HOW TO DEAL with the UK voting for the EU’s exit door? Strategists bent over laptop screens polishing drafts of the SNP’s 2016 election manifesto in the party’s campaign centre must have been just as sceptical as everyone else that what they were writing about Europe would ever need to be invoked. They knew they had to provide circumstances under which a new independence referendum would be held, to give the party faithful a reason to slog doorstep-to-doorstep for the party’s re-election as the Scottish government. Just a year and a half after an epoch-defining vote on sovereignty caution was always going to be the watchword, and even as late as the early spring of 2016 Brexit seemed improbable.
The eventual wording put before the electorate was a masterwork of caveats. Capable of being read minimally as simply supporting Holyrood being allowed to hold a referendum, it balanced a clear reiteration of support for independence while freeing any re-elected SNP government from a commitment to call a vote speedily:
We believe that the Scottish Parliament should have the right to hold another referendum if there is clear and sustained evidence that independence has become the preferred option of a majority of the Scottish people – or if there is a significant and material change in the circumstances that prevailed in 2014, such as Scotland being taken out of the EU against our will. (SNP, 2016)
The specific, unequivocal mention of the EU as a circumstance that could trigger a second referendum provided a clear democratic mandate should the Scottish government choose to hold one. Subtly it also almost compelled them. By choosing Brexit as an example – the sole example – of a possible ‘material change’ the party set up as the default expectation that if Brexit were to happen it would indeed trigger a new referendum. After making such an explicit manifesto commitment a subsequent decision not to call an independence referendum would need almost as much explaining as actually calling one. Yet at no point since the EU referendum did Nicola Sturgeon even come close to holding back.
By the morning after the Brexit vote the implicit caution of that manifesto text was nowhere to be seen. The political tension of those hours is easily forgotten. Friday 24 June 2016 was a day of high stakes: a Prime Minister resigned in Downing Street and the Governor of the Bank of England urgently handed the economy a £250bn injection. Into this the First Minister of Scotland called a new independence referendum ‘highly likely’, announcing the initiation of legislation to that end. Since then, in every interview, speech and public statement by Scottish government representations the option has been played up rather than down.
While the threat of a referendum would always have been the Scottish government’s strongest bargaining chip to secure a voice in the Brexit process, the possibility of empty bluff was never open to them. From the moment of her ascension to leadership in the wake of the 2014 referendum defeat, Nicola Sturgeon has been perched atop a hugely politically-charged membership that was burgeoning to over 100,000. Many members and most voters had come to the SNP from other parties and could just as easily drift away again if momentum shifted.
For a significant minority, the question within a matter of months became not whether there should be another referendum but why there had not been another referendum already. The SNP depends on its rank-and-file more than other parties, principally for finance and communications, and mechanisms exist for the membership to dispense with a leader who is not delivering. A political culture that values openness, accessibility and iconoclasm means strong expectations that leaders will be responsive to ordinary members. Institutional memories abound of the consequences of the perceived softening on independence in the early 2000s for party unity and consequent electability. Strategists knew that backing down from a new referendum that had been talked up would be costly in ways that are wholly unpredictable, and would present almost as much risk to the SNP’s dominant position as would taking independence back to the electorate.
Ever since the Brexit vote there has been a growing sense in the wider movement that this is an opportune moment. Nationalist administrations run a famously tight ship when it comes to message discipline, but the standard bearers of the former regime have been forthright. Both former First Minister Alex Salmond and his former chief-of-staff Geoff Aberdein took to the newspapers and TV studios to argue that a new independence referendum is now winnable. Based on her actions since the Brexit vote the current First Minister agreed as throughout the winter of 2016–17 she very visibly marched the independence movement’s troops to the top of the hill before finally passing the point of no return on the eve of the SNP conference.
Circumstances were conceivable where those troops could have been quietly marched down again. If support for independence – or willingness to entertain a second independence referendum – had plummeted, enough members of the independence movement might have shown caution to tip the balance back. An exit would also have been provided if the UK government had delivered a significant devolution of additional powers. Perhaps it still could. The Scottish government’s repeated sincere offers to take a referendum off the table if the Scotland Act were revisited to accommodate the new post-Brexit situation have however been repeatedly rebuffed by the UK government. For supporters of independence moreover, Whitehall’s relationship with Holyrood through the Brexit process has only highlighted the fundamental imbalance of esteem that has always provided fuel and justification to their cause.
A first call for the Brexit vote to require support in a majority of the UK jurisdictions as well as a majority of the UK’s voters was after all rejected out-of-hand. A common condition for constitutional change in genuine federations, it was alien to the political culture of a UK that still, in London at least, sees itself as one country rather than four. Yet had that requirement been included, English voters would undoubtedly have reacted with the same frustration and fury at being held in the EU against their will as Scotland’s leaders reacted at being pulled out.
