Ten Years On: The Matter of Independence

Here David McCrone suggests a non-linear path to independence: more Caledonian zigzaggery than Caledonian antisyzygy. This is the latest in our #2014-2024 series reflecting on where we are ten years after the independence referendum. Read the other articles here.

Consider where we are, or thought we were. It’s probably fair to say that few of us would have predicted that we would be, ten years on, stuck in a constitutional cul-de-sac. However, as Tom Nairn was wont to advise: reculer pour mieux sauter (step back to jump better), so let us take him at his word. 

The Context

We are 25 years on from the founding of the devolved Scottish Parliament. It has become the key governing institution, trusted, almost regardless of its competences. We got the devolution conundrum: credit for achievements, even when it had no responsibility for them, while blame went to its UK equivalent, regardless. 

After the indyref in 2014, the momentum was with Yes; it carried SNP government forward with a project after seven years in power, and the stage seemed set for indyref2, at least in people’s expectations. After all, in 2014, the winners (No) lost, and the losers (Yes) won. There seemed to be an inevitable momentum. The SNP government got a new lease of life, and a new leader in Sturgeon. The rest is a messy history.

Two years later the materiality of Brexit seemed to give added force to a second Scottish referendum, given that the UK had left EU against wishes of people in Scotland.

The Implications

We find ourselves, however, in a constitutional cul-de-sac, unable to move forwards. We chose, deliberately, to ignore the black-letter law enshrined in the Scotland Act of 1998. Recall Kenyon Wright’s famous words at the Scottish Constitutional Convention of 1989: “What if that other voice we all know so well responds by saying, ‘We say no, and we are the state’? Well, we say yes – and we are the people.”  

Westminster retained the right to decide; Scotland could only ask nicely. Cameron ‘allowed’ us a referendum as a device to take the issue off the agenda; he succeeded, narrowly, only to come unstuck when he tried it again in 2016, and it led to Brexit. All those resounding phrases in the Claim of Right about parliament being the will of the people ran up against black-letter law; we just chose not to read the Scotland Act 1998 too carefully or ponder what it meant. The UK Supreme Court laid down the law and decreed that Holyrood is simply the creature of the British state, and has no independent right to exist, still less order a second referendum on Independence. Black-letter law lords might be expected to be legal literalists, but it leaves in limbo a nation within a state without recourse to an escape route. 

The Scottish Parliament, nevertheless, provided a political platform for the SNP which dominated Scottish politics since elected as a minority in 2007. The party seemed invincible until 2023 or thereabouts, when things began to fall apart quite quickly (and not because the Opposition was any good), in essence under the weight of its own contradictions. It never came to terms with the complex relationship between ‘movement’ (for Independence) and ‘party’ (winning elections and running public policy). The SNP never thought through what it was about, apart from favouring ‘independence’, but neither discussed properly what that meant, nor how to get there, and in which contexts. It never properly understood why it was successful from mid-2000s, nor why it fell from grace more recently. It wasn’t the first to have this problem. Think of Labour in Scotland in its own heydays, especially from 1979 until 2003. 

Above all, the SNP failed to do the necessary groundwork post-2014. The sensible route was to expand the 45% by doing serious homework on the economics of independence; how Scotland would get from A to B without major deleterious shake-up in its economy, and in a progressive way. Who wants to live in a country where the vast majority of people are worse off? That’s a hairshirt economy which would have little public appeal. True, doing the work on the economics of independence is necessary, if not sufficient, but getting a consistent 60% in favour of independence was surely necessary, if only to avoid a large minority of well-connected and disaffected No voters going around the place making trouble.

The SNP government kept running at the brick-wall of indyref2 despite the fact that unionists (especially at Westminster) were leery of allowing that, having been given a serious fright first time around. After all, why risk it? And trying plan B to get a majority of MPs in favour of independence looked like the feeble escape route that it was. We’ve reached the stage of saying to the SNP on whom we’ve heaped so many expectations: is that the best you can do? Which probably means: is that the best we can do?

The Impact

And yet we are at an odd moment in our politics: a nationalist party in trouble, and yet support for independence fairly constant at more than 40%. Consider the contrast with what was on offer before indyref 2014, when support for Independence was around one-third. Little wonder that allowing another indyref2 would be a big gamble for the British state, and is judged to be so by its power brokers, Labour and Tory alike. Once bitten, twice shy. We are not back where we started, because both the indyref 2014 and Brexit 2016 shifted the dials so that a new social cadre pro-Independence as well as ‘pro-European’ entered our politics.

And yet it is a mistake to think that this is simply a Scottish story. England moved steadily rightward, mobilising Leave support in 2016 such as to make ‘English nationalism’ a serious political force in the land. It is not so much that public opinion across the board has shifted rightwards in England – broadly speaking, it hasn’t. In 2016, at the height of the Brexit madness, 50% of people in England even considered themselves on the Left (in Scotland it was 60%). Mobilising ‘being English’ paid off handsomely for the Conservative party in 2016, and again in the 2019 British General Election, though it became a poisoned chalice in 2024. 

