How the SNP damaged the independence cause

If you really want to annoy a Scottish nationalist, tell them the 2014 Scottish independence referendum had a lot in common with Brexit. Well, what was the battle cry in both cases? It was ‘take back control’.

For all its internationalist rhetoric, the Yes campaign was – is – a campaign to erect borders against a union, the United Kingdom, that its advocates say does not serve the nation’s interests. Strip down the Leave campaign and it too was about erecting borders – albeit against a different union, the EU, which was claimed not to serve the nation’s interests. Indeed, historians may come to regard 2014 as the first manifestation of the national populism that has rocked Europe over the past decade. The 2016 Brexit referendum was just the next shoe to drop.

There were differences, of course, between Brexit and the Yes movement. Immigration was clearly a significant factor in the desire of red wall Brexiteers to leave the European Union – even though it has, ironically, increased since 2016. Immigration was never much of an issue in Scotland, largely because there’s been so little of it north of the border. But both Brexit and the Scottish independence campaign represented cries of pain from mostly working class people in ‘left behind’ communities reacting against globalism, neoliberalism and elite politics.

The Yes campaign may have been promoted by some middle class intellectuals, but its momentum came from large numbers of disillusioned Scots living in forgotten, post-industrial housing estates, who’d largely given up voting in conventional elections. The numbers tell their own story. Voter registration for the ‘indyref’, as it was popularly known, reached an astonishing 97 per cent. The turnout on the day was 85 per cent – higher than any British election in over a hundred years.

The Festival of Politics, as it was called, captured the imagination of the masses. People really did discuss things like a currency union and the future of the Bank of England after independence in supermarket queues. I witnessed this myself. Politics meant something to people for once. Of course, unlike Brexit, the campaign to leave the UK failed. 55 per cent voted to remain as part of the Union, against 45 per cent who voted for Scotland to become ‘an independent country’. It was a conclusive result. Yet while the Yes campaign lost the war, the SNP won the peace. It went on to return all but three Scottish seats in the 2015 ‘tsunami’ general election. Party membership soared to over 120,000. As the SNP went on to win election after election, politicians and metropolitan commentators started wondering if the Union was toast after all. It seemed only a matter of time – but demoralised unionists didn’t reckon on Nicola Sturgeon.

The SNP first minister who replaced Alex Salmond turned out to be the union’s greatest unintentional asset. She kept a lid on the independence movement just long enough for it to subside into frustrated apathy. She refused to endorse national populism and even tried to remove the word ‘national‘ from the SNP party name. Her ‘progressive’ policies – like hate speech laws and transgender self-ID – left the working class mainstream cold. And then there was Operation Branchform – the police probe into SNP finances – and her husband, the former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell was charged this year with embezzlement.

Over the last few years, the SNP went into steep decline and the independence movement has been left without a focus. Ten years on from the indyref, support for independence in opinion polls is, if anything, generally higher than in 2014. But there is sober realism now about the practicalities of becoming independent. Both Brexit and the Yes campaign promised more than they could possibly deliver. 

One of the less dignified slogans of the Yes movement plastered on billboards across Scotland asked: ‘What would you say to living in one of the world’s wealthiest nations?’ While economists mostly agreed that, in the longer term, there was nothing to necessarily stop Scotland becoming one of the wealthier small nations of Europe – in those days, Scotland’s oil and gas was still a valuable resource – only the most naive nationalist believed an independent Scotland would become richer overnight. Moreover, it was assumed in 2014 by both sides that Scotland would remain in the European Union. What no one quite expected then was that the UK would vote to leave and take Scotland with it.

Brexit led to much nationalist recrimination after Scots voted to remain by approximately 60 per cent – but leaving the EU was a poison pill for the independence movement. Unlike in 2014, an independent Scotland would now have to erect a hard border with England and set up a new currency in order to rejoin the EU. That could take a decade. And, ultimately, the divisive aftermath of Brexit has moreover diminished respect for referendums in general.

The final irony of 2014 is that if Scots had voted Yes, a chastened David Cameron would probably never have risked holding the Brexit referendum in the first place. Now there’s a counter-factual for Remainers to ponder…