The second concession that was seriously debated, where the Scottish parliament was given the power to retain full EU membership unilaterally, was less credible. Nicknamed ‘reverse Greenland’ after that jurisdiction’s unique position outwith the EU while still a part of the state of Denmark, it would have required Scotland to assume functions associated with being an independent state in order to discharge treaty obligations, such as international representation even up to participation in mutual defence, that were never realistic.
The more credible Scottish government position of December 2016 however evolved from this; that the Scottish parliament should gain sufficient powers to be able to retain membership of the Single Market unilaterally, as opposed to full membership of the European Union. Such an arrangement would require devolution of powers over immigration, business regulation, health and safety and employment law. Precedents exist in other federal states around the world for each of these to be governed by component parts, rather than the central government, but while the UK government has strategically avoided ruling out this proposal, they have also displayed no obvious enthusiasm and made no concrete commitments. Instead the leader of the Scottish Conservatives has predicted on a public platform that Brexit will lead to a turf war over whether Westminster seeks to reclaim powers over agriculture. Those powers were devolved to Scotland at a time when that responsibility, in practice, largely meant administering a public policy that originated in Europe. David Cameron’s description, in the dying days of the independence referendum, that the UK is a ‘family of nations’ may have been an expedient soundbite at the time but now more than ever seems a flattering and inaccurate description of how differing interests within these islands are accommodated.
Much else has changed since 2014, and the actual process of Brexit itself is actually far from the most important. When Theresa May stated ‘Brexit means Brexit’ she presumably meant that the one certainty was that Brexit means the UK will no longer be a member of the EU – no more, no less. That change is very abstract – a narrow definition of Brexit – and alone would be insufficient to shift Scotland’s politics radically. The Scottish Social Attitudes Surveys have consistently, over years, found little widespread evidence of a gut attachment to European identity. In-depth focus groups conducted by IPPR Scotland and IPSOS-Mori ahead of the Brexit referendum concurred. Scotland’s EU membership is not, in and of itself, of definitive importance to more than a small number of citizens – certainly much fewer than intrinsically value a sense of attachment to the UK, its identity, traditions and flag. A new independence referendum that came to be a choice between pure emotional attachment to the EU or the UK would be a disaster for the Yes side.
To see Brexit in such narrow terms, however, is to overlook the wider impact of all that has now been bundled with it. This is now a political divide about much more than whether the words ‘ European Union’ adorn passports, just as Scottish independence means much more than whether ‘United Kingdom’ is on them.
This ‘wider Brexit’ is what has fundamentally altered the political landscape.
The future of Britain now looms with doubt and even menace. In the independence referendum the No campaign, by contrast, made doubt the cornerstone of their efforts to weaken the independence cause. Introducing ‘Project Fear’ into the political lexicon, they ruthlessly associated Yes with uncertainty and risk and framed No as stability and security. The Yes campaign spent many months fruitlessly trying to contest that territory, portraying independence as steady-as-she-goes. As late as February 2013 billionaire Jim McColl was describing the prospect as ‘a management buyout’ in a well-heralded endorsement in Scotland on Sunday. By the end of that year the independence case had evolved into a White Paper offering social democracy with distinctly Nordic overtones but without the tax increases. Often fronted by Nicola Sturgeon as the Scottish government’s official ‘Yes Minister’, they sought to win votes through inspiration and conviction. The new Scotland offered by the Yes side won the support of 45 per cent of those who voted: short of victory but tantalisingly close.
The relative strength of these arguments has now changed utterly. The UK government is now unable to offer answers about the future. Even worse, if they followed Yes Scotland’s example and instead put forward an authentic pledge of change, the worldview they would be tied to offering would be that of a Conservative-dominated little Britain. Nothing could be more guaranteed to repel rather than inspire Scotland’s voters, who have been rejecting Conservative visions at the polls for over fifty years.
In 2014 the No side sought to make voters fear that they would lose their pensions with independence, never mind that the UK’s pensions were already the third lowest relative to wages in the industrialised world(House of Commons Library, 2015). Today independence supporters can more easily convince that it is staying with the UK that invites the loss of employment rights as EU-wide minimums no longer compel UK governments to at least basic safeguards. They will be able to talk up the threats to public services posed by the free trade deals that the UK will have to negotiate with strong-willed countries like the United States. Even the core economic debate will take on a new tenor when the UK government has in Brexit a flagship policy most mainstream economists have publicly denounced as self-destructive. A second No campaign will have to explain to undecided voters the likely sight of office buildings in London being emptied of financial services companies 10,000 employees at a time, as they relocate to Paris, Frankfurt and Dublin, turning a 2014 spectre used against independence on its head. It is an unenviable position.
