November 17, 2023 - 5:10pm
There’s a golden rule in communications: if you want something to get attention, don’t announce it on a Friday. How strange, then, that the Scottish Government’s latest attempt to persuade the nation to leave the UK — its supposedly guiding purpose — was announced earlier today.
A document setting out how a separate Scotland would join the European Union was released. A minister issued some words to go with it. Launched into Scotland’s pre-weekend slumber, not even the SNP’s unionist opponents could be bothered to muster anything more than perfunctory outrage in response.
Of course, the new independence plan was always going to struggle this week: the country’s attention has instead been taken up by the extraordinary expense claims and curious holiday arrangements of SNP Health Secretary Michael Matheson. But the damp squib launch of the new paper speaks to a deeper truth.
The absence of a heavyweight nationalist leader, the lack of an obvious route to separation, and the presence of far more pressing issues (such as the incredibly bleak outlook for Scotland’s finances) have all conspired to give the cause of independence a theoretical quality this autumn. More than ever, it meets the description once coined by Billy Connolly to describe the Scottish Parliament: “pretendy” politics. Independence may not be dead (polls show around 45% of people still back it) but there is no question that it is currently sleeping.
The SNP must be seen to keep trying, however. Launching the paper, Constitution Minister Angus Robertson declared that Scotland would join the EU “quickly and smoothly”. This would “meaningfully reverse the damage of Brexit”. Scotland would, he concluded, “be well-placed to fulfil the requirements” of the process for entry. The great irony of the SNP’s prospectus on Europe is that, having spent years railing against the cakeism of English Brexiteers, its plans to return via independence amount to a great Scottish bake-off: cakeism on steroids.
For example, the paper argues that the new EU border with England, which it accepts would be created, would be a “smooth” one. Like a Caledonian David Davis, Robertson claims only minimal checks on goods will be required. Thus, the paper concludes breezily that “the rest of the UK” — where 60% of Scotland’s exports currently end up — “will remain an important trading partner”. Phew. As for that quick entry back into the EU, the paper glides past the thorny question of Scotland’s currency. We’d use sterling “at the point of application”, it says, before adding that “the process of establishing a Scottish pound would be closely aligned with the process of re-joining the EU”.
No, me neither.
The truth is that Brexit has become a double-edged sword for the nationalist movement. The referendum result in 2014 and the ensuing five years of chaos undoubtedly boosted the emotional case for independence. It was a feeling for which Remainers like me felt some sympathy. But the reality of Britain outside the EU has made the technical case for Scottish independence that much harder to sort out.
Rather than waste their time publishing unnoticed papers on a Friday, a more strategic reset is required for the SNP. If they really are the pro-Europeans they say they are, the party should focus solely, for now, on getting the UK as close as possible to the EU. Only then — and after far more attention sorting out Scotland’s stalling economy — might the case for independence once again appear even vaguely realistic. Anything less is a waste of all our time.
Eddie Barnes is a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail and director of the Our Scottish Future think tank.
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SubscribeEarlier today I read a piece written by a Scottish nationalist in which he was advocating that nationalists exploit the difference between Scotland’ s majority support for Palestinians/Hamas and England favouring the plight of Israelis. There was political capital to be gained for Scottish independence, it was suggested, if Scotland portrayed itself as historically oppressed victims of colonialism, just like the Palestinians Scots feel greater sympathy for.
There are a few obvious problems with this – the fact that Scotland voluntarily joined the Union for its own selfish financial advantage and that the Scots were at the forefront in investing in slavery and colonisation of the rest of the World, and the nation grew rich off the back of both – but Scots like Palestinians don’t let facts get in the way of a national proclivity for a self-pitying, victim mentality.
The best, almost indefensible argument for independence would have been for the SNP to have used its time in power to prove, through a display of disciplined administrative competence and professionalism, and through implementing policies that brought substantial tangible benefits to Scotland, that it was, as a party and a government, ready to take over the reins of Scotland as an independent country.
By any standards, the SNP spectacularly failed the audition. They delivered stunning administrative incompetence, internecine infighting, profligate waste, corruption, and while public services were falling apart, they occupied themselves arguing that women can have d.cks, sending dangerous male sex offenders into women’s prisons and criminalising any speech that offended the Church of Woke.
The machinations of the nationalist suggesting the SNP exploit the death and misery in the Middle East or the Author’s suggestions of what the SNP should do advance its EU ambitions, it’s all just desperate stuff to distract from the fact that the SNP have demonstrated that they are entirely unfit to lead a parish council, let alone an independent Scotland.
I think you are putting too much weight on facts. The die-hard nationalist just ‘feels’. Like the UK government, they are trapped in 20th century politics and have no idea of the profound shifts already underway.
Don’t underestimate the skills required to run a Parish Council, though.
a ‘nationalist’ party which also supports liquid modernity, various luxury beliefs imported from America, virtually open borders, international elites, green ideologies negating their previous claims about north sea oil resources, and re-entry into the EU, doesn’t seem to make much sense?
They just need to identify as an independent government surely no one would want to hurt their feelings by pointing out the harsh facts.The next step would be to claim they were a bi-country that identified as a Member of Europe and accuse the European Commission of being T’Scot-phobic, a bunch of T’Scot Exclusionary Radical Foreigners if they didn’t accept their claim. That should see them fold for tear of being cancelled. If all else failed just lift their kilts to show their credentials.
“Rather than waste their time publishing unnoticed papers on a Friday, a more strategic reset is required for the SNP. ”
Well yes, but this “reset” must, finally and surely, be an admission that the SNP is an ideologically dishonest and incoherent mess. It presents “independence” as regaining membership of the EU, which is self-contradictory: no EU member state is independent, and ironically Brexit (and the accelerated federation the EU has been able to pursue since) makes this painful truth now unavoidable to even the most committed believers in the fanciful idea that the SNP can remain a successful coalition of Scottish Europhiles and Scottish souverainistes.
These two ideologically opposed groups can only remain bound together as long as the gravitational pull of Westminster holds them together. Win a second Scots independence referendum, and they’ll each have nowhere to hide any more.