For a Scottish Republic

Just when you think nothing will ever change, and the dark nights and the short days of Midwinter encourage you to despair, a glimmer of light beckons. Winter is here. Spring is coming.

A poll by Norstat, (formerly Panelbase) asked this week: If Scottish independence meant that Scotland would be a republic – meaning the King would no longer be the head of state, so Scotland’s governance would be fully democratic and not a monarchy – how would you vote if there were an independence referendum tomorrow?

The idea of a Scottish Republic moves independence support from 54% to 59%.

The poll raises a hundred questions. The first of which, is this real? Does this stand up? Is this an outlier? We’ll see, I doubt it.

What I think we are seeing is a generational shift without memory of the Second World War, it has a memory of the catastrophic behaviour of the Windsor (very) extended family, and more recently the disgraceful handling of Prince Andrew and Prince Harry. What having a Royal family means is not unclear to see, it is very clear to see. The idea of a commitment to Royalism has collapsed before our eyes just as the idea of Britishness has. They are conjoined and doomed twins.

This poll, if it stands up, changes the game completely. The notion that we should construct a softly-softly case for independence is shattered. The idea that we should construct a case on the basis of ‘not frightening the horses’ is gone. The horses, in terms of Britain and the Union have bolted. They’ve gone. The idea of replaying the 2014 case for independence has gone too.

Many (most) of the players of 2014 have left the stage: Queen Elizabeth, Alex Salmond, George Osbourne, David Cameron, Nicola Sturgeon, and many more.

We are in a completely new landscape and this new ground doesn’t have faith in the previously ‘unifying’ idea of a British monarchy. This might seem like a constitutional sideline, an interesting but irrelevant bit of detail but it is far bigger than that. Without the endless bunting propaganda of coronations, births, deaths, marriages and social media distortions Britain is reduced to its harsh realities: destitution, food banks and grotesque inequality.

This is a challenge to the independence parties and movement. How do you create a movement that responds to this?

The data from the polling suggests that, as Believe in Scotland lays out:

“Once again, a republic garners more support for independence in every age group with the oldest (and most pro-union) males and females aged 55+ jumping 2% and 3% respectively. The biggest increases in the Males 35-54 increasing 10% and Females 35-54 increasing 9%.

Middle class support for independence jumps 3% and working class support jumps 6%. Remain voters increase 5% and even those that voted to leave the EU increase 2%. Let’s spell it out – an independent Scotland being a republic not only takes independence support from 54% to 59%, it increases support for independence in every age group, gender, political party support, social class and place of birth category.”

The cynic, or the skeptic, or the realist, would say, “So what?” We don’t have a routemap to independence, the SNP have been useless, the British state have the whiphand”. All is despair, Branchform and Reform UK.

I mean, that’s understandable but also too much, or too little.

The fact is that events march on and circumstances and people change. Alex Salmond, despite his recent canonisation, was both brilliant and problematic. He was, and Alba’s experience reinforces this, a Marmite figure. This polling amplifies and accelerates the idea that a new case for independence would be completely different in nature and tone. It suggests that to create a case for a new Scottish democracy it would be far more attractive to frame it as a real change rather than a partial, apologetic change.  Elections across the world suggest that people are dissatisfied with continuity and status quo and are yearning for rupture and deep change. This impulse is relentlessly exploited by the populist right, but it mines a deep seam of anger and dissattisfaction.

We know this from the experience of 2014 where the people were motivated by the glimpse of actual change. So what would this look like?

An independent Scotland brought into being on the basis of the vision of being a Republic is a very different thing than what was proposed in 2014. It would be first of all a generational rupture, a visceral and intellectual rejection of the whole concept of the Union, and both a far more attractive idea to young and future Scotland, and a far bigger threat to the British establishment. The forces that will oppose this will be scared and angry and would undoubtedly revoke and regurgitate a version of Project Fear.

I think that would fail badly. Not only have the demographics of Scotland changed dramatically in the last decade, and we don’t have to be too ghoulish to know what this means, but the idea of the monarchy has effectively collapsed. Project Fear 2 won’t work.

Britain is a severely diminished reality and concept in 2024. It won’t fly.

To be fair, Labour had a whole series of chances. The much flagged and flaunted blueprint for constitutional change mapped out by Gordon Brown came to nothing at all, the social change promised by the new Labour government also came to nothing at all, other than a dispiriting Blairism re-warmed and a litany of promises betrayed. They had their chance to show that Britain was a reformable, mobile, dynamic place. It isn’t. It’s a stagnant broken backwater, even more in the post-Brexit miasma, a landscape haunted by the ghouls of Prince Andrew, Kemi Badenoch, Nigel Farage and their entourage of strange celebrants.

The irony is we didn’t break Britain, we are walking into the broken Britain destroyed by Unionists, Royalists, and people who scavenged on the entrails of a sold-off, privatised commodity. The irony is that all sorts of people: May, Cameron, Sunak, Brown, Starmer could all have done more – something – to recreate and nurture a sense of Britain and Britishness. They couldn’t, or didn’t, partly out of a smug sense of entitlement and condescension – the idea that the constitutional and ‘those Bloody Scots’ – had been put to bed and shut up permanently – but also just out of a complete cluelessness about what to do next. I mean, what is Britain anymore? They, like you and me, have no idea. They have no idea how to construct or portray a modern Britain other than some pathetic shouting about ‘Britannia Unleashed’ and other strange post-imperial rants.

So what would a Scottish Republic look like and what would its consequences be?

