Nicola Sturgeon: “In the course of next year, I will initiate the process necessary to enable a referendum before the end of 2023.”
In fairness to Ms Sturgeon and the rest of the SNP leadership, that’s a reasonably clear and specific promise compared to some we’ve heard in the recent past – which means it will be possible to objectively determine on certain cut-off dates whether the promise has been kept or broken. If, by 31st December 2022, action has not been “initiated” that would “enable” a referendum to take place, then the promise will have been reneged upon – and that initiated action will clearly have to go significantly further than simply sending another letter requesting a Section 30 order, because it’s abundantly clear by now that would only result in a firm “no” from London and a dead end. Realistically, the minimum required for the promise to have been kept will be the tabling of referendum legislation in the absence of a Section 30.
If you read carefully, the promise does not, strictly speaking, require a referendum to have been actually held by 31st December 2023, but from Ms Sturgeon’s other comments it’s clear that the only reason envisaged for delay beyond 2023 would be the continuation of the pandemic. So if normal life has more or less resumed by 2023 but no referendum occurs by the end of that year, it’ll also be reasonable to conclude the promise has been broken.
If words and promises were enough to get the job done, we’d all be able to relax on the basis of what Ms Sturgeon has now said. But unfortunately, there have been very similar promises made in the past about the dates by which action would be taken, and those were not honoured. Even after we were marched back down from the top of the hill in the wake of – ironically – the SNP’s landslide victory in the 2017 general election, we were still being told that there would be a referendum once the terms of Brexit became clear, but before Brexit actually occurred. That simply did not materialise, and no, Covid is not an alibi for that. Brexit Day was at the end of January 2020, and the threat of Covid was not being taken seriously in this country until late February 2020.
I totally understand the desire to give Ms Sturgeon the benefit of the doubt and assume she means what she says, because I fully shared that desire myself in 2017. There are still hardcore Wings devotees who excoriate me for my supposed “naivety” back then, but I would strongly argue that it was rational to cut the SNP leadership a little slack at that point. Less than three years had passed since the first indyref and there was not yet any track record of broken promises. It would have been wildly premature to assume bad faith – but it’s certainly not premature now.
Some people retrospectively justify the lack of a referendum before Brexit by saying “it would have been suicidal to hold one” – well, I’m sorry, but that’s just nonsense. The results of referendums are decided during referendum campaigns, not before, and the idea that Yes in the mid-to-high 40s was not a good enough starting position to make victory a possibility is just so ludicrous as to be, frankly, not even worthy of serious consideration. In any case, there were no conditions attached to the promise of a pre-Brexit referendum.
So I really urge people who have remained loyal to the SNP leadership to make this latest promise your line in the sand. Believe it to be genuine, by all means, but if it turns out not to be, admit to yourself what has happened. Don’t pretend to yourself that the promise was never really made or that it somehow didn’t really count, or that the next promise to hold a referendum in 2030 or 2035 or whenever is somehow the ‘real’ promise.
This is it. A referendum by the end of 2023, and certainly the start of a referendum process by the end of next year – or it’ll be time for the current SNP leadership to make way for people who are actually serious about independence.
