Scottish Politics and the Twilight of the British State, Part 2

This is the second part of Gerry Hassan’s extended essay exploring the challenges Scotland faces in our economy, democracy and wider culture of public life. Read the first part here: Scottish Politics and the Twilight of the British State – Bella Caledonia

Part Two: The Missing Scotland, Need for New Stories and Embracing Post-Britain

Scottish politics needs to address a wider tapestry and range of issues than it did in the 2026 campaign and beyond. First, the campaign was conducted with little reference to the economy and the flatlining of Scottish and UK living standards since 2008. Even Grangemouth was hardly mentioned, despite recent trade union and community campaigning over its closure. Add to this a degree of fiscal dishonesty and illiteracy across all the parties in the campaign; one example being the recent Fraser of Allander Institute report which identified a £5 billion per annum gap within four years in public spending with huge consequences for the NHS, education and public services. None of the parties addressed this, with the commonplace SNP response being to talk about their record of balancing the budget as if the cold facts could be just wished away.

Second, 27 years of devolution have seen an absence of democratising power and institutions. To many in the SNP independence is an event, not a process, an abstract, not a detailed prospectus. This can be seen in the missing politics and policy of empowering citizens over two decades of SNP government. Many people feel this reduces politics to an insider Holyrood class thinking that they know best and treating people as passive spectators. Self-government has to be an ongoing process, not just about waiting for the day of independence.

A small start to extending democratisation would be to reform Scotland’s political structures, a task for which the SNP and political classes have no appetite. It cannot be that pre-devolution Scotland regularly altered its local government architecture – most recently in 1975 and 1996 – while the Scottish Parliament was established in 1999, and then since devolution there has been no change. Local democracy needs a dramatic re-envisioning with smaller local units to give voice to communities, while there is clearly a case for strategic authorities in some areas, at least for Greater Glasgow.

 

As well as this the Holyrood electoral system needs reform. The current Additional Member System (AMS) with its FPTP and list votes emerged from needing to keep the former, to not scare away Labour support, while being broadly proportional. Now, 27 years later, many voters find the two-vote system and list incomprehensible. Moreover, the list vote presents a choice from closed party lists, promoting the tyranny of party, which hardly empowers voters. Add to this that the recent Scottish election was the most electorally distortive in the Parliament due to the SNP’s overwhelming dominance of FPTP (57 out of 73), according to Ailsa Henderson of Edinburgh University, and the case for reform is overwhelming. This would entail moving to a more proportional system which empowers and offers more, and clearer, voter choice.

Third, related to this the democratic explosion of the 2014 indyref has been left to wilt, untapped and unchampioned. This movement had the potential to remake and reshape the body politic and public life of Scotland in unimaginable ways; harnessing the energies, enthusiasm and engagement of Scots up and down the land. Yet, this was never really explored by the SNP or Scottish Government post-2014, and a politics of ‘business as usual’ returned. But that spirit – which is more than a spirit of 2014 – but is about people learning to take power into their own hands – is still out there and could be nurtured and built upon.

Fourth, there is a conspicuous gap in SNP thinking, policy and practice in relation to culture. This is the terrain of Scottish culture and self-determination. This would entail an ambitious programme of celebrating how Scotland projects itself domestically and internationally; champion artists and creatives; address cultural representation of Scotland, and thinks about arts and culture in a way which touches the fabric of the nation. This would involve a unique Scottish story that rejects ‘the creative class’ idea of culture which reduces arts to an instrumental extension of economic policy – the original premise behind Creative Scotland. Positive developments may emerge from the defeat of Angus Robertson, who was Culture minister, who had a pronounced Edinburgh-centric idea of the arts with damaging implications for the rest of Scotland.

Fifth, how Scotland is portrayed in media and public sphere has wider consequences. The SNP has not talked about these issues since the early days of Salmond’s period as First Minister and the Scottish Broadcasting Commission. Self-determination should be about more than politics and politicians, and address how the ecology of public life, media platforms and public agencies contribute to policy discussions. The absence of a properly funded and constituted pro-independence think-tank after two decades of SNP rule is a glaring failure, says much about how the party leadership sees public life and the potential of a diversity of policy ideas. Instead, evidence suggests that they have given priority to policy from within the system which ministers think they can control, but which has contributed to the system capture of the SNP with all the damaging consequences which flow from that.

