The night of September 18, 2014 was a foggy one in Edinburgh. It gave the old city an appropriately spooky and uncertain atmosphere. Scotland was waiting, poised, tentatively wondering what it had just done: by morning, would it find that it had taken the historic step of leaving the UK, or decided to stay? Would three centuries of union have been brought to a sudden end? What would happen next?
Ten years ago this morning, we found out. I had spent the evening in the pub with senior campaigners from both sides of the independence referendum. Friends again, after a tortured few months in which Scot had been pitted against Scot, in which emotions had run at fever pitch and which had seen an unprecedented outburst of democratic energy, not all of it good. The mood over our pints was mainly one of relief that it was nearly all over. Everyone was tired, stressed, pretty much wrung out. Whatever the outcome of the day’s vote, we would at last have an answer.
Of course, the decade since has made a mockery of the idea that it was “all over”. Though Scotland voted to stay British by 55 per cent to 45 per cent, the pro-independence juggernaut was just getting started. What emerged on September 19 was a nation locked in constitutional struggle, and which ever since has barely drawn breath to consider any other aspect of politics or policy. The SNP, which had been in power at Holyrood since 2007, has remained so till this day. After Alex Salmond’s resignation, Nicola Sturgeon ascended to the office of First Minister. She had thought the Yes side was going to win, and the relative narrowness of the result would drive her over the course of her leadership to repeatedly attempt to force a second referendum, in the belief that one more heave was all that was needed.
To be fair, the UK generously fed this belief and obsession. Brexit, which Scots voted against, undermined the argument that staying within the Union provided Scotland with a safe harbour in changing geopolitical times, along with an effective seat at the top table. Prolonged Tory austerity sat ill with many voters. Boris Johnson, then Liz Truss, were practically precision-tooled to irritate the inhabitants of North Britain.
In these circumstances, it’s possible to understand why Sturgeon and the team around her kept pushing for another vote. But it also sowed the seeds of their decline – any obsession with a single issue is by its nature time-limited. At some point, the punters will feel the need to move on. They’ll start to notice the consequences of that obsession – the neglect of other important matters, how everything is being forced through the funnel of that single issue rather than being judged on its merits. It took a while, but this inescapable fact is, finally, reasserting itself.
It didn’t help that Sturgeon made a series of mis-steps which ensured she got in her own way. Immediately after the Brexit result, she demanded a new independence referendum, a misjudgement of how Scots were feeling in the immediate aftermath. Most were unhappy with the outcome, but they wanted time to consider it and to observe the consequences. Their First Minister might be in a rush, but they weren’t. In the 2017 general election, that message was delivered good and hard – the mighty SNP lost 21 of their 54 Westminster seats.
But the party wasn’t really listening. It was still in government in Scotland and the largest Scottish party in the UK parliament. Its membership was swollen after the influx of newbies that followed the independence referendum. It had money, popularity and, in Sturgeon, a genuine political star. So on we went. The Holyrood government was used as a battering ram to drive the independence cause. Policy was designed to show that Scotland was fundamentally different from England – nicer and more just. Money was lavished on “progressive” pet projects, such as the child payment policy and the inflation-busting pay settlements for public sector workers. Independence papers were churned out by civil servants, in an attempt to provide a veneer of intellectual seriousness to the cause and to keep the momentum rolling. Any serious reforms to the creaking public services, which might have caused conflicts with workforces and vested interests and in turn affected support for independence, was avoided.
And the electorate seemed happy with this state of affairs. The SNP continued to win every election that crossed its path. Scotland continued to debate the idea of independence almost to the exclusion of all else. Those of us who saw clearly that we were stuck, and that we were storing up trouble for the future, and who said so, were shouted down. We were heartless, Yoons, Tories, barely Scottish. The wheel always turns, though – that’s the problem with pesky democracy. The data started to emerge showing Scotland’s school system was in decline. NHS workers began to speak publicly about a crisis that might still prove existential. The money started to run out. And, as with most governments that have simply been in power too long, the Nats began to make mistake after mistake.
Attempts to introduce reforms to gender laws did Sturgeon’s reputation huge damage among ordinary voters. Her confused and confusing decision to use a general election as a “de facto referendum” wasn’t even popular in her own party. Almost every government policy seemed to dissolve on contact with reality. The government began to look incompetent, arrogant and self-indulgent. SNP membership numbers plummeted. A police investigation into party finances was launched. Sturgeon departed, having failed to deliver that “one more heave” and leaving a thin legacy of achievement behind her. Finally, came the reckoning. In this year’s general election, the SNP was put in its place in humiliating fashion. The party lost 38 seats, and was reduced to a rump of just nine. Scottish Labour, trampled under the wheels of Nationalist hegemony for so long, was back.
John Swinney is now First Minister and is attempting to square the circle of voter disillusionment and the declining salience of the independence issue with the fact that the SNP really only exists to pursue the break-up of the UK. He is finding it hard-going. The Nationalists have been in power for too long for any attempted change in direction to feel genuine. They are no longer given the benefit of the doubt. It’s hard to see the point of them in the absence of their independence perma-campaign, when voters are more worried about schools and hospitals and jobs.
So, after a decade, Scotland seems to be coming to the end of its indy-ref era. There won’t be a second referendum in the foreseeable future, because not that many people want one. The SNP looks set to be ejected from office at the next Holyrood election in 2026. The devolved government would then refocus on policy for policy’s sake, like a normal country. After ten years of strife, argument and exhausting relitigation of the same old debate, it is as if a fog is finally lifting.
