This isn’t actually a premeditated attempt to demonstrate Professor John Robertson was comically wide of the mark when he said I was in a “gang” of four that also included Robin McAlpine, Stuart Campbell (!) and Craig Murray, but as it happens I was scathing about Stuart Campbell in my previous post, and in this post I’m going to be critical – or at least quizzical – of Robin McAlpine, albeit for completely different reasons.
Robin was on the side of the angels during the SNP leadership election, and I found myself agreeing with almost every word he wrote during that period. He understood it was essential that one of the two ‘non-continuity’ candidates, ie. either Ash Regan or Kate Forbes, had to win, and he also stated explicitly that one of the key reasons for that (one of several, admittedly) was Humza Yousaf’s lack of a credible plan for winning independence. And yet, at face value, Robin’s approach to winning independence, both before and after the leadership election, seems almost indistinguishable from Humza’s. Both men believe that the problem with Nicola Sturgeon was not that she failed to deliver the vote on independence that she promised, but that she promised it in the first place. Both men, curiously, think the problem is at least partly solved by simply abandoning the promise. They both think we somehow get closer to independence by not actually holding a vote on independence and by constantly telling ourselves that such a vote is too difficult or impossible or not actually desirable anyway, even though that essentially means lying to ourselves.
Robin has been absolutely explicit in recent days: he thinks we’re further forward because the leadership election forced people to wake up to the ‘truth’ that he has supposedly ‘known’ for years – ie. that Nicola Sturgeon’s promise of a vote was never deliverable. But of course that isn’t what’s just happened. The leadership election didn’t show that a vote on independence was impossible – far from it. The problem was simply that the election was won by a candidate who had committed himself to abandoning the independence vote. If it had instead been won by a candidate who was committed to sticking to the Sturgeon plan of a de facto referendum, that vote would have gone ahead and nothing could or would have stopped it.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but to the best of my knowledge Robin has never actually explained why he thinks a vote on independence is undeliverable – he just seems to always invite us to take it as read that grown-up people understand from their more mature perspective that the vote can’t happen for some entirely unspecified reason. I’d suggest the reason he doesn’t explain his belief is that no such explanation is actually possible. A commitment to an independence vote is actually an unusually easy one for a political leader to deliver. If Ms Sturgeon had held her nerve, a Referendum Bill could have been passed by the Scottish Parliament, and then either upheld or struck down by the UK Supreme Court. If it had been struck down, moving on to a de facto referendum would have been an elementary step, because it would have simply involved inserting into the SNP manifesto for a scheduled election that a majority of votes for pro-independence parties would be taken as an outright mandate for independence, and also as a mandate to negotiate an independence settlement with the United Kingdom government.
All of the claims about a de facto referendum being a “conceptual nonsense” were just people who didn’t like the idea scrabbling around for any excuse to oppose it. No, a de facto referendum doesn’t mean having a single-line manifesto – you can, if you wish, have 200 pages packed full of policies on the bread-and-butter issues voters care most about. You simply place those policies in the context of the SNP’s plans for an independent Scotland, and explain they’re all reasons why people should vote Yes to independence in the de facto referendum.
But if Robin truly believes an independence vote is undeliverable, even though it plainly isn’t, it leaves him with a further commonality with Humza Yousaf, who uses magical thinking to claim that you can get independence without ever holding a vote on it because the “barriers will just melt away” if independence support rises high enough. Surely Robin cannot be that naive? Surely he must know that the higher the Yes vote gets, the greater the incentive there is for the UK Government to erect even more barriers against any exercise of Scottish self-determination?
My suspicion is that, deep down, Robin understands perfectly well that a vote on independence is both eminently possible and absolutely necessary. I’m just guessing, but I think what he really means when he says the Sturgeon plan was undeliverable is that he had a prescription after 2014 for how independence was going to be won, involving policy development and a mass movement, and a vote much later on once the spadework had been done. He was therefore annoyed with Nicola Sturgeon for announcing a quick referendum in 2016 which he felt was putting the cart before the horse, and he wished the whole thing would just go away. But believing something is a bad idea or that it might backfire is not the same thing as believing it is undeliverable, and there’s a touch of intellectual dishonesty in suggesting that it is.
The reality is that we can go on a scenic detour for however many years Robin and Humza want, but ultimately we’ll always come back to that stubborn ‘process’ question that simply can’t be magicked away. And whenever the SNP are ready to answer that question (almost certainly after replacing Humza as leader), they’ll find that, just like now, the only realistic answer consists of three words: “de facto referendum”.
