For those of you who still wear your WWJD bracelets, you need wonder no longer, because the great man’s latest blogpost leaves little doubt that the answer to the question is: give up, throw in the towel. In fact, Jeggit isn’t just giving up on independence for the fabled “generation”, but for two generations, judging from his comment about how our grandchildren might yet get it right.
Does Jeggit have a point? Short answer: no. If the independence cause was as dead as he seems to believe, Scotland would look very different from how it does today. It would look, in short, like the Scotland of twenty years ago. There would be a unionist coalition government at Holyrood, with no indication in the opinion polls of a pro-independence alternative being viable. The SNP would have only a tiny handful of seats in the House of Commons. Support for independence would be in the doldrums. All of those things could very well happen again at some point in the future, but for the time being there’s absolutely no sign of it.
Instead, what do we have? A majority pro-independence SNP-Green government, which would almost certainly be re-elected if there was an election tomorrow. Pro-independence parties (the SNP, Alba and Margaret Ferrier) have over 80% of the Scottish seats in the Commons, and that situation might actually improve if there was a fresh election. And support for independence stands at either 50% or 55%, depending on which of the two most recent polls you believe. We are, in a nutshell, in a phenomenally strong position. We have the means to bring about a vote on independence, and we have a realistic chance of winning that vote if it occurs.
There is, admittedly, a practical problem. Our pro-independence government has been hijacked by an SNP leadership faction that probably still believes in independence in principle, but is far more preoccupied with sustaining itself in power. If, as a by-product of staying in power, independence was somehow to magically fall into these people’s laps, they would be happy enough about it. But they’re certainly not going to take any risks to make it happen. And in the real world, independence can’t and won’t happen without risks being taken.
But this is a practical problem with a practical solution. A useful comparison is the ban on fox-hunting in England, which was brought in under the Blair government. Labour were elected on a commitment to legislate for a ban, but the leadership had no intention of actually doing anything about it because they didn’t want to offend small ‘c’ conservatives in the countryside. In the end, though, the Labour grass-roots and backbench MPs piled on enough pressure that the leadership realised they would pay too high a price by failing to act.
So the task for all of us is to make the SNP leadership realise that they will pay heavily if they fail to honour their promise of holding a referendum in 2023. That pressure can come from within the SNP, or from outside via support for Alba. Jeggit, however, insists that Alba will never command majority support in Scotland for as long as it holds its current position on the trans issue. That’s odd on two counts: firstly, opinion polls convincingly show that Alba’s position on the trans issue is shared by the majority of the population, while Jeggit’s position is shared by a relatively modest minority. And secondly, Alba don’t actually need to command a majority anyway – they just need 5-10% of the vote to force the SNP to think about what it would take to win those voters back. And we all know what it would take – genuine action on independence.
