I think the main reason the last six months or so have been so uncomfortable for me is that I’ve found myself midway between two warring camps – and instead of pleasing everyone, that’s ended up offending almost everyone. To give an example, I was – on balance – happy about the election result, because the number one objective had to be to retain the pro-independence majority, and the number two objective was to increase pro-indy representation. Both of those were achieved. The number three objective from my point of view was a presence for Alba, and we didn’t get that, but two out of three isn’t bad. That perspective is totally alien to the hardliners who inhabit the comments sections of certain blogs, and who have somehow convinced themselves that the result was a dreadful (and perhaps fatal) blow to the independence cause.
But on the other extreme are the “just trust Nicola” true believers, who presumably think that if we just sit back and relax, an independence referendum will be along in a jiffy. Well, maybe not quite in a jiffy, but “in due course, in the fullness of time, at the appropriate juncture”. I can only suggest those people haven’t been paying attention for the last four years. I was thinking back last night to an episode in early 2017, when Bella Caledonia summoned a number of bloggers and pro-indy new media people to a sort of summit in Edinburgh to “resolve our differences” in preparation for the independence referendum that Nicola Sturgeon had just called. It didn’t really work out that way, because I ended up having a sit down argument with Angela Haggerty (she also clashed with another well-known blogger, who unlike me had the admirable knack of staying calm and retaining a beaming smile throughout!). But what’s funny in retrospect is that, whatever our differences, the one thing that united us is that we were all taking it as read that an independence referendum was actually going to happen. It hadn’t really occurred to anyone that Nicola Sturgeon’s “announcement” would prove to be utterly worthless. Is there anything more tragic than devoting one’s energies to “winning” an election or referendum campaign that you think is taking place but isn’t?
In 2016, the SNP asked us for a mandate to hold an independence referendum in the event of Scotland being dragged out of the EU. We gave them that mandate. They didn’t use it. OK, the pandemic would have made it difficult or impossible to hold a referendum between March 2020 and now, but that doesn’t explain or excuse the inertia in the preceding four years. The most logical time to hold a referendum would actually have been before Brexit occurred in January 2020. And if anyone seriously believes a referendum would have been held last autumn if coronavirus hadn’t intervened, they’re deluding themselves.
The SNP also asked for a “triple lock mandate” for a referendum in the 2017 UK general election. They explicitly said that would be attained if they won a majority of the 59 Scottish seats. That’s exactly what happened, but that mandate was dishonoured too – and what was particularly cynical was that the “triple lock” rhetoric was practically disavowed in the middle of the election results programme.
This month, the SNP asked us for yet another mandate for a referendum to replace the ones they’ve wasted. We gave them it (and I’m fully entitled to say “we” because I voted SNP on the constituency ballot and urged others to do the same), but I think even some loyalists now recognise that this is the end of the road in terms of asking for more and more mandates for exactly the same thing. As voters we’ve gone the extra mile for the SNP – we owe them nothing more, and it’s now time for them to deliver on a referendum and to deliver on independence. If they come back to us in 2026 with more of the “make London listen” stuff, we can safely assume we’ve been taken for a ride.
The task at present for those of us who aren’t in positions of power is not to re-win a mandate we already have, and it’s not to win a referendum that is not taking place. You can persuade all the soft No’s you like, but if those people never actually get the opportunity to vote Yes, the whole exercise is a monumental waste of time. No, the focus of our efforts must be to ensure that a referendum or equivalent democratic event actually occurs before the mandate expires in 2026. And that, frankly, means applying pressure on the SNP leadership to keep their word in this parliament in a way they didn’t in the last.
That can be done externally by building up Alba, or it can be done internally via the SNP’s own democratic structures. But one way or another, it has to be done.
