Two: Self Determination
The biggest threat to Scottish independence, which it is in our hands to fix, is a mistaken belief that too many of us carry around in our heads. People have absorbed the idea that you win referendums during referendums. And so perhaps the single most important point I’d like to make in this book is to refute this idea as strongly as possible.
You do not win referendums during referendums. Or at least you should try very hard to not be in that position. You want to go into a referendum having already won. That should be the aim. You don’t walk into a pub, pick out 11 people at random and try to win a serious football match. You train; get fit; devise and practice strategies; train more. You don’t invite people round for dinner having never switched on a cooker before and then try to cook them all soufflés. You would generally practice a bit; start with scrambled eggs; get better; learn.
So why do we behave like we’re going to get anywhere by sitting around, talking among ourselves, proving our loyalty, believing really, really hard? Think of your line of work. If you had put as much time and effort into a project as big as Scottish independence and that project failed, a project which is crucial to you and your work which you are determined to see realised, how would you approach it (assuming you’re not an investment banker already expecting to be bailed out...)? Would you plan to wait around hoping the opportunity comes round again and then when it does come round again, do exactly the same thing you did last time but slightly more manically?
I suspect that whether you are a nurse or an accountant or a cleaner or a taxi driver, you are thinking about how you’d prepare better for next time, work out what didn’t work and get started now fixing things that you believe will better enable you to get it right next time.
In the case of electoral politics, that would mean that you’d want to start right now, shifting more and more people towards the voting outcome you want to achieve. You’d want to look carefully at what didn’t work so well last time and you’d try to find out what it was that you did or didn’t do that made it not work so well. You’d then try to identify ways you could address what it was that you did or didn’t do so that next time it is different. And you wouldn’t be waiting until next time was right upon you to do these things.
Almost every independence activist I’ve ever met is acutely aware that we failed to secure sufficient votes among those aged over 60 who are either reliant on a state pension or who are likely to be in the near future. Some in that age category are the post-war generation and feel strongly British as a cultural identity. Some are that generation of retirees who have become very wealthy out of the British management of the economy (and in particular the unsustainable way the housing market has made them wealthy). They probably will never vote Yes.
But what of the rest, the many, many pensioners who face life on one of the lowest state pensions in Europe with some of the highest housing costs in Europe, the ones whose insecurity about their financial future led them to vote No? We know, all of us, that failing to secure their vote was almost in itself enough to explain our failure to win. So we’ve analysed what went wrong and we’re taking substantial steps to make sure that problem does not arise again? We’ve begun work to ensure that there is a really solid and defensible plan in place to secure pensions for generations to come?
Nope. Actually, we’ve done nothing at all. I’ve heard some people on the small-c conservative side of the independence movement (many of whom are in influential positions) argue that this is precisely why the SNP must be a small-c conservative government, tacking to the centre to reassure those pensioners that they’re in ‘safe hands’. But is this not just a kind of projected self-interest? Is this not giving the impression that a small-c conservative future under the current political leadership is all that pensioners or anyone else can expect from independence?
And worse still (as I shall discuss at more length in Chapter Five), is this not precisely reassuring them that Britain is the safest option? If we ourselves adopt the view that being as much like Britain as possible is the best way to make people feel safe, are we ourselves not reinforcing the idea that continuity, that Britain, is the definition of safety? How does that help the independence case?
So what have we done to address this substantial hole in our hopes for independence? Cross our fingers? Is that sufficient? Do we really believe that if only we can get that ‘one more shot at it’, this time they’ll ‘see sense’? Are we happy to go into the campaign with them not believing us but infused with the belief that if we just knock their door one more time, then they’re bound to believe us?
I would suggest that is risky. In fact, I would suggest that such a view is foolhardy verging on reckless. Often it takes people time to change their minds, sometimes quite a lot of time. And it can also take material change, a real-world shift that in turn shifts them. There are products I won’t buy because they’re unethical and I can’t bring myself to turn a blind eye. Their manufacturers can come back with all the rebranding they want, saturate me in as much advertising as they want, if they’re still unethical, if they still make me feel bad when I think about them, I still won’t buy them. Sometimes you have to accept that the barrier is not about how smooth you were with your sales pitch; the barrier is what you were trying to sell. That is not something you can fix during the sales pitch. You need to work in advance.
For me, the biggest irony in all of this is that we are a movement for self determination which seems a little too happy to leave our fate in the hands of others. I’ve heard far too much talk along the lines of ‘the Tories will do our job for us’ by being unpopular (or the Brexiters will; or TTIP will). It is of course possible this is true. It is of course entirely plausible that someone, somewhere else will do stupid things which deliver us exactly what we want. Then again, it is just about plausible that a really brilliant government will come along in Westminster and be so damned good that we won’t even want independence any more. Do you want to pin all your hopes on it though?