Finally, language and respecting others matters. One independent supporter told me post-2014: ‘There are no such things as No voters. There are only people who voted No.’ This insight avoids the lazy labelling of people that sees politics as fixed camps of unionists versus nationalists which is limiting and not something that not all people fit into.

The corrosive effect of dehumanising language should not have to be restated considering the debased, bigoted rhetoric of Reform and other politicians on asylum, refugees and immigrants. Tragically, it has to be restated. Scotland had a bitter, divisive debate on trans rights and its consequences for women’s rights. The deep-seated wounds of that debate still fester and can erupt at any point. Thus, in the aftermath of last Thursday where two openly trans MSPs were elected to Holyrood amid the celebration there was also a backlash. An article in The Scotsman called pro-trans MSPs ‘women deniers’ while a Twitter debate saw the claim that there were no new lesbian MSPs disproven followed by what amounted to ‘a proper lesbian test’ (which meant not supporting trans rights). Such a reactionary politics has damaging consequences; Cas Mudde, international expert on populism, noted: ‘Transphobia everywhere across the world is a gateway to the populist right.’

The need for a different SNP

Alongside the above, how political parties do politics is increasingly part of the problem in Scotland and the Western world. In our politics there is a specific set of challenges for the SNP considering their length of period in office, cumulative effect of incumbency, and weakness of their opponents. Beyond independence the governing credo of the party is vague – centre-left but in an ill-defined way, embracing civic nationalism without intellectually battening it down. A truism the world over is that nationalism is never enough: a point underlined by Fintan O’Toole in his critique of the implosion of the ‘Irish economic miracle’: Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger; Scotland is no exception.

 

These dynamics have become more acute for the SNP after two decades in office. James Mitchell of Edinburgh University believes that electoral dominance has come at a cost:

Senior members of the SNP have been socialised in their politics in an era in which the SNP has been in in office and the independence referendum in particular.  Politics for this generation is all about campaigning and government as the servant of campaigning.  It has won a succession of elections with the same formula – make promises with little or no thought to delivery, seek to polarise opinion and pick fights with London. 

He continues that: ‘Even the looming crisis in public finances are unlikely change anything other than intensify the claims that this is all the fault of the union. Scottish nationalism in its current form is not about self-government and taking responsibility but has become the debilitating politics of grievance.’

John Curtice expresses the future choices facing the Nationalists:

The SNP have to address the issue of what happens post-Swinney to the leadership. Is Stephen Flynn any good as a minister? Can he run a department: something he has had no experience at? Can Mairi McAllan who is unknown by the general public raise her profile? Flynn is good at rhetoric while McAllan is highly spoken of by people she works with. But can either be good at rhetoric while dealing with the challenges of government in a way which inspires confidence as Salmond and Sturgeon previously did.

Scotland has changed but we need a new political dispensation  

Scotland has changed dramatically in recent decades. This is particularly true in relation to how large numbers of Scots think of the ideas, stories and potential of the country. They see that we can have a collective power to change Scotland, organise and run things differently, and not look to the old top-down methods so beloved of party politicians. However, this division between a self-organising, DIY Scotland and a formal institutional Scotland, evident in the 2014 indyref in different visions of independence, has only grown more acute in the years since.

This is one of the major challenges facing those wanting change in Scotland. We have together collectively changed the idea of modern Scotland – what it stands for, how it sees itself and what its future could be. We have not done this uniformly or completely, but a shift has occurred that sees Scotland as self-governing, as a political community, and does not see Westminster as the primary political body in our future – irrespective of whether this translates into support for independence. In Alex Niven’s words in the New Statesman there is in Scotland along with Wales and Ireland ‘frequent agreement … [of] … the broad outline of the nationalist imaginary’ and breaking with the post-imperial delusions which still haunt England.

