Simon Brooke: Why politics as usual won't shape our future

Chris McCorkindale, senior lecturer in law at Strathclyde, and Aileen McHarg, professor of public law and human rights at the University of Durham, have one view. They have written a serious, well thought through and good-hearted attempt to discuss the path to independence. I advise you to read it. If you don’t have time, they summarise the Scottish Government document Scotland’s Right to Choose: Putting Scotland’s Future in Scotland’s Hands, and analyse the reasoning behind its arguments.

They then go on to make the case for legality, for following constitutional practice. You’d expect them to, of course: they’re both law academics. And they do it well.

They discuss how to secure a lawful referendum. Their essay is careful, well informed and comprehensive. I also think that it is wrong. In this essay I shall discuss why.

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McCorkindale and McHarg write that “any ... approach would require the UK Government willingly to join [independence] negotiations, something that seems unlikely without clear and unambiguous popular endorsement”. Well, that’s true, but it also seems very unlikely with clear and unambiguous popular endorsement, or, indeed, at all.

The costs to the United Kingdom of Scotland’s independence would be very high:

It loses its only strategic nuclear weapons facility;

It (probably) loses its permanent seat on the UN security council;

It loses Scotland’s mineral wealth;

It loses Scotland’s potential renewables wealth;

It loses Scotland’s very extensive and strategically important territorial waters;

It loses most of its fishing grounds;

It loses five of the world’s most esteemed universities;

It loses the best educated workforce in Europe;

It loses one of the world’s most esteemed arts festivals.

Fishing grounds are the least of the UK's worries when it comes to losing dominion over Scotland

In short, it loses wealth, military power, influence, talent and prestige. It loses these things out of all proportion to Scotland’s population share. These are costs it will not willingly accept.

The United Kingdom has always presented itself as an honest, open, fair-minded and generous negotiating partner. Because Scotland has, for the last 300 years, been part of the United Kingdom, we’ve seen this flattering self-description as applying to us; and, because it’s flattering, we’ve liked it, and believed it of ourselves.

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Well, maybe.

But in the independence negotiation we are not part of the United Kingdom. Rather, they are our opponents: our interlocutors. It’s time tae see oorsels – or rather the United Kingdom – as its past interlocutors have seen it. The French, who have negotiated with England and later with the United Kingdom longer than anyone else, call it “perfidious Albion”. The United Kingdom’s history of colonisation around the world has been characterised by grandiloquent treaties entered into between the UK and indigenous populations, and then trampled on or simply forgotten when it has been convenient for the United Kingdom to do so.

What history teaches is that the United Kingdom state is and always has been ruthless and self-interested. It is manifestly and significantly not in the United Kingdom’s interest to see Scotland leave. Therefore, any strategy for independence which expects goodwill or fair-minded generosity from our interlocutors will fail.

And there’s a bigger problem, which underlines the one I’ve just outlined. McCorkindale and McHarg’s essay is written after the December 2019 Conservative election victory, but it does not seem to take it significantly into account.

The Tories now have a large, largely English, majority; their limited Scottish representation is not of a high intellectual calibre, and is not of a mind to defend Scotland’s interests within the Union. These new Tories are a party, what’s more, from which the centrist, more liberal, pro-European elements have been ruthlessly pruned.

Heseltine no more.

Hammond, no more.

Letwin, no more.

Clarke no more.

The United Kingdom Government are Brexiteers, they are triumphalist, and they are on a roll. They are convinced that they have already won; that we are already defeated.

The UK Government are right-wing Brexiteers, and they think they've already won

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FURTHERMORE, the Tories plan, through voter ID, through gerrymandering, through reduction of the number of MPs, through further privatisation of the means by which votes are collated and counted, to suppress opposition votes in future elections. At the same time, the Labour party have all the unity and focus of a sackful of hungry ferrets. This is unsurprising in so far as Labour has always, since it was forged out of the dissimilar metals of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the Fabian Society, been a house divided against itself.

That division may seem like ancient history, but it is not. The corpse of the ILP lives on as People’s Momentum, while the shambling revenant of the Fabian Society is animated by the spirit of Progress. Labour unity has only ever been achieved by slaying one of these two primordial beasts, but, like the draugr of Norse mythology, they won’t stay dead.

In this context, the prospects of a non-Tory government of the UK in the next 20 years are very slim; and consequently, it is in the shadow of a triumphalist, revanchist Tory party that Scotland must slouch towards Bethlehem – or perhaps Arbroath? –to be reborn.

So, in summary: all constitutional routes to independence will almost certainly be blocked. The United Kingdom will not come willingly to the negotiating table, whatever we do. It’s highly unlikely we can force the United Kingdom to the negotiating table, except perhaps by making Faslane unusable to them – but they would almost certainly respond to that with force, and if it comes to a shooting war, we certainly lose. So there will be no independence by constitutional means.

Chris McCorkindale is certainly right that we still have a lot of convincing to do

However, McCorkindale and McHarg are certainly right that we must persuade the people of Scotland – and in particular, a majority of those of us who oppose independence – that we have done our very best to achieve independence legitimately; that the opposition to it by the United Kingdom state has been oppressive and tyrannical. And to do that, we must, against all my protests, follow Nicola Sturgeon’s path of exhausting the constitutional options at least a little further – but Nicola, please, if ’twere done, ’twere best ’twere done quickly.

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So, in a sense, McCorkindale and McHarg’s advice, in so far as it goes, even though it will surely fail, is good. But we must do more.

THE United Kingdom, in seeking to oppose independence, will seek to chip away at a viable Scottish state. It will seek to lure away our blue borders and our orange outer isles. It will seek to annexe and retain Faslane. Those are places their blows will be aimed. And we must parry; we must riposte.

We need, more than anything else, to persuade Galloway, Dumfriesshire, Roxburgh, Selkirk, Peebles, Berwickshire, Orkney and Shetland, that within the new Scottish state they will have a status, a prosperity, and a degree of local autonomy that would be forever denied to them within the United Kingdom. That means love-bombing not just by the Scottish Government but by the Yes movement. It means radically reversing the SNP’s policy of centralism.

We need to persuade Europe – at the very least the members of the European Free Trade Association – that we have tried our best to achieve independence constitutionally, and that the blocking of constitutional routes has been unreasonable. For this we need diplomacy, and we need that diplomacy now. And, of course, the Scottish Government have already started, for which they must be

congratulated; but civil society, particularly those Scots with business and personal relationships in our European neighbours, must play our part in building strong bonds and communicating Scotland’s aspirations.

And we must each of us individually talk to our friends, to our neighbours; especially to our neighbours who are undecided, or who are still Unionists.

Obviously, we must seek to persuade them of the merits of independence; but more critically, we must persuade them of the legitimacy and justice of the right of Scotland to choose.

Ultimately, like George Kerevan, I believe that independence will not be won by politics as usual, nor even by constitutional actions as usual.

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Like Kerevan (Why We Can’t Leave Independence To The SNP Alone, the National, January 13), I believe we need to extend beyond normal political action to, as he suggests, civil society conventions, but also, I would say, non-violently to the streets: to create a festival of independence, as we did in the spring of 2014.

In the end, every nation is an act of imagination, a fairy tale. Like Tinkerbell, when we all believe that Scotland lives, Scotland lives.

We can all help build that groundswell of belief, in our different ways. We can all learn to deliver a well judged positive remark, a clear statement of fact, even an inspiring conversation.

At the very least we should all develop our skills at delivering social “nudges” to build the understanding and confidence of our fellow Scots – new, young and old. It’s our job now to persuade our friends, our fellow citizens both here and furth of Scotland, to believe.