I heard it said too many times during the referendum. Senior figures I admire and who I thought should have known better told me things like ‘when UKIP wins the European Elections in England but no UKIPers are elected in Scotland, that’ll be the tipping point which gets us a majority’. That’s the problem with relying on external factors to deliver what you want – they’re damnably unreliable. As soon as you find yourself saying ‘the key to us winning is not what we do but what they do’, you have immediately created a strategy based on weakness. And strategies based on weakness seldom work out well.
We need strategies based on strength, based on our own agency, our own ability to make things happen. Before we can have self-determination for Scotland, we need an attitude of self-determination in the independence movement. I suggest that the way to achieve that is to plan as if the outside world was neutral and then consider in depth how we should respond when things go better or worse than neutral.
This approach forces you to come up with a way that gets you from here to there relying first of all only on what we ourselves do. Let’s say all the possible beneficial external circumstances we’ve got our fingers crossed for (Tory unpopularity; oil price recovery; Brexit with a Scottish In vote; another financial crisis; etc.) fail to happen. What then? What is it that gets us to a victory? That question must be answered in some detail – replying ‘keep voting SNP and wait’ isn’t a strategy but a conviction of faith. What should the SNP do with its electoral power which can be expected to make pensioners feel comfortable with their wellbeing in an independent Scotland? The working class voters who were sympathetic to independence but somehow felt that it was too risky, what do we do to get them to vote Yes? Can the famous ‘aspirational middle classes’ ever be persuaded to shift and if so, what credible way can that happen?
If nothing else happens, how do we achieve these things on our own? That would be self-determination. Of course the outside world will not stay the same, but predicting in advance exactly what will happen is a foolish pursuit. Being prepared to deal with and use constructively all the possible external events we can think of is essential, but relying on them is dangerous.
Perhaps the most visible sign of our weakness, of our lack of self- determination, is our constant talk of ‘triggers’. We have speculated to an unhealthy degree about which external event will give us what is effectively an excuse to return to the battle we didn’t win. So desperate are we to believe that we can win the next referendum over the course of the next referendum that we are at risk of grasping at straws when we try to come up with a way to achieve that next referendum. It is this that has led us to use the word ‘trigger’ – the work of the good fairies who will sprinkle magic dust on us if only there is a...
So we’ll ‘just get’ another referendum if there’s a Brexit. But will we really? If Britain is ripped out of the European Union it will be financially very vulnerable with global markets considering the country to be an increased risk. You think the powers that be in the City of London will want that risk exacerbated by losing Scotland at the same time? Why does a slightly different vote on either side of the border compel anyone in Westminster to do anything at all to help us in our goal? What happens if there isn’t a Brexit?
There is no bigger sign of weakness when you predicate your whole purpose in life on the actions of an external, hostile entity based on an event which may or may not happen and which even if it does happen has no constitutional or conceptual link to the staging of a second referendum. In fact, hoping that ‘something will come along’ is virtually a sign of desperation. What if it doesn’t?
I am not for a second suggesting that there are no events which may occur which might not create a political environment in which refusing to permit a second referendum is untenable. I am most certainly not suggesting that we should not be ready to seize on that opportunity if it comes along. For my money, I suspect that another major financial crisis prompted by ongoing corruption in Britain’s banking system as a result of failure to regulate and punish after the last one is the event which might enrage enough people to view staying in Britain as more of a risk than leaving it. We should be ready.
But we need a Plan A. Waiting for something to come and rescue us isn’t Plan B because it isn’t even a plan, it’s a hope. Thankfully, there is a simple Plan A. We need to seek a democratic mandate for a second referendum. If we have that mandate, we can compel a second referendum. If that democratic mandate is not heeded, it will provoke a constitutional crisis which will almost certainly lead to Scotland’s independence one way or another.
Achieving that mandate is comparatively easy. There will be a Scottish Election in 2021. We can convert that election into a referendum on having a referendum. There are a number of ways it can be done – the SNP could be supported in standing on a single ticket pro-referendum platform and other parties could step aside on a promise that if for any reason a referendum is not secured, a new election would be called. All the pro-independence parties could form a ‘referendum alliance’ to the same effect. Indeed, all the pro-independence parties could stand aside in favour of a single ‘party’ on the ballot paper called ‘Give Scotland a Second Referendum on Independence’.
