Why Nicola Sturgeon's approach is Scotland's best chance of independence

In the last seven years, we have had two referendums, a pandemic, three UK elections and two Scottish elections. You would think this might be enough, yet here we are looking for another referendum and perhaps further polls of various kinds.

However certain or uncertain national independence may be in the end, the process of winning it has not accelerated. The slow pace seems perfectly acceptable to Nicola Sturgeon, who has never made a fetish of her timetable. The pressure on her now eases somewhat, after minor currents of democratic dissent have played themselves out.

The demographics favour nationalism in the long term, with the proportion of Yes voters inching forward in each generation. But nobody can forecast the speed of the change or be sure that, in a global external environment that so often hangs in the balance, treacherous forces will not drive everything off the expected course from time to time.

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Nicola is in no hurry to call a referendum, because it is Boris Johnson that faces the real risk of ruinous mistakes. Time will not wait for him. The longer he rejects a Scottish referendum, the more his case for the absolute sovereignty of the UK Parliament will be tested. Neither the constitution that sustains it nor the strength of the economy it has to defend and develop will suggest it can easily pass all the tests that lie in wait. Meanwhile, a cautious and stable government in Edinburgh seems to offer Scotland the best chance of stacking the odds in its favour.

As an economy fully integrated into the international system, Scotland is better than the average, with a relatively prosperous population, a wealth of resources and historical bonuses such as a strong academic tradition.

It is as much as several successful European nations have ever had, and more than a good few of them can boast even now. The UK Government will need to argue it is still somehow insufficient to assure us of economic success outside the battered Union.

It is not even, however, as if we are imprisoned within these existing economic structures either. Scotland was one of the first capitalist nations, then also led the world in switching from the initial production of consumer goods (food and textiles) to the late capitalist specialisation in heavy engineering. Now we’re pretty good in the digital world too.

Nor did this enormous long-term adjustment need to be the conscious aim of public policy, in times when government had little Scottish policy of any kind. The capitalists just did it themselves, with the full consent and co-operation of their workers. More recently, it was the UK Government that rashly forced us from a cautious and thrifty exploitation of North Sea oil into making it the means of wasteful maintenance of expenditure by the state. We would have been better letting the private sector keep the money.

Today again, the private sector is the wellspring of ideas for a realistic prospect of an alternative future. Wiser heads already propose we pass as smoothly as we can manage from oil to renewables. A key to this future in the management of natural resources is a branch of economics where we already excel in many particulars. New technologies and creative industries are surviving even the pandemic crisis. As things stand, we have a clear incentive to develop the right skills and resources on our own initiative, something that is lacking in the plan for a spendthrift UK promised by Boris Johnson’s Tory Party. This future management is something other countries may well want to learn from us.

WE could do still better if we worried less about the details of social equality and more about higher economic efficiency. The choices should be more discriminating than nationalists like to believe, when they promise everything to everybody (or at least, most things to most people).

Nicola has often praised equality as the guiding principle of her government. She is seldom more precise about what it actually means, though we must presume that personal income levels have a great deal to do with it.

A society that is wanting in dynamism is in general also one where it is hard for even the most dynamic individual to forge far ahead of fellow workers who only need to carry out the few functions necessary in a stagnant economy.

This leads, among too many SNP supporters, to an over-simple view of independence. They think it will be above all an opportunity for us each to spend as much money as we like.

There is a logic to this: if our present situation is imposed by anti-Scottish government in London, then walking away from it will solve the problems. We will be able to look forward to a more static future state where we are in charge of our own destiny because it is stable, re-assuring and secure. It seems to me pretty well what Nicola is aiming for.

But the achievement would also have a price. For its sake we must go through the volatile act of secession, a process that is bound to be awkward and could be painful. The UK embarked on the process of Brexit in June 2016 and though we have now signed the treaty, there are still five years later a vast number of details to iron out together with temporary arrangements like the border in the Irish Sea.

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One lesson from Brexit is that change takes time. Another is that the junior partner in the negotiation is likely to be the one that gets less of what it wants. Five wearisome years were required for the UK to get out of the EU, and then with a deal from which the early ambition had been shorn. Since Scotland is bound even more tightly into the UK, full independence could take twice as long.

I support Nicola’s European aims, but I somehow doubt if an economic programme of equality for everybody is the way to fulfil them. The most dynamic economies are unequal. They succeed because they have enough entrepreneurs to generate victories in the international market place.

And these victories are the work of individuals, not of official committees of the great and good. If we disapprove of the entrepreneur, as Scottish government often does, then he or she will go to another country to fulfil their ambitions.

A cautious and stable government in Edinburgh will have its achievements to celebrate too. But they may never include making us all richer. In that case they may never arise at all, if the people prefer an unequal prosperity.