Stands Scotland Where it Did?
The years since the referendum represent a wasted decade. It's time for a new national story.
When you look at a globe, there’s a little island in the North-eastern Atlantic which is one colour, rather than two.
Thanks to the campaign we ran between 2012 and 2014, Scots rejected lower political instincts and decided to choose unity over division. In a decade when so much of the world fell to the politics of populist nationalism, Scotland, almost uniquely, replied, “No Thanks.”
I can look at schools and hospitals saved from catastrophic cuts; shipyards still employing thousands that would have been shuttered; a border without barriers to commerce; a more powerful, more mature Scottish Parliament. Most of all though I’m proud of our young team, inspired by the much-missed Alistair Darling, who came through the longest campaign in British history, and withstood extraordinary pressures to stick to their winning strategy.
The referendum was won by our campaign for three reasons:
We ruthlessly focussed the choice on the economic consequences of separating ourselves from the rest of the UK and refused to engage in the emotional test of national pride the SNP wanted.
The nationalists didn’t have enough confidence in their own their own policy: they knew Scots wouldn’t (and still won’t) vote for a separate currency, less money for services or a border with England so they couldn’t tell the truth about these things.
Alistair Darling’s personality represented the strengths of the No campaign: safer, more responsible, and more serious. While Alex Salmond’s personality represented the weaknesses of the Yes campaign: arrogant, reckless, and untrustworthy.
But this post isn’t about why we won. It is about the years since.
So while I’m proud to have helped lead the No campaign to its victory ten years ago, most of my feelings on this anniversary are negative. This has been, by any analysis, a wasted decade for Scotland.
The SNP, who in the years after the vote were dominant politically, and invested with more powers, could have done so much to renew our nation. Instead, holding office became an exercise in excuses. To accept responsibility and to acknowledge the opportunities of the power they held would have been to remove grievances which they needed to cultivate. If positive change was possible within the UK, then it would have undermined the case for leaving. A political movement created from the promise of change became the barrier to delivering that change.
The referendum cast a cloud which suffocated the life out of our political debate. For too long, the only question that mattered was how you voted on one day in 2014, not the answers you were able to offer people. The abuse and misuse of power was overlooked for the sake of the cause. All concerns were viewed as being motivated by the complainants’ constitutional preference rather than their love of country or hatred of injustice.
Government became a vehicle for press releases, and the hard work of delivery was forgotten after the cheers at SNP conference had faded. Accountability was something reserved only for those who supported the Union. The consequence is that no part of Scottish public life now functions as it should.
One in six of us are now on NHS waiting lists. Even critically ill patients can wait two hours for an ambulance. Private GP clinics and hospitals are booming. The attainment gap between richer and poorer kids is widening. Places at university for Scottish kids are slashed as are opportunities to learn at colleges. A third of bus routes have disappeared. Ferries are a national joke. The police say they can no longer investigate crimes. Just a tenth of promised green jobs in offshore wind have been delivered.
All this, remember, with higher public spending than the rest of the UK. The SNP have already frittered away their offshore wind windfall. A budget crisis looms as we all pay the price for a populist government that never stopped campaigning for long enough to make any difficult financial choices.
It has taken ten years, a series of scandals and the lived experience of such incompetence to shake off the legacy of the referendum campaign. Never again should the UK engage in a plebiscite of this sort. Referendums should only be used to confirm a consensus, not as an attempt to narrowly cross a finish line.
Few of us believe that every decision should be made in Edinburgh and hardly anyone believes that every decision should be made in London. Yet the referendum invited people into artificial, irreconcilable, binary political camps. Those of us who believed that sharing a DVLA with our neighbours didn’t make us less of a nation were suddenly anti-Scottish traitors. If you add to this social media algorithms that discourage consensus and reward conflict, it was always going to be a poisonous mix.
The anniversary has been welcomed by the nationalist movement as a moment to celebrate their failure. Why do the losers look back fondly and the winners wince at the memory of it all?
After coming to power 17 years ago, the SNP cultivated a narrative of unstoppable momentum. It was an attempt to sweep up the population in the excitement of a movement and a moment. It was also about delegitimising the No campaign as unpatriotic outsiders. This was political strategy but also philosophical necessity: if a nationalist movement doesn’t have the support of the nation, then what legitimacy does it have? They couldn’t inhabit the moment when it was clear that Scots didn’t support them so they had to live in an imagined future when there was a consensus behind leaving the UK.
The problem was that the SNP leadership forgot that the momentum story was just a story. When an aberrant poll gave them the lead towards the end of the referendum campaign, they got carried away. Instead of reassuring voters over the lingering doubts they had about the case for leaving the UK, the Yes campaign embarked on a 12-day victory party.
So deeply embedded was the story of the inevitability of Scotland leaving the Union that the SNP immediately started talking about the next referendum. Their explanation of our comfortable win was based on the idea that a victory had been unfairly stolen from them, rather than accepting blame for their own defeat. There was no reflection on the reasons they lost.
Read the ten-year anniversary reflections by SNP leaders and it is still us who were in the No campaign who are to blame for the Yes camp’s failure. Of course they think this way. If the cause you support is inevitable you never needed to take responsibility for making it happen. For years, supposed leading thinkers in the nationalist movement have talked complacently about how No voters would die and Yes voters would inherit Scotland. Active strategy was replaced by waiting for victory to come to them and they were surprised when the polls didn’t move.
I’m amazed that SNP members are so relaxed at this failure. For a decade, their leaders had every possible political advantage. They had the intellectual resources of the state, a hegemonic dominance of every aspect of society, and an incompetent, unpopular set of opponents gifting them a succession of crises to exploit. Despite all that, they have gone nowhere. They seem happy with the idea that independence will always be inevitable, even if it never happens.
The energy is gone from the debate. YouGov found fewer than a third of voters, whether pro or anti-Union, were motivated by constitutional preference at the General Election. Ipsos had only 17% listing the constitution as a very important issue in the contest. Nationalism will always be there, but it is now background noise, a side-show to the real motivating forces in our politics.
If the above is a pessimistic assessment of the time since the referendum, I’m filled with hope for the future. Anas Sarwar has shown no interest in living in 2014. He has begun a new conversation that doesn’t ask where you were ten years in the past but instead where you want to go in the future. It is so much more interesting and colourful than the lifeless debate we are leaving behind.
The guddle that the government in Edinburgh has created necessitates a completely different politics. We will have to make up for lost time and work out how to grow the economy, how to reform services, who should receive support, and how to pay for it all. We have to acknowledge that the mess Scotland is in is a consequence, not of the referendum itself, but of the ideology that lost it.
I began with Shakespeare but I’ll close with Constantine P. Cavafy:
And some who have just returned from the border say there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
Nationalism led us nowhere but it was reassuring. In a complicated world it offered simple explanations or excuses. The absence of a viable nationalist project will cause dissonance to those who have known nothing but the constitutional argument.
The simplistic, divisive, and grievance-filled politics of the previous age must give way to new national leadership that embraces nuance, that values consensus, and which is positive about what we can achieve working together. That’s the kind of politics we demanded when Scotland did vote Yes - in the referendum of 1997, in the early days of another new Labour government. We can find that voice again and demand better government once more.
The SNP is discredited and disorganised, but blaming others for our own failings will always be an attractive narrative for some. The familiar always has an advantage in politics over the new and nationalism remains the default framing of our debate. But there is an alternative, more uniting and hopeful story that can be told about Scotland.
It is there within us to find, as long as we are not, as Ross replied to Macduff, afraid to know ourselves.
Aye, right!