Now I of course realise that some of these ideas are more realistic than others. And people will argue that you need to have a full manifesto and a full plan for government in a Scottish parliamentary election. I would argue that, if you’re really serious, you don’t want a commitment to an independence referendum to be one item in such a manifesto. It leaves the door open to Westminster saying ‘you have a mandate for the overall plan but that does not mean we have to go along with any individual bit of it’. If you really, really want to nail this down, I’d suggest that you need a mandate which is unequivocally about that second referendum. Of course you’d need to promise another election soon after a Yes vote where people really could get a chance to vote on a domestic agenda. And you’d probably need to offer a second quick election if you failed to get enough votes for a second referendum (though if that was in doubt, we’ve failed and the whole strategy would need to be shelved). So I accept that this is not normal or usual practice. But I am arguing that this is, conceptually, the way to guarantee another referendum.
Because all that is required is that an unequivocal statement be made by a majority of the Scottish population that they want this to happen and the democratic mandate is secure. But this would be a risky strategy if we’re looking at 50.5 per cent. We need to get 60 per cent of the voting population to back this proposal. That is not only a mandate, it is the basis of a referendum victory.
If we were to achieve this (and if we were to follow the various steps proposed in chapters Four, Five, Six and Seven), we would already be prepared by the time of that 2021 Scottish Election to win a rapid referendum. There is an assumption among many independence supporters that referendums ‘naturally’ go on for ever. This is an assumption which springs only from the referendum we had. As the EU referendum shows, they do not need to last for three years. Indeed, they need not last more than a month or two. If we get a mandate for a second referendum in early May 2021 we can hold a referendum vote in September or October 2021 and have voted to be an independent country by Christmas 2021. That would be a self-determined strategy built on strength and confidence.
But – and it’s a substantial but – it relies on us having effectively won that second referendum by May 2021. Ideally we need a cohort of 65 per cent of the population which fully understands what is happening and which is committed to two votes within six months to create an independent Scotland. It will require both those votes to be secure before the process begins – if either of those votes goes wrong, independence is over for our generation.
This book is being written in May 2016. That means that as I type, we are already less than five years away from that momentous six months. If, by the middle of 2020 we are not sitting at at least a very solid 60 per cent support for independence (with rigorous checking and double-checking of methodology to ensure there are no nasty surprises), we need to pull out of this strategy and accept that it will be another five years again before it can be enacted. Which means that from this moment (mid 2016) we have only got four years to win Scottish independence. Tick tock.
If there is a crisis event between now and 2021 which looks like it might be sufficient in scale to move a sufficient number of people over to independence, the same solid strategy can be used by calling an early election. However, this is a much riskier strategy to enact in a period of volatility. Crises have a habit of producing outcomes which no-one expects. One poll for independence could reach 60 per cent but within the six months from there it takes to get to a referendum vote, events could have turned (an additional crisis in the Scottish economy for example) and we could lose. So while we should be prepared, a little patience is not a bad thing. Snatching at half chances – that’s a bad thing...
I hope I have outlined a clear path to Scottish independence which is in our hands. I hope I have also persuaded you that, if humanly possible, referendums should be won well before referendums are held. But there is one additional conclusion that can be drawn from these arguments, and it is one I hope independence supporters will be happy to hear. You do not need a No campaign to have a Yes campaign.
I’ve come across the view held by some that it’ll be much harder next time because the No campaign won’t be as awful as it was last time (though actually as will be discussed in Chapter Six, it wasn’t quite as bad as you think). I’ve heard others who think that we need really to work out what the next No campaign will throw at us and be prepared to combat it. Both things make sense and are partly true. But what if there isn’t a No campaign? If we can put together a successful, enthusiastic, large and grassroots driven Yes campaign years before the actual referendum, will the No side even have
the will to fight for that long? If we’re staging this battle continually over four years, what kind of No campaign would there be?
Would Labour really have the will to be drawn deeply into a long, damaging battle on which it is on the wrong side? The Tories in Scotland have little to lose but can they run a No campaign all by themselves? Are there enough activists to keep a visible presence for that period of time? Can they make up for this through big donors and professional agencies? What message can they sustain for four years? It would be fundamentally and dangerously cocky to assume that we have this in the bag or that all we need to do is turn up. But when we’re designing a campaign, why would we design it as if we’re re-running 2014? If a plan anything like that outlined above is pursued, the dynamic will be significantly different. We should be planning to have won over a lot of people years before a referendum. When we think about the fight in those terms, we think differently.
There is a clear, simple, straightforward path from here to Scottish independence and it is within our hands. We don’t need to pray to the gods for divine intervention. We don’t require anything magical or mysterious. We just need to work and work hard. As soon as you realise that there are no ‘triggers’, that referendums should be won years in advance, that you don’t need a No campaign to have a Yes campaign, you free yourself to devise the future as something which you can determine yourself. I believe firmly that it is this self-determination which will make the difference between us winning and losing. And I’m determined we don’t lose.