The settled will

This week First Minister John Swinney unveiled details of his plan for independence, which rests upon the SNP securing a majority in Holyrood after next year’s Scottish elections. An opinion poll published on Thursday, the first Scottish opinion poll in a while, found that the SNP is within shouting distance of securing a majority in Holyrood, but a far more likely outcome is a pro-independence majority consisting of the SNP and the Scottish Greens. The First Minister argues that the result of the 2011 Scottish elections set a precedent.

Famously, in that election, the SNP under Alex Salmond achieved the seemingly impossible feat of winning an absolute majority in a voting system which had been designed by Labour and the Lib Dems in the 1990s to make it vanishingly unlikely that any party could win an absolute majority. Should the SNP repeat that victory next year, and win a fresh absolute majority in Holyrood, the First Minister argues that Keir Starmer would be democratically compelled to introduce changes to the Scotland Act in order to give the Scottish Parliament the legal right to hold a binding independence referendum.

The big problem with this plan is that no one believes that Keir Starmer and the anti-independence parties will play ball. Assuming that the SNP does indeed win an absolute majority, Starmer will merely find some reason to shift the goalposts as the anti-independence parties did following the Scottish elections of 2021 prior to which it had been the accepted political wisdom in Scotland that the democratic route to an independence referendum was for the SNP together with the other independence parties to win a pro-independence majority in Holyrood.

That’s exactly what happened in 2021 following an election campaign which was dominated by the question of a second independence referendum. The record pro-independence Holyrood majority which was won in that election did not result in an independence referendum. It resulted in a campaign of gaslighting and goalpost shifting by the anti-independence parties which was aided and abetted by most of the Scottish media, which disgracefully abdicated from its supposed role of holding power to account and instead collaborated in traducing the democratic will of the people of Scotland as expressed through the ballot box, britnat-splaining away the election results.

Should the SNP break the d’Hondt system a second time and win that sought after absolute majority, they would on current polling do so with significantly less than 50% of votes cast in the next Holyrood election. Starmer, Sarwar, Findlay, and whichever former Tory frother winds up leading the Reform UK contingent in Holyrood will then pivot to the claim that a majority of Scots don’t want another independence referendum and will be enabled and legitimised in so doing by Scotland’s overwhelmingly anti-independence media.

There’s no shortage of alternative proposals for achieving Scottish independence, some of which are frankly implausible, despite having the support of a small but vocal band of online cheerleaders.

The bottom line is that we are where we are because a belief in independence is not – yet – the settled will of the people of Scotland. I believe that there is now a small but solid majority in Scotland for independence and that majority will only increase when we do have a second independence referendum campaign. However we are not there yet, a large and influential minority part of the Scottish population, a part which enjoys the validation of the overwhelming majority of the media in Scotland, remains unconvinced about the need for independence. It’s the existence of that segment of the Scottish population which grants a fig leaf of supposedly democratic legitimacy to Westminster’s refusal to concede to another independence referendum.

It’s also the existence of that large and highly influential minority which dooms to failure any attempt to cut through the Gordian knot of Westminster obduracy by making a unilateral declaration of independence. Such a strategy can only succeed when independence is already the settled will of the people of Scotland. We’re not there yet.

Some supporters of a UDI strategy have cited historical precedents such as Norway’s independence from its union with Sweden in 1905. On 7 June 1905 the Norwegian Parliament, the Storting, passed a bill declaring that the Union had been dissolved because the Swedish King Oscar II had effectively abandoned his functions as King of Norway by failing to appoint a new government following his vetoing of a bill passed by the Norwegian Government calling for the establishment of separate Norwegian consulates abroad, despite foreign policy supposedly being a matter for the union of Norway and Sweden. Rather than agree to Oscar’s veto, the entire Norwegian Government resigned. Oscar then refused to accept the resignations.

This unilateral declaration that the Union was at an end was followed by a referendum in Norway on 13 August 1905 asking the Norwegian electorate, which at that time consisted only of men, whether they agreed to the “already completed dissolution of the union.” This form of words was chosen to pre-empt the insistence of the Swedish Government that the Union could only be dissolved by mutual consent. The referendum produced an overwhelming result in favour of dissolving the Union. Out of 368,392 votes cast, only 184 votes were cast against dissolving the Union. Turn out was 85.4% and there were only 3519 blank or invalid votes. 99.95% voted in favour of dissolving the Union with Sweden.

Naturally the Norwegian Government already knew that Norwegian public opinion was massively in favour of ending the Union with Sweden long before it unilaterally dissolved it. That’s a fundamental difference between what happened in Norway and where Scotland is now.

In most other European nations which have become independent in recent times there has been overwhelming support for independence. In Kosovo, which also made a unilateral declaration of independence, the Albanian population which made up over 80% of the population during the period of Yugoslav rule was overwhelmingly supportive of independence. The 4% of the population who were Slavic speaking Muslims likewise supported independence, as did the Turkish and traditionally Muslim Roma minorities who between them made up some 3% of the population. Only the 15% of the population which identified as Orthodox Christian Serbs was implacably opposed to independence, they were and are a minority concentrated in areas of the north of Kosovo where they form a majority. When the Albanians of Kosovo unilaterally declared independence during the break up of Yugoslavia they knew it was the settled will of the Albanian and Muslim majority.

The lesson for Scotland is that there is no clever-clever plan, no constitutional magic which can bring about Scottish independence before it becomes the settled will of the people of this country.

That said, I believe we are getting close to the tipping point when Scottish independence becomes the settled will of the people. The UK is not just drifting to the far right, Keir Starmer is hell bent on driving us into the arms of the fascists in a charabanc bedecked with English and British flags. There is no place for a distinctly Scottish political identity in an English nationalist UK presided over by Nigel Farage. All there is is the reduction of Scotland to the status of a historic region within a unitary and centralising Anglo-British state with no greater political relevance than East Anglia or Northumbria. There are some in Scotland who might welcome that, but they are a small minority.

The next Westminster general election could prove to be an effective four way de facto referendum with pro independence parties winning in Scotland and Wales, parties of Irish unification winning in Ireland, and the English ethno-nationalists of Farage’s Reform UK winning in England. I do not believe that the UK can survive such a development and it would serve to boost the existing support for independence in Scotland, which is already 50% plus, into an unarguable and decisive majority, the settled will of the people.

However in order to take advantage of that radically changed political landscape, it is imperative that Scotland has a Parliament in Edinburgh with a strong pro-independence majority which has a mandate to press Scotland’s case. That’s why it’s crucial that Scotland returns a Scottish Parliament with a pro-independence majority and that means voting for the only pro-independence parties which can get their candidates elected. The Alba experiment has failed and the other micro-parties do not register with anyone outwith their small bands of vocal online supporters. Only a vote for the SNP or the Scottish Greens can get results in terms of MSPs, given the current state of polling, the SNP will need list seats as well as constituency seats.

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