Independence requires action beyond the current SNP inertia

This displays the high stakes at play, as both sides, for now, have little strategic sense of how to reframe and define the debate. Instead, they are content to play for time and to their respective bases, and wait for the changing of the guard at the UK Government in 2024. None of this seems adequate given the challenges people face in their lives, the state of the UK or seismic global challenges.

Some of the talk has been hyperbole. On the Unionist side, there have been insults thrown Nicola Sturgeon’s way, with Scottish LibDem leader Alex Cole-Hamilton describing her remarks post-court decision as “Nicola’s Trump train” and Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar saying she “risks fuelling violence after [the] court ruling”.

READ MORE: Alister Jack: Holyrood elections can not deliver mandate for indyref2

On the independence side, there has been loose talk of Scotland being a colony after Lord Reed’s assessment that we were not a colony or oppressed. And the SNP leadership have no consistent line about using the next UK election as a “de facto referendum”, with depute leader Keith Brown saying of winning 50% plus one of the vote, “if they vote for independence, then that’s what we will have”.

Nicola Sturgeon talking of independence as “Scotland’s democracy movement” has offended some pro-Union folk. It does raise the stakes, but also poses that democracy is about more than independence and that the political project of democratising Scotland is much wider than independence and could reach out to pro-Union voices and the unsure.

Former Green MSP Andy Wightman, who is opposed to a referendum in 2023, responded to Sturgeon by saying: “I am thus genuinely shocked to be told by the First Minister of Scotland that I am (by implication) not part of ‘Scotland’s democracy movement’. I have been arguing for better (especially local) democracy all my adult life.”

In such times it is natural for some to over-reach. Thus some pro-independence supporters think it appropriate to publicise their intention to burn copies of the Supreme Court decision – after previously burning copies of the 1707 Act of Union. Marching on BBC Scotland’s Pacific Quay headquarters, as All Under One Banner did on Saturday, might not be of the same order but this is indulgent and self-destructive.

Similarly, if the talk is now of coalescing independence forces, this has to add to rather than subtract. George Kerevan talked in these pages yesterday of a gathering under the umbrella of a National Assembly of All Under One Banner, Now Scotland and Common Weal, as if this will achieve anything positive.

The kind of political co-operation needed is not true-believers speaking to each other but a Popular Front politics open to those needing to be won over. The famous Popular Front victories of Spain and France in 1936, Chile in 1970 and France in 1981 were successful because they were geared to winning new converts and aiming for a socialist majority. The coalition of leftists formed a front that won them the elections. There is a lesson in this.

The bigger context is the electoral dominance of the SNP and the continued live nature of independence alongside the broken UK political system, which seems to degenerate and become more amoral every day.

In the past few days, The Guardian claimed that Tory peer Michelle Mone and her family secretly received £29 million via PPE Medpro, a company awarded PPE contracts after Mone recommended it to Tory ministers through their “VIP lane”. Mone is a testimony of our rotten system: of shameless Tories, a bloated House of Lords, the claims of PPE crony capitalism and what passes for “business credentials” which, in many cases, is nothing more than shameless self-promoting chancers.

Camilla Long in The Sunday Times wrote: “Mone is typical of a new breed of Tory ‘lifestyle peers’ who have flooded the Upper House in the past decade. It doesn’t matter who they are or what they have done, as long as they’re loaded and serve some minion-like purpose to whichever bored Tory PM has put them there … offer[ing] up private jets or hotels.”

Welcome to the world of unabashed Tory liggers – from Michelle Mone to Evgeny Lebedev and Peter Cruddas – embodiments of a broken amoral political system and capitalism.

Labour have said for the last 122 years that they plan to abolish the House of Lords, but the wider problem is the undemocratic political system, patronage and rise of this shameless class. The state of Britain – economically, socially, democratically – informs part of the independence debate.

The lack of a pro-Union strategy means it refuses to confront the undemocratic imperial centre, economic and social inequality and its links to the constitutional question. But there is also an absence of an SNP strategy and no obvious one post-2014. Since then, and even more post-2016, the SNP have oscillated between holding the line and trying to manage expectations and encouraging the notion of “one more heave” and that Brexit, Tories and the state of the Union will somehow bring victory without trying too hard.

Underneath this, Scotland’s centre-left political sentiment has become overrun by a politics of complacency and managerial centrism. Today’s SNP are characterised by a defensive Scottish nationalism and defensive social democracy, some of which comes from 15 years in office, a history of weak opponents, and a rising generational class in the party who have only known the SNP in office.

All of this leaves the Scotland to be won unchampioned. Where are the creative movement politicians and leaders? Where is the institution building which would be the characteristic of a vibrant, pluralist, confident independence movement? Where are the ideas of change and innovation – not just from the political class? And how do we understand Scotland beyond Yes?

Too many independence supporters think the battle for independence is already won and all that is needed is bold leadership. This is what left-wing Labour leaders said for decades pre-Corbyn; it used to be called “infantile leftism” because it believed that the correct leadership would wake up the socialist credentials of a majority of voters.

Independence movement building has to be about more than marching and flag-waving. It should be about equipping a cause with the resources and skills to make new independence politics, undertaking research, policy papers and building real expertise in the hard graft of making a new country. And listening to the Scotland yet to be won, of doubt and uncertainty.

As Richard Haviland wrote recently in Byline Times: “Scotland is divided into Yeses, Nos, Maybes, Don’t Knows and Deeply Conflicted.”

We are not just Yes/No, two tribes or even a 50:50 nation. We need to see the nuances of Scotland and speak and act accordingly.

Instead, the independence debate is defined by an SNP approach that no-one beyond Nicola Sturgeon knows anything about – including senior figures in the party – and a politics of virtue-signalling and counter-productive posture politics.

Where this takes us is the continuation of the phoney war we are currently in which will carry on at least to 2024. Scottish independence needs a politics of doing things beyond SNP inertia and centralisation and people publicly burning things.

A Scottish democracy movement would be a positive, but it would not just be an add-on to the independence cause.

Rather, it would challenge Westminster and Holyrood and point out that a genuine politics of self-government and self-determination needs to take power away from London and shift it within Scotland.

And that would be a threat to the narrow political class conversation which is nearly as much of a problem here as down south.