have yet to offer coherent answers to the problem of seceding from Britain after Britain has seceded from Europe. Nicola Sturgeon departs as First Minister of Scotland having failed to find them. But her opponents should not crow, for they have not succeeded in this task either.
The rise and (temporary) fall of Scottish nationalism has been a failure of the British state - and much of the British establishment - to break free of its bizarre obsession with its own mortality and to properly confront the challenge of reconciling devolved with central government and efficient administration with political liberty. This must be done without recourse to any of the lazy bywords - take your pick of ‘parliamentary sovereignty’, ‘devo-max’, ‘federalism’ independence itself - that have promised so much and delivered nothing.
Nicola Sturgeon’s political demise will have inflicted a grave wound on the United Kingdom if it causes the British establishment within Whitehall and Parliament to forget, yet again, about the Union. In this respect, it may turn out to be her parting gift to the cause to which she has devoted her entire adult life.
I believe that it was the pro-Unionist Prof. Jim Gallagher - the UK Government’s most senior official advising on devolution and the constitution - who was supposed to have said during the 2014 referendum, “the problem is, the nationalists have all the music, while the unionists seem only to be able to communicate in dry facts and figures.” Nicola Sturgeon went out with an aria - one that brought tears of sorrow from her supporters and tears of joy from the rest of us - but the music will play on.
