[Robin McAlpine Blog] A present from Santa Keir

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A present from Santa Keir

First published by The National

Who’s that coming down the chimney? It ain’t Santa Claus ‘cos whoever it is is going on about delivery milestones. Then a puff of grey soot and, look! It’s Saint Keir of the Metrics and stuffed in his sack is a giant opportunity for the independence movement. It’s a terrific gift, but it’s a voucher. It isn’t worth anything until we do something with it.

That’s a decent summary of where the cause of independence is as of Christmas 2024. We ought to be in trouble given the public can’t see a meaningful route to independence, our own campaign is basically non-existent and there is a less than enthusiastic public reception to the SNP Government.

That we’re not is down to our opponents – again. I have always believed that it wasn’t a bad Tory government that would be the final straw for the state of Britain but a bad Labour one. There was always a chance for people to tell themselves ‘there’s nothing wrong with Britain, it’s just bad management’. It is the realisation that the problems are more fundamental than who is setting the targets which I believed would push a new generation of supporters over the line.

I had high hopes the moment the Labour Party selected Starmer as their leader. He’s a dull, lifeless technocrat who struggles to make personal connection with voters. That he has spent his time as leader using the language of a Tory and whistling the same dog whistles as Reform seems designed to alienate the maximum number of people.

Starmer keeps telling people that government isn’t that powerful, that if government wants to change anything even a little bit it takes a very long time. This is a massive misreading of what the public wants (purposeful, change-orientated government), and it is almost an advert for an independent Scotland.

But we’ve been here before. In fact the heart of what I want to get across is that we keep ending up in precisely this place over and over. At the risk of boring some of you who have read and heard me going on about this for years, there are 55 per cent of the population in Scotland who already ‘want to believe’ in independence. They’ve been in that position since about 2016, and arguably before that.

About five percentage points of them need to be given a more direct reason to support independence at any given moment and for them it’s not a top priority, hence the fact we keep surging to 55 per cent and then slipping back to 50ish. There are then another five percentage points of the population who express a willingness to shift sides to independence if their concerns are assuaged, giving us 60 per cent support.

Unless the independence movement grabs the opportunity Keir Starmer (and his counterpart Nigel Farage) are offering, we’ll find ourselves back down at the bottom of the cycle again sooner or later

That has been true for a long time, and exactly in the same way that we keep winning over and then losing the five per cent, so we’ve failed to address the concerns of the next cohort. And that explains the Groundhog Day nature of independence support.

But there is a more important feature of this ever-repeating circle I’d like you to focus on; what are the factors which have prompted the yo-yoing five per cent to move over to our side? In answering that question it is important to follow data and not political spin. It is in the nature of political parties (all of them, forever) to claim that anything good that happens is down to their wise actions.

Unfortunately, on support for Scottish independence, the data really doesn’t support that. For a start, Starmer is as unpopular in England and Wales as he is in Scotland so assuming his and his government’s unpopularity is something to do with increased support for independence, that isn’t about something happening up here.

In fact, if you tally every previous surge in independence support with external factors, you find the same thing over and over – independence hits 55 per cent at the same time as support for the government in London dips across England and Wales too, or when UK politics is particularly polarised.

We have had three main 55-per-cent peaks; in the aftermath of Brexit, when Boris Johnstone was elected Prime Minister and at the time of his government’s abysmal handling of the pandemic. All of these were either widely unpopular or highly polarising in England and Wales, meaning it’s not just a ‘Scotland thing’.

It’s also important to note that there isn’t an example of a Scotland-generated surge, a home-crafted event or strategy which moved the polls independently of events south of the border. Waiting until the other side messes up isn’t a strategy, yet that’s what we’ve been relying on.

We’re trapped in this loop for a simple reason; when the polls are static we all demand that ‘something should be done’, but when they surge we lose our urgency and say ‘there we go, nearly there’. That’s a mistake. It’s moments of surge when we should accelerate, not ease off. That’s how you solidify the 55 per cent and start to make inroads with the next five per cent.

This is the pattern – we trundle along in Scotland, they do something idiotic or rubbish in London, we gain the blowback in the polls, we tell ourselves that trundling along is therefore clearly working, so we remove the pressure from ourselves to act, the momentum is lost and a little while later we realise we’re still just trundling along.

We can’t afford to let this cycle keep repeating. Unless the independence movement grabs the opportunity Keir Starmer (and his counterpart Nigel Farage) are offering, we’ll find ourselves back down at the bottom of the cycle again sooner or later.

This gift from Starmer to the cause of independence is an exciting and promising one, but unwrapping it isn’t enough. It’s like a friend has given us a gym membership for Christmas – great, but a gym membership doesn’t get you fit, going to the gym gets you fit.

In 2025 the independence movement needs to shed its flab and get in shape if we want to break out of this cycle. We’re lucky to have been gifted another opportunity so quickly. Let’s really make the most of this one.

Source: A present from Santa Keir