The key point to grasp, however, is this. Rather than people in England becoming ‘English’ to the detriment of being ‘British’, those who said they were ‘English’ were suffused with right-wing Tory politics. 

More generally, we see the global rise of right-wing populism, which the Conservative party mobilised on its right flank by squeezing out UKIP/Reform and its right-wing groupuscules, but then discovered that the incubus was inside the party, not outside the body. That hasn’t ended well for the Tories in 2024, but elsewhere in the west the centre-right has given space and airtime to further-Right parties almost everywhere we look. 

This is undoubtedly a crisis for democracy, at least as we’ve known it since 1945. Not many predicted the rise and rise of rabid, right-wing, populism from America to Russia and points in between. Furthermore, nationalism in Scotland is not populism; this is not Hungary without the goulash. 

So the world of politics is quite different from that in late 1990s, and not for the better. Forces of reaction, almost unthinkable then, have mobilised around issues of ‘cultural’ politics. Culture wars against black and brown people, migrants or not (a long dishonourable history of imperial racism was always to hand), and against unspecified ‘elites’, judges and the like, and more generally ‘progressive’ opinion. 

Furthermore, we have entered a world of silos, in which only those deep within them are judged to be able to speak about what it is like to be in there. The rest of us are left to imagine. I am reminded of the observation by Craig Calhoun (another sociologist) that there are two dominant perspectives anent global society: the utopia of cosmopolitan liberalism, and the spectre of reactionary nationalism or fundamentalism. He observed:

At least in their extreme forms, cosmopolitanism and individualism participate in this pervasive tendency to deny the reality of the social. Their combination represents an attempt to get rid of ‘society’ as a feature of political theory. It is part of the odd coincidence since the 1960s of left-wing and right-wing attacks on the state. (1)

The Bind of Binaries 

What does this have to do with us, here in Scotland? We’ve got used to thinking in binaries but they are straitjackets which do violence to people’s views. Abjure the temptation for binary divides, encouraged by a referendum mentality; are you for us or against us? Or perhaps you are both, indeed. True, much boils down to yes or no, if push comes to shove, but it’s not straightforward. The 2023 Scottish Social Attitudes survey confirmed the range of public opinion: 

1. Independent Scotland separate from UK and EU: 8%
2. Independent Scotland separate from UK but in EU: 40%
3. Scotland as part of UK with elected parliament with some tax powers: 34%
4. Scotland as part of UK with elected parliament with no tax powers: 6%
5. Scotland as part of UK without elected parliament: 9%

DK or N/A: 3%

You can read those figures in a variety of ways; but note that those in favour of devolution (with or without tax-varying powers) and those favouring independence in the EU are evenly matched (at 40%). And while over 90% of Indies (1 and 2) respectively would vote Yes in a referendum; over 90% of the rest would vote No.

Again, on Brexit, we reified the binaries: Remain and Leave, but that simply boils down a range of public opinion into binary simplicities. Again, using the 2023 survey data (question: ‘leaving aside ref on Britain’ membership of EU, what should Britain’s policy be?), we find the following:

Be outside EU: 16%

Be part of EU and try to reduce its powers: 32%

Be part of EU and try to keep EU’s powers as they are: 35%

Be part of EU and try to increase its powers: 8%

Work for the formation of a single European govt: 4%

DK or N/A: 5%

Support for the EU options is evenly matched: 35% for being part of the EU with current powers, and 32% in the EU with reduced powers. Only 12% want a more powerful EU, while 16% want Britain to be outside the EU. 

Similarly, divisions between ‘nationalists’ and ‘unionists’, or ‘sovereigntists’ and ‘unionists’, are not straightforward. Michael Keating and I have been exploring ideas of sovereignty by means of survey questions: ‘People in Scotland should have the ultimate right to decide for themselves how they should be governed’ and ‘Because a majority of people in the UK voted to leave the EU in the 2016 Referendum, people in Scotland should accept that decision’. Sovereigntists are those who agree with right to self-determination, as well as disagreeing with the view that people in Scotland were required to accept the pan-British – actually, English – view; while unionists do the opposite. Around 40% of people in Scotland are ‘sovereigntists’, and 16% are ‘unionists’, but there are 40% who are in-between (‘semi-sovereigntists’). 

Furthermore, even sovereigntists and unionists are content to think in sharing of responsibilities, post-independence, in terms of immigration, currency, armed forces, and matters of public policy including taxation and welfare, and farming policy. We concluded that we live in a world of layered and shared sovereignty. 

So complex realities abound out there in the real, not the binary, world. In any case, abusing one’s opponents as fools or knaves is not a good idea; and in Scotland, we’ve had a long history of excoriating our opponents as backsliders or heretics. Maybe it’s our religious history which does that. 

And in any case, what ‘independence’ means in 21st century requires proper debate. Surely it is a matter of degree, not of kind? Independence in Europe is fine – as long as we know what that means and accept the consequences. 