The vision of a fairer Scotland put forward by those who argued for independence could meanwhile remain broadly the same. Some aspects of policy, like currency and how to bring expenditure and revenue into greater balance through economic growth, need to be updated. To the SNP, however, the contrast that epitomised the late stages of the 2014 independence campaign – for example the ‘Kirsty’ broadcast that presented the two potential futures of a child born on referendum day – has only been vindicated since. To this can be added the collapse of the UK Labour Party as a force that could credibly win power in Westminster and the growing alignment in Scotland of unionism with Conservatism. The prospect of voting No in expectation of the UK being restored to its old self by an incoming Labour government, as many did in 2014, is now implausible.
Among those left voters there is also an enduring group of genuine progressives who are instinctively suspicious of any political movement that carries the name of ‘nationalist’. For them the social democratic promises of the Scottish government and the support of the Scottish Green Party for independence in 2014 were insufficient to allay their fears of a dark side to nationalism, even as the Yes campaign offered nuclear disarmament, a living wage, extended childcare and protection of a public NHS. These are also though, precisely the people most likely to feel a heartfelt sense of European identity, along with the immigrants from the EU who also voted against independence by two-to-one.
Together these groups have now experienced not just Brexit but also the sight of Scottish (and Welsh) nationalists repeatedly taking up the causes of Europe and immigration. In contrast the Labour Party continues to self-consciously equivocate on both issues and the UK government increasingly looks outright like the exclusionary nativist movement they fear. Realisation of the consequences of the SNP’s progressive bona fides being reinforced has led to ever more severe attacks from Labour, culminating in London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s infamous Scottish Labour conference speech in Perth alleging that Scottish nationalists were not racists per se, but somehow also that nationalism was no different to racism. Set against the backdrop of the Scottish government’s internationalist response to Brexit, such accusations only further question the credibility of the accuser.
After all of this, supporters of independence could be forgiven for surprise at polls seemingly still lodged roughly where they were on that auspicious day in September 2014. Since Brexit it seems that the cause of independence has lost as many supporters as it has gained. Why? A section of the population open to appeals to independence has always been simultaneously sceptical of appeals to Europeanism. Nigel Farage enjoys poking fun at the SNP by alleging that the party wants to win power from London only to hand it over to Brussels. Such a worldview is simplistic. The UK is not the EU. To even resemble the EU, the UK would need to have veto powers for the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish governments over all UK-wide legislation, a Cabinet made up of nominees from those governments and devolution of powers over tax, welfare, defence, employment rights, foreign affairs, broadcasting and currency. The UK affords less flexibility in these policy areas than even the USA affords to its states, let alone the European Union. Yet despite all of this this, some voters do see equivalence.
Those optimistic about a new independence referendum base their strategy on a simple calculation: that these voters can be won back to Yes as easily as they drifted away. This is not far-fetched. After all, the Yes campaign these voters supported in 2014 was one resolutely in favour of a Scotland in the EU. Winning these voters back, while not alienating new converts, would be a challenge for a renewed independence campaign; but holding on to these voters while not alienating more of the 62 per cent of Scots who voted remain would be a challenge for a renewed anti-independence campaign too.
This strategy is based on a belief that rather than a growth in support, what has grown is an openness to the appeals that a new independence campaign would put forward. Respondents in polls are notoriously terrible at predicting how they will vote in the future. Five polls in the run-up to the Brexit vote saw Scots responding that in the event of the UK voting to leave the EU against Scotland’s will they would vote for independence – in one case 54 per cent to 39 per cent. Such polls shaped the Scottish EU referendum debate, despite the precedent of the three Yes Scotland-commissioned polls in 2014 that showed clear leads for independence in the event of the Conservatives being re-elected as the UK government. Both events happened and in neither case did the promised support for independence materialise in any real way. With the injection of former No voters, Brexit, has at the very least, enlarged the proportion of people who have been in recent times supportive of independence. Deeper research than a simple opinion poll would be needed to predict how they will react to a campaign.
As Scottish government ministers increasingly invoke the rhetoric of ‘hard Britain’ or ‘Tory Brexit’ it is clear they see the wider implications of Brexit as part of a message that will resonate with this population. They may well be right. A larger audience in the country is receptive to their arguments than in 2014 and progressive arguments now carry greater credibility. The UK government is mired in economic uncertainty and the face of union is now unreservedly Conservative. No referendum result is ever certain, but in post-Brexit UK, Scottish nationalists have reason to feel that circumstances have changed such that if they present their pro-European, social democratic vision of independence to the people once more they can be justified in hoping for a different result.
House of Commons Library (2015), Pensions: international comparisons.
http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN00290/SN00290.pdf
SNP (2016), Re-elect the SNP: Manifesto 2016.