You might remember that after the Supreme Court verdict last autumn, the Tories’ Adam Tomkins seemed to panic because he realised that he and others had misstepped by being far too triumphalist. He had used a football score analogy to present the ruling as a crushing defeat for independence, which pretty obviously implied that the right to choose or reject independence lay in the hands of judges in London, rather than in the hands of the people of Scotland. So he hurriedly backtracked by deleting his tweet and then stressing that there was still a democratic route to independence, or to a vote on independence. He summed up that route as “persuasion”. He said the ruling had simply left the legal decision in the hands of the UK Government & UK Parliament – but it was obviously unrealistic to expect London to allow the independence question to be revisited when public opinion hadn’t changed much since the 2014 referendum. Support for independence had “only” increased from 45% to 50%, so barely no change at all. So what the SNP and the independence movement needed to do was increase the support in opinion polls for both independence and for a referendum to such a high level, and to a high level on such a sustained basis, that the UK Government would be bound to take note and allow a referendum.
What could possibly be wrong with any of that? Why shouldn’t democrats in the independence movement have no difficulty in agreeing with every word? In fact, almost everything is wrong with it. None of it is consistent with the principle of democratic self-determination, and a fair bit of it is not even consistent with the basic principles of democracy itself. As I’ve pointed out before, it grants a massive de facto constitutional role to opinion polls, and indeed elevates the results of opinion polls higher – far higher – that the results of general elections or Scottish Parliament elections. Quite apart from that being a barking mad thing to do, it couldn’t even possibly be considered democratically legitimate until and unless pollsters are under legal obligations to eliminate bias from both their questions and their methodology, in a way that all sides accept as fair. There used to be a time when the Tories would say “there’s only one poll that counts and that’s the poll of tens of millions of people on election day”. Now it appears their message is “there’s only one poll that counts, and that’s a YouGov poll of 1000 people that we quite like the look of”.
Tomkins also hinges everything on the narrative that there’s essentially no difference between a Yes vote of 45% and a Yes vote of around 50%. That’s plainly an absurdity that no true democrat could ever accept. 45% is what the BBC would – and repeatedly did – call a “decisive defeat”, whereas 50% is a tie. If you can’t see the difference between those two concepts, then the onus is on you to go away and reflect, not on those who take a different view.
Tomkins believes that there needs to effectively be a supermajority – that, say, 51% support for independence will not be enough to justify the people of Scotland being allowed to make a democratic decision. You only need to think about that for two seconds to see why it’s not consistent with democracy – he’s saying that if 51% (or quite possibly 54% or even 57%) of Scottish voters wish to leave the United Kingdom, the correct democratic outcome is for Scotland to be forced to remain in the United Kingdom against the majority’s wishes. Indeed, he believes the majority should not even be allowed a vote in which to express those wishes.
Tomkins makes the UK Government the arbiter, totally at its own whim, of what the threshold for “sufficient” support is, and also what the threshold for “sustained” is. That of course also means that it can change “the rules” at any time it wishes, so that if a threshold of 55% over one year is met, we’ll suddenly be told we actually need 58% over five years. Before we know it the threshold will stand at 75%.
The operative word in democratic self-determination is “self”. There’s no veto from the external master. The whole point of Nicola Sturgeon’s strategy last year was to ensure that an exercise in democratic self-determination would definitely take place, in line with the clear mandate for a referendum received by the Scottish Government in 2021. If the Supreme Court ruled in our favour, the preferred option of a conventional referendum would go ahead as planned, and if it ruled in the other way, that would make no practical difference because we would simply move on to a de facto referendum. In either outcome we would define a mandate for independence as a simple majority of 50% + 1. The decision would be the decision, and it wouldn’t have to be “sustained” for seven years of 73,241 successive opinion polls showing Yes at 63%+.
What Adam Tomkins is inviting us to do is to convert the Supreme Court ruling into a real defeat by ditching the de facto referendum, accepting the UK Government will make all the decisions from now on, and getting on with trying to impress the UK Governments with epic – and almost certainly unattainable – sustained supermajority runs in opinion polls. Not a single person in the SNP should have any problem in dismissing that as the anti-democratic outrage that it is. Instead, very senior members of the party, including the “free by 2050” faction led by Stewart McDonald and Alyn Smith, the continuity leadership candidate Humza Yousaf, the MSP Tom Arthur, and frankly even Kate Forbes, have been queuing up to accept the Tomkins worldview practically word for word. Don’t believe me? Well, consider the following –
1) Nicola Sturgeon intended that an independence mandate should be based on a simple majority on the day of the decision. Do Humza and co accept that, or do they believe that far more than 50% + 1 should be required and over a much longer period of time?
2) Nicola Sturgeon’s purpose in having at a de facto referendum was that Scotland would control the process by which an act of self-determination could be made – we cannot, of course, control whether the UK Government respects the result or acts upon it, but that’s a separate matter. Do Humza and co agree with that principle, or do they agree with Tomkins that instead of organising a democratic event for ourselves, we should hand over all control to the UK Government and get on with the near-impossible task of trying to “impress” the UK Government into “giving” us something?
3) Nicola Sturgeon believed that the decision on whether or not a democratic vote on independence is held should be made by the people in an election. Thus, because the people clearly decided in 2021 that a referendum should be held, there would definitely have to be either a referendum or a de facto referendum by the end of this term of office in 2026. Do Humza and co accept that principle, or do they agree with Tomkins that the Supreme Court ruling was a real defeat and that therefore the 2021 mandate for a referendum should be dishonoured, and that in future all decisions on referendums should be entirely at the discretion of the UK Government, informed only by whether there are ill-defined “high enough” numbers for Yes in opinion polls of 1000 people run by private polling firms such as YouGov?
I included Kate Forbes above in the list of people surrendering to the Tomkins worldview, and I think that’s unavoidable given one or two clear statements she’s made during the leadership campaign so far. However, call me a hopeless optimist, but the type of people supporting Ms Forbes does still leave me with some lingering hope that a victory for her would not quite lead us into the graveyard for independence that Mr Yousaf’s candidacy represents. Obviously by far the best outcome would be an outright win for Ash Regan, but whether that’s realistically possible, I’m not sure.
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