I am reminded of a comment by Neal Ascherson in his book Stone Voices (2002): 

The Scottish people do not see their future in a binary way, as an either-or. They simply wish Scotland to run its own affairs, as other nations do. For most people, devolution and independence are little more than different uniforms which can be buttoned over the single reality of self-government. (2)

We may wish it otherwise, or perhaps we take the view that the last 20 plus years have proved Neal wrong, but the evidence doesn’t suggest that. 

Where now for independence?

And what about the social base of home rule movements, be they for devolution or independence (and bearing in mind that these are not binaries either)? One of the common features across all modern societies is the growth of the service class (dienstklasse), and Scotland is no exception. This class appears to have distinct propensities to support Scottish independence; and it is as true of those who work in market services as well as public services, hence, private or public. 

The point is important, given the tendency (such as Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin’s book National Populism: The Revolt against Liberal Democracy, 2018) to dismiss ‘nationalists’ as just another form of national populism, as belonging to Hillary Clinton’s infamous ‘basket of deplorables’. 

Not at all so in Scotland. There is a highly educated, largely young, liberal and progressive class cadre, who were key to the coalition who gave the British state such a fright in the Scottish independence referendum of 2014. 

This is not a klasse für sich (class in itself), as Marx would have put it, acting out class consciousness as a social group, but a key bloc in a progressive coalition, and in 2014, mobilising alongside working-class voters; and bear in mind that many of them have been upwardly mobile through education, and have working-class origins, indeed, have a propensity to describe themselves as ‘working-class’. As Lindsay Paterson noted at the time of the 2014 referendum: ‘… not only may we conclude that the Yes intention was strong among left-leaning middle-class people; it was strongest among those left-leaning middle-class people who identified with working-class Scots, and among left-leaning working-class people who did not show much solidarity with working-class people across the border.’ (3)

So what is to be done? I offer you a new concept: not the Caledonian antisyzygy (done to death, and hard to spell), but Caledonian zigzaggery. By this I mean that progress is not continuous (nor is retreat for that matter, but I doubt that’s the route we’ll take). It’s like hill-climbing: often you have to zig-zag to get round difficult obstacles, rather than going vertical and risk falling off. It takes longer, but you get there more safely in the end. You keep your eyes on the prize, but you also work out the steps to get there. Utopians give us the vision-thing; and pragmatists map out the way. Lindsay Paterson has observed that ‘radical challenge is followed by pragmatic adjustment as the state cedes just enough power to keep the Union intact for the time being, a compromise which sows the seeds of the next phase of radical rebellion.’ And in similar vein, the literary scholar, Scott Hames: ‘The Dream’ is a story of cultural vanguardism in which writers and artists play the starring role in the recuperation of national identity, cultural confidence and democratic agency. (5)

It contrasts sharply with the less inspiring story I will call ‘The Grind’: the longer, thinner political history of devolution as a shrewd and sometimes grubby saga of electoral expediency, characterised less by stirring visions of democratic rebirth than ploys of cynical circumspection appointed to do or rather recommend, as little as politically possible.’ 

That’s how we got the Scottish Parliament of 1999 in the first place. Then, ‘politics’ in party political terms failed to deliver, and civil society took it on; think back to all those groups and organisations (often involving complex masquerades involving the same people wearing different hats) post-1992 when we didn’t get a Labour government at Westminster which was to be the way to get there (the vertical climb, as it were). We took it on ourselves, and many did heroic work of all sorts, without worrying too much about whether they were the ‘right’ people or not. If there is disappointment, maybe it lies in allowing the politicians and political parties to take over, because it doesn’t take much for the sectarian political turn to happen. 

We’ve reached a cul-de-sac, have we not? We’ve reached the point of having over 40% saying they are in favour of ‘independence’, but that isn’t good enough – and we need to work out why and what we mean in terms of making a difference to people’s lives. ‘Independence’ has got to matter out there. And we can no longer rely on crazy UK government and Boris Johnson, Truss, lettuces and the rest to provide the reactive politics; a sugar rush in the short run, but not much good in the longer. It’s a different ballgame now. That ball is in Labour’s court, but actually we own that ball; it’s sovereign; it’s oor ba’. We’ve had 25 years of ‘devolution’; there’s a parliament in Holyrood, and by and large, people think it does a good job, certainly compared with Westminster. They invest it with primacy; it’s oor ain. So where do we go now? What is to be done? Hereabouts the hard graft and thinking need to begin.

Notes 

1. Craig Calhoun, ‘”Belonging” in the cosmopolitan imagery’, Ethnicities, 3(4), 2003, 536.
2.  Neal Ascherson, Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland, Granta Books 2002.
3.  Lindsay, Paterson, ‘Utopian Pragmatism: Scotland’s Choice’, Scottish Affairs, 24(1), 2015, 42-3.
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caledonian_Antisyzygy
5. Scott Hames, The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution: voice, class and nation, Edinburgh University Press 2020, xii.

Feature Image Credit: Fergus Walker