Despite a lineage that goes through Maclean and Connolly and Burns, a Scottish Republic would be less about historical heroes and more about facing the future. If these polling figures are to be believed it propels the case for independence into new terrain. A generation of people and more have grown up with the spectacle of royalty as celebrities, and with the subsequent impermanence of Love Island. Harry and Megan upped and left because they were trapped in a racist dysfunctional family. Of all the open goals for Britain to re-present itself as a salvageable entity, open to reform and modernisation, this was it.

Just as Starmer’s new Labour government was presented as an opportunity to right the wrongs of the long years of Tory rule, these were Britain’s last hopes to make the case for itself, and it failed. Gordon Brown’s blueprint for constitutional reforms – that had been talked up for years – were quietly shelved and this week Labour stuffed the House of Lords with ridiculous peerages, the chumocracy was cranked up again and Peter Mandelson was announced as our American envoy.

A Scottish Republic would do three things at once.

First, it would re-cast Scotland and the independence movement into a new light. It would cast off the shroud of deference and the couthy Balmoralism of twee nationalism. Second, it would do what was almost feared most, it would create the threat of a good example to the rest of the UK. Third, it would create that which is intolerable to the Union – it would articulate difference. If devolution was all about continuity and proving the malleability of the Union to change, declaring the goal to be a Republic fundamentally changes everything. This would be brilliant and intolerable.

As Morrissey pointed out prematurely The Queen is Dead, and with her died a generation-load of good wishes and constitutional karma. In 2014 the Queen relinquished her supposed neutrality and whispered political statements that David Cameron seized on with glee. Now, the Union in defiance of a move to a Republican stance would have to appeal to King Charles and Queen Camilla for such soundbites, and that is not the same thing at all.

Last year’s coronation allowed The Mail to have a go at this, suggesting that this was somehow, the ‘People’s Coronation’, and, even more strangely, this would allow us ALL to swear allegiance. We did not.

This exercise in fealty failed miserably. As Tom Nairn put it: “…the stage hypnotists and sullen audience were compelled to go through their motions – the reproduction of a traditional Britain, crowned by Monarchy and attired in the feudality of Lordship, the reliquaries of caste and imperium, a domain of narrative cast in the familiar immemorial tones of stable repetition. They felt obliged to go on living as if Britain had not died, with troupes of hypnotists encouraging viewers in their suspension of disbelief…”

It is possible, I suppose, that the remaining constituent parts of the UK would remain a monarchy, but it would be historically absurd and an extreme form of exceptionalism. Perhaps, given the mood, a Scottish Republic would create an English backlash, cleaving to the Crown and tradition in a boosted new form of nationalism. It could however go the other way, and draw on and encourage the latent progressive forces of republicanism. This could be the Roundheads and Cavaliers Culture War.

But a Republic would have other consequences as it would mean the break-up of the remnants of feudal order and landed power that is the connective tissue of huge estates with the highlands as a symbolic and actual playground for the aristocracy. That would be broken up and – what would really terrify and motivate the forces that benefit from the established order – would be England finally alone.

Nairn again. Writing in Pariah (Verso) he suggests: “An explanation is that when many English intellectuals and politicos are forced to think about ‘Britain’ and England together they do go ‘mad’. This is not because they are those ‘whom the gods wish to destroy’ as Enoch Powell once darkly hinted. Rather, it is as if the ‘one people/race’ dilemma triggers the equivalent of a fit, or spasm, from which they find themselves momentarily unable to escape. The low semantic barrier between ‘British’ (dead but Great) and ‘English (desirable yet intolerable) sets up something like a computer loop. A form of Automatic Writing takes over. Normal debates degenerate into séances, during which ancestral spirit-guides appear and fight it out in the respective craniums, relaying encrypted messages alternately from Beowulf (or J.R.R. Tolkien), Edmund Burke and the speeches of Churchill. These are usually mixed-up with protestations of antiracism, outreach affidavits and platitudinous conclusions like Scruton’s. Studying these we can see that for the subjects of ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ have become like Siamese Twins. There can be no question of sacrificing the one to save the other. What the Union of Britannic watchdogs demands is that at all costs both must be kept alive.”

So, a Republic would be both enticing and motivating for a whole generation of Scots that could push independence into the sort of support that was seen for devolution a quarter of a century ago, and send Unionist forces into apoplexy.

If this was to transpire then it becomes irresistible. Numbers bubbling along at 45% can be rubbished, contained and rejected. Numbers bubbling along at 65% cannot. Or they can but the stakes become considerably higher.

So how might this be moved forward?

If conservative forces within the SNP might continue to resist a move to an explicitly Republican position, others with a glance at the polling would certainly not. A likely way to change course would be to declare a body to explore the constitution of an independent Scotland and have a modern republic at its centre. Suddenly, many who were uninterested by the previous outline of a future Scotland, still basically attached to key pillars of British statehood, would be interested and motivated. What we’ve learned, and this shouldn’t have been so difficult to understand, is that when you offer people real change, they are motivated by it, and greatly so.

People sense and know there are things that are fundamentally wrong about our society and our politics. This is why the bland alternatives of Keir Starmer and Kamala Harris have suffered so badly in the court of public opinion. Yes Starmer was elected, but his fall from grace is so spectacular (and so self-inflicted) as to be the last gasp of the Union.

Given the way Scotland has been treated since the Brexit debacle, and given the extraordinary governments of May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak, it is extraordinary that support for Scottish independence isn’t far higher. Given the social conditions we have all witnessed, and as capitalism cracks and burns under its own far-advanced meta-crises, is it really so surprising that people want real change? Given the decades of farcical behaviour of members of the royal family, what is surprising is that idea of republicanism haven’t come forward much earlier. But the reality is that monarchism and deference just aren’t hard-wired into the Scottish psyche in the same way as they are in English popular culture. This presents a real problem and a real opportunity. It is one we should grasp with both hands.