[Robin McAlpine Blog] These indy ‘strategies’ shouldn’t be taken seriously

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These indy 'strategies' shouldn't be taken seriously

I’ve been holding off from commenting on the various ‘strategies’ for achieving independence which are doing the rounds just now. I do this mainly from solidarity with their authors, the majority of whom are genuinely trying to find solutions. But the more time we spend on these the longer it is before we do what we actually need to do.

The one factor all of them have in common is that they want to shortcut or bypass the primary task. But you can’t, so they are a mirage of a path, not a real path. We live in a democracy and in a democracy we can’t make the case for change if we don’t have a democratic majority. It really is that simple.

There are three basic approaches to inventing shortcuts which are floating around. One you might call ‘public by proxy’, one you would call ‘who needs the public anyway?’ and one you might call ‘pudding before dinner’. I’ll go through them one at a time.

Let me start with pudding before dinner. This has been the most corrosive mirage of them all, and it is the shortcut the SNP has been promising for ten years. The promise was that you didn’t need to think about or start on the hard work because that would all get done after a politician pulled a rabbit from a hat.

The rabbit was ‘second formal vote without any change in public support’. A politician would deliver a second referendum and then in the referendum we’d win the public. That was it. No-one ever explained how to get the referendum and no-one ever explained how to win over the public. It would just happen.

This was largely a knowing untruth; the politicians all knew they wouldn’t be given a referendum with independence sitting at approximately 50/50 in the polls and they almost certainly knew (or certainly had the easy capacity to know) that this wasn’t within the power of the Scottish Parliament alone. Since the first part wasn’t true, there is no point thinking about the second part where the referendum wins itself with no preparation.

This is also why it was so overwhelmingly premature to talk about de facto referendums. We didn’t have the numbers to win, and the assumption that we could achieve those numbers just by asking for them is equally unrealistic. So just forget this stuff. You don’t get referendums by wishing for them and you don’t win referendums by talking about them.

We can’t replicated the process which delivered an outcome with majority support and a civic consensus without majority support and a civic consensus

Let’s therefore look at ‘who needs the public anyway?’. I can dispose of this one very straightforwardly. This one is predicated on there being some extra-national legal route to independence which doesn’t require majority support from the public. I hope you can see how daft that is by just reading the words.

Even if there was a legal route for becoming independent in an international court of law (there isn’t), and even if there was a nation state willing to take that case up for us (about which I remain deeply sceptical), they’re sure as hell not going to do it if there remains minority support for independence. Talk me through ‘today your honour we ask this court to make this other country independent against the will of its own population’…

This leaves us with the current talk of the steamie, some convoluted constitutional convention process. There are two versions of this, a sensible-but-unrealistic one and a magical mystery tour one. The former seeks to replicate the broad approach that delivered devolution, which makes perfect sense.

The problem is that the conditions are different this time. The purpose of the Constitutional Convention was to build a coalition around, and flesh out the detail of, a proposition which was already broadly consensual. There was already long-established public support for a devolved parliament and most of the stakeholder organisations started out being on board. Yet from there it still took more than a decade of diligent, careful work.

We don’t have majority support and we barely have a single civic stakeholder unequivocally supporting independence. More to the point, I simply can’t see a circumstance where any of them will unless there is evidence of a settled will among the public. We can’t replicated the process which delivered an outcome with majority support and a civic consensus without majority support and a civic consensus.

I have patience for this model of convention in the sense that at least it is honest and making a real attempt to address the issue. That it won’t work is only because it is the wrong tool for the task at hand because the conditions are all different.

What I have no patience for is the idea that you can use a Citizens Assembly to substitute for hard work. It’s impossible to go over the range of reasons why this is a non-starter, but let me give you a number of them.

The first is that the indy movement cannot run a Citizens Assembly about independence. By their very nature they must be run by people entirely neutral on the question being asked or they have no credibility. If they are not free to come up with a solution the opposite to what you want, they’re not real – you cannot coerce a Citizens Assembly. Are we giving the No campaign equal access?

Then let’s say they do come up with your preferred solution. So what? It’s just 100 people. You still need to convince the public and saying ‘we’ve just persuaded ten people to change their mind’ isn’t going to do it. That’s just smoke and mirrors, especially since we have nothing new to offer other than saying over and over the things we’ve been saying over and over.

We have done not a single bit of the essential work, none at all – and yet we think we deserve a shortcut

In any case, that we’re talking about this again is mad. We just did exactly this. In 2019 the last person selling snake oil solutions to independence stood up in the Scottish Parliament and announced she was going to break the deadlock by holding a Citizen’s Assembly. She did exactly that, and the outcome didn’t even mention independence.

Worse, they did produce a surprisingly good report with a number of solid, sensible suggestions – which the Scottish Government rejected out of hand. It was a disgraceful episode. (In fact I suspect this is why the Scottish Government has, quite shockingly, deleted the final report of the Assembly, which I can only find in html format buried away in the National Records of Scotland archive. This took place three years ago so I repeat, deleting the website and not leaving the final report properly available is absolutely outrageous.)

If that Assembly’s report had been taken seriously and if it had been enacted in full, perhaps then there might have been some case for going back to the public and saying ‘OK, we did all that – what now?’ and hope they came up with independence this time. But that’s not what we did, and our opponents will make hay with the entirety of this whole appalling charade.

Nothing at all in this proposal is serious. It is a puerile idea that you can put 100 people in a room and badger them with propaganda until they submit to your will, call that a Citizens’ Assembly while ignoring the fact that this already happened and was treated with contempt by an SNP government and that the result would be the rest of the public simply changing its mind on independence.

Can you see what all of these strategies don’t do? Other than a well-meaning attempt to get together a civic coalition that doesn’t exist, the rest are marked out by their efforts to treat the public with contempt. They all offer a magical shortcut to changing the minds of the public without talking to them, listening to them, responding accordingly or changing anything.

I urge you to clear this nonsense from your minds. The Independence Forum’s Convention in November has some viable value as a forum for us starting to sort out some of our problems, but it is not going to move us any closer to independence any time soon. There is no merit to wasting any of your time on the others.

I shall sit here patiently saying the same thing over and over and over again. When you want someone to support something and they don’t, you must talk to them carefully to find out why. You do that so you understand why you’re not winning them over and (hopefully) to identify what it is that you can do to change that. Then you need to do that thing seriously and credibly. And then you need to go back to them and explain that you’ve done that thing and hope that this let’s them change their mind.

Barring some public attitude research carried out by the Scottish Independence Convention with a very modest budget, we have done not a single bit of this, none at all – and yet we think we deserve a shortcut, that we can do this without the work if only we listen to someone-or-other’s cunning plan to magic up support from nothing or just skip getting public support altogether.

I can only repeat once again that, unlike the others who are offering these solutions, I do this stuff for a living and have done for 30 years. If I took any of these ‘solutions’ to someone else in the trade and explained how they would deliver independence without bothering with the public, they’d laugh me out the room.

Until we do the same, leave this nonsense behind and start on the activities which actually win campaigns, we’re lost.

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