For ten years we’ve all been stuck with a single strategy for independence and for ten years I’ve been trying to persuade you that it won’t work. I’ve been asked to cover two columns for the National over the next two weeks, so let me take one more shot to try and persuade you – and tell you what can work instead.
The single strategy we’ve been following for a decade is best understood as ‘parliamentary mandate’. It has been phrased in various ways but it boils down to ‘an overwhelming majority for a political party will give us the mandate to negotiate the next steps to independence’.
This of course has the great merit (for the politicians) of giving them all the power and resources first in return for a promise that they will do something later. The problem is that this isn’t how countries become independent.
Before I explain why, let me remind you that big social changes virtually never occur because of the actions of a single entity and even less often because of a single person. They are the outcome of chains of action and context that take place over time – some leaps forward, some steps backwards, lots of them just marking time until an opportunity arises.
But all social change has a single thing in common (as does every case of a nation becoming independent other than the genuinely weird situation in Czechoslovakia). Social change happens when enough people believe in it. Not ‘fifty per cent plus one’, enough people to make those who don’t agree feel like they have lost, fair and square. That’s when social change happens.
We are wilfully refusing to see this. We have examined every nation that ever became independent for clues as to what we should do but we refuse to acknowledge the one giant thing they all have in common. Strong public consent.
In every single case there was large public support for independence before the process began. In no instance did a process kick off when support for independence was sitting at around 50/50. Support for independence is not the outcome of a process, the process is the outcome of support for independence.
The reality of the need to persuade the public to support independence has always been acknowledged by politicians, but there has always been a reason to do something else first. First elections. First legislation. First negotiations. First the day job. First a constitutional convention. First some more reports. Something.
But these are all procedural and conform to that political rule that if you don’t know what to do, do some bureaucracy. All of this, literally, amounts to promises to change hearts and minds later, but not just now.
The thing is, competent government is the entry price for independence, not its main driver
Shifting public opinion was then directly attached to another false idea – that a competent domestic government will automatically lead to rising support for independence. The thing is, competent government is the entry price for independence, not its main driver. Political parties in power shed support over time, not the other way round.
This all creates a hardly unintentional, hardly subtle but utterly cynical trap. You have to vote SNP every two or three years based on promises they make to undertake procedural acts and win people over through good government. The more they don’t deliver, the more you have to vote for them.
None of this will work because none of it is designed to work. It is designed to create the appearance of action where no action is actually taking place. I mean, absolutely all of this is what everyone would be doing anyway – standing for election and governing is the job, not a strategy.
Incidentally, none of the other unlikely paths to independence are going to work without mass pro-independence support either. I am highly sceptical that the United Nations decolonisation process is the way forward for us but I can guarantee you that the UN isn’t going to break up Britain on a 50/50 opinion poll.
For what it’s worth, this is not just an anti-SNP thing. It’s not that the SNP has somehow failed to ‘pick the lock’ of Scottish independence from inside the Scottish Parliament, it’s that no political party and no politician could do it because it can’t be done. Not from here, not at this stage.
So I’m certainly not saying you shouldn’t vote SNP; I’m just saying it won’t make much difference to independence if you do, because the next big step in the path to independence won’t happen in the Scottish Parliament and nor will it happen on the backbenches of Westminster.
Here is the path that successful big ideas take. First they are impossible, then they are fringe, then they are minority, then they become mainstream, then they become a settled will, then they become legislation, and then they become reality. Sometimes they go backwards (support for Scottish independence was the settled will of the public in 1708…) but they rarely skip steps.
And we have already taken the last major step prior to achieving a settled will. It was the task of the SNP to bring independence into the mainstream where people could see it and would have to talk about it and it did that successfully in 2011, a reality which was cemented during the independence referendum.
Once the next big step is taken, the baton will be handed back to the SNP. But that next big step is to go from mainstream to settled will. That is the only thing that will break this logjam. Without that support there is no path forward. With that support all the paths forward open up.
We’ve been kidding ourselves on that we can lift the trophy despite the fact the game is at nil-nil. We then tried a hopeful ‘next goal is the winner’ approach and asked Westminster to sort us out a simple tiebreaker (which we have always simply assumed we would win).
That’s just nonsense. We gain support or we stay stuck. Next week I’ll try and explain why we’re not gaining support and how we can.