Yet at the same time there a seismic gap between the shift in how Scotland is seen, and the policy prospectus and institutional evolution of the country post-2014. This is one of the terrains that those who champion self-government and independence have to creatively address and work on.

New Collective Stories of our Future and outlining Post-Britain

Related to this are the stories that modern Scotland tells itself about what it is and what it wants to be. This did shift in 2014 and subsequently but there has been a degree of retrenchment and what could be called radical nostalgia. Central to modern Scotland’s sense of itself is the experience of the 1980s, Thatcherism and the reign of Thatcher. This is still an open wound for many in Scotland: a mobilising story, a foundational account, and a generational perspective passed down through the years. It was revealing that post-election SNP high-flyer Mairi McAllan when pressed on the BBC for reasons for independence after Brexit and Boris Johnson failed to fly cited Thatcherism and the imposition of the poll tax. 

This is revealing because the poll tax is weaved into the folklore of a large part of Scotland: imposed, hated, treating us as ‘guinea pigs’. But to cite it as one of the main reasons for independence 37 years after it was first implemented in 1989 is to embrace a politics more backward looking than future facing; relevant here is also that McAllan was born in 1993 – four years after its imposition on Scotland. 

‘The continual harking back to the 1980s and Thatcher’s butchering of Scotland in my mind uncomfortably mirrors Farage and Reform’s nostalgic view of 1950s monocultural England’ noted one observer of Scottish politics which many will find an uncomfortable comparison. What it reveals is that 27 years into devolution and 20 years into SNP rule, Scotland needs to nurture a new set of stories about who we are and what we aspire to be. The temptation to drink continually at the same well of anti-Thatcherism still has resonance but has become increasingly dried out and arid.

The SNP have become a victim of their own success here: buying into their own story of Scottish moral sentiment, centre-left communitarianism, and public virtue. They have in many respects become trapped by the power of their own story and need to find a way to step out of it to be part of the journey of a new set of stories. This is a predicament that many defining and potent collective stories can fall into: a point made powerfully in Seduced by Story: The Uses and Abuse of Narrative by Peter Brooks.

What would the future stories of Scotland be and who should tell them? The first is the easiest to explore. Such ideas should not be led by politicians or political parties, but instead come from artists, cultural practitioners, and creatives: the people who can make cultural self-determination real, and an array of people living and leading the self-organising, DIY Scotland beyond the official state.

The content of this future Scotland would be the sum of millions of interactions. But some of its contours are clear. It is not centred on Holyrood. It is not about ‘the normal powers of a normal Parliament’ as SNP politicians frame independence. Rather it would be centred on a Scotland where power, authority and legitimacy was dispersed across the country, where the bonds, connections and social contract which make us more than individuals but rather members of a civilised society would be central, acknowledging that we live together not just in a political, but ethical community.

This would be a vision of Scotland more about interdependence than independence: inter-independence both as a community and society, and about our place in the world. At the same time, it would celebrate the principle of self-determination not just as an abstract or one-off event about statehood but instead defining how we exercise power as individuals, communities and a nation.

Scotland needs to build on the shifting sense of itself, ‘the quiet revolution’ which made 2014 possible, and dare to tell new stories which create our future and a self-governing Scotland. This would be an empowering, open-ended project creating a Scotland of the imagination, linking it to everyday life and how we govern and see ourselves. As a first step we have to recognise that the big changes will not come from party politics on its own or via top-down processes. Rather they will only come from creating the spaces, institutions and stories which can nurture and encourage the revolution already underway – one centred on different ideas of power and authority which have autonomy and self-determination at their heart. 

As we live in the shadow of the twilight of the British state and the insipid, undead Starmer government comes to its predictable end, Scottish self-determinists will need to mobilise a set of national stories which aid us planning our future road map. This would speak to the many Scotlands, embrace our diversity and multiculturalism, and work with others across RUK in Wales, Northern Ireland and England to fashion a modern, outward-looking post-British set of identities and institutions to break with the atavistic, anachronistic English nation-state at the core of the present UK.

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