Independence nearer than unionists know

My final book now being written is titled “There Is Still a Case for Optimism.”

In England, and among Scottish Unionists, the year 2024 was when independence was declared dead. For them the July election massacre of the SNP was the end to Alex Salmond’s dream. They are wrong. I am heading to 2025 in optimistic mood, and I have sound reasons for being so.

Their mistake is to equate independence with electoral support for the SNP, and failure to understand that the balance of the economic argument has shifted decisively in favour of Scotland de-coupling from England, a fact that has yet to also dawn on many within the movement itself.

Previous to the formation of the Sturgeon/Yousaf/Swinney administrations independence voters invested their confidence in and gave electoral support to the SNP, which in the long struggle through the difficult years and then the relevance and competence of the Salmond government, deserved it as was demonstrated by the triumph of 56 seats out of 59 at the 2015 Westminster election.

The July 2024 election showed that those same supporters of independence regarded it as rational to look at Scotland’s condition ten years after Salmond, assess the contribution the present SNP government has made to it, find them incompetent and inadequate, and decide either to lend a vote to Labour to get rid of Tory Westminster government or abstain. That repudiation of the SNP does not reflect their belief in independence, as the polls since July show.

There, therefore, remains a high level of support for independence from which to make the next and final advance. But that support lacks a sense of direction. One reason for that is a lack of confidence in the SNP. Another is that there are now around 21 separate organisations within the movement all doing their own thing – a number doing excellent policy work – but no single national organisation to knit that work together into a coherent single powerful message. Most people in the street have never heard of them.

Overcoming that weakness and creating a national organisation is the task to accomplish in 2025. It will have to be done outside the political party structures. The venomous exchanges between SNP and ALBA show reconciliation there is off the table. In any event, both will be concentrating on their respective preparations for the 2026 Holyrood election, with the added anxiety for the SNP of the outcome of the Branchform police investigation, capable of throwing them off any track they may be on.

Creating that national organisation is imperative because, as I mention above, the balance of the argument over independence has shifted from opponents to us. Remember 2014? The unionist case was that for survival Scotland had to shelter, and be financially fed, by the big economically powerful UK. That case is no longer tenable. We are now witnessing the final stages of post-imperial decline. To quote a headline in The Daily Telegraph “The UK is a poor country pretending to be rich.”

From 1945 onwards, through economic crises followed by economic crises, the Mandarins in their Whitehall offices, no matter which government was in nominal power, have been engaged in managed decline. A glimmer of that truth was behind Starmer’s recent admonition to the civil service for being in “the tepid bath of managed decline.” But what about Thatcher, didn’t she halt it? Actually no, she gave it a push with the de-industrialisation of the country, something for which a big price is being paid now.

But even the skilled managers of the British state could not cope with two major shocks to their system: the financial crisis of 2007-08, when national wealth and increased debt was used to save the banks, while plunging the economy and the people into austerity; and the monumental mistakes in dealing with the Covid19 pandemic when, despite knowing that only the elderly and those with serious medical conditions were in danger, they trashed the economy, and thrust the Treasury into another deadly cycle of borrowing.

In the financial year 2023-24 the UK government spent £121 bn more than it took in all taxes. All of it borrowed. In this financial year 2024-25 it has already borrowed £96.6 bn. In October alone it was £17.4 bn. The debt has risen to £2.8 trillion, with servicing it costing more than is spent on defence. For that downward plunge to continue all it takes is the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time making the wrong decisions – step forward Starmer and Reeves with her July budget.

The British state, which is really the English state given that nation’s numerical dominance, is crumbling. A state is held up by the strength of its institutional pillars. England’s are collapsing.

The Royal family is no longer on a deferential pillar, more like an unfolding worn at the edges soap opera, providing pages of gossip for the tabloid press. Parliament is a diminished institution with its members subject to ethical judgement by outside bodies, able to effectively dismiss them, a power held previously only by the electors in a constituency. The armed forces are hollowed out. The Metropolitan Police, once the gold standard, is riddled with corruption and bad characters. The Church of England is no longer able to give a moral guide, and is in disgrace. The BBC lives in a metropolitan bubble divorced from the rest of the country, losing license fee payers and audiences. Its universities are more concerned with self-flagellation over its long gone empire than a commitment to intellectual rigour and free speech, and are in hock to foreign countries and the students they send them.

Then there is the economy and the social structure it can no longer support. Major components of its economy from water companies to ports and airports are foreign owned. It is regularly described as broke and broken, noted for its low growth, stagnant wages and expansion of food banks. That big powerful economy that Scotland was supposed to shelter under doesn’t exist.

England is going down the tubes, not managed slowly as in the past, but quickly. What the independence movement has to get into the minds of unionists, a big chunk of whose votes we need to win, is that if Scotland remains tied to it, then down the tubes we are all going along with them. There are already clear signs in Scotland of that.

I do not describe England’s precipitate decline with any pleasure, and I don’t say that to record the statutory “I am not anti-English.” I have a large number of family members and friends who are English, and there many Scots in England who will continue to live there. Even as England declines the social union between Scotland and England will continue: the family connections, the cultural inter-actions, the up and down flow of visitors. But the movement should approach our relations with England guided by one key principle and a fact: Scottish state interests can only be served by severing the political and economic control exercised by England within the union; and recognising the fact that however much we regret England’s decline, we 5.3 million cannot save its 60 million – we can only save ourselves.

Scottish state interests is something that we have not had to consider for more than 300 years. In this lopsided union where Scotland has always been a minority, state interests has meant England’s state interests. In the past, during the time of empire, the use of “England” when people described the UK state, was no slip of the tongue. It reflected reality. Churchill in his WWII memoir, vol I, describes prime minister Chamberlain, in the run up to the war, addressing “the English nation” in a BBC radio broadcast.

It is vital that we in the independence movement absorb that state interest concept, and make it a widely acceptable measure of events and issues for the people whose votes we require to win next time.

Given that the decline of England cannot be hidden, as it was in 2014, the case for independence can now be made with clear and convincing argument. The prospect of independence has never been better. That doesn’t make it inevitable. We need a national organisation rooted in policy that has depth to achieve it. I sit here at the age of 87 believing it can be done in my time. My final book now being written is titled “There Is Still a Case for Optimism.”

That title is borrowed from a book I wrote in 1986 “The Case for Optimism” when support for independence was around 12 per cent, and the forward picture was bleak. The book’s optimism was based on an analysis of what had gone wrong between the high water mark of 30.4 per cent in October 1974 to 17.3 per cent in 1979 (and heavy loss of seats) with further slippage thereafter, along with how the movement could recover. Two years later the SNP won the Govan by-election, and all was changed for the better. Change for the better now can happen, and I believe will happen.