SNP need to take time to consider what indy really means for us all

Well, let’s see what they do with it.

For a while, I’ve been pragmatic (if not phlegmatic) about the parties of independence at a UK level. Especially when I’m able to express my left-green preferences in Holyrood’s proportional system.

Also, the spectacle of scores of talented Scottish politicians, being patronised and traduced on the green benches of Westminster, has never, ever inspired me. Perhaps they’re better up the road, in some shape or form?

READ MORE: The National view on the election: A new start for independence?

So I’d rather cut to the chase as an indy supporter. What are the new, wider circumstances we advocates have to adapt to – not just in London, but globally too?

I find the musings of Jeremy Corbyn’s former economic adviser James Meadway – usually applied to the oncoming context of a Keir Starmer government – to be very clarifying for the future of Scottish independence also.

“Stability and growth” is, in truth, a mantra Starmer and John Swinney share. But these goals are challenged, as Meadway puts it, by “a world of repeated ecological and geopolitical shocks, and of rising costs”. These repeated shocks are “draining legitimacy from the liberal centre ground in the Global North’s systems of government”, he says.

I was struck by his recommendations for responses by the “broader left” he still identifies with. They must, he asserts, “place immediate demands at the centre of what it argues for”.

For example, if energy prices surge again, “the response is not ‘first build more wind farms’, but ‘first cap prices’”.

This points to something of an in-built tragedy here for the SNP government. Didn’t it just try to run on a record mostly composed of tangible responses to “immediate demands”?

Recall it: no tuition fees, no elder care fees, no prescription charges, no bus costs for old and young, free baby boxes, and notably the Scottish Child Payment (lauded by anti-poverty campaigners as groundbreaking). There’s even a longstanding concept behind it: the “social wage”, as Alex Salmond spoke of it in the noughties.

So the majority of indy parties in Holyrood seem to be responding to these trends, if they are correctly identified. (Compare this to a Starmer’s Labour which recoils from any social expenditure not underwritten by some speculative “growth”).

Again, another retort to Meadway from the SNP government could be: we can build both wind farms, and address direct deficits in household budgets, at the same time.

But won’t the SNP government hit the limits of how much they are able to mitigate the cost of living crisis, under conditions of devolution? Pretty soon?

And look at what just happened. An SNP trying to outflank the Labour Party on the left, on the basis of the policies it has implemented, has just failed electorally. The Scottish electorate seemed unwilling to value this distinction.

To me, that implies that the party’s standards-shredding shenanigans, and an invitation to become part of the anti-Tory wave, were definitely ringing much louder in Scottish citizens’ ears.

Meadway believes that what will define politics for the next five years are “economic shocks from the ecological crises; war; and the rise of the far right”.

I believe the indy movement has to take these factors on directly. In fact, what political scientists call the “polycrisis” – where the above forces, and others, interrelate and amplify themselves – looks like it’s the new test for the necessity of independence.

In a supply chain crisis over food, due to climate upheaval – or over energy, due to war as well – can we make the call for indy? As a means of strengthening our national self-provision of these resources?

We may face the advance of Reform and other far-right forces in the rest of the UK, as the Starmer government stumbles and crumbles. Do we assert the need for indy as a means of securing Scotland’s democratic difference?

And Europe may become as much a theatre for disruptive and intolerant populists, as it is an “acquis communautaire” that smoothes our business relations.

So do we call for indy as a necessary buffer of sovereignty, allowing us some geopolitical distance from assumed alliances?

Those might be the top lines for a coming strategy on the “case for independence” – but only if Meadway’s downbeat predictions about the next few years (if not decades) are right.

The Starmer government may also be compelled to be bolder, when faced with the “immediate demands” of the polycrisis.

Keir Starmer outside Downing Street (Image: PA)

They may detach themselves from their hydraulic model of “no spending without growth” – and thus narrow the distance between Scottish and rUK ideological preferences.

Yet there’s another reading of “independence” which opens up a different dimension of politics altogether. What do we make of just over 40% of Scots not participating in this General Election at all?

That’s close to the worst-ever percentage. Most political scientists would agree that this is a volatile reserve, waiting to be mobilised one way or the other.

But by whom and what?

It’s notable that Nigel Farage’s Reform Party – which struck up 14% across the UK – only did half as well in Scotland (around 7%).

READ MORE: Scottish independence supporters give verdict on General Election

It’s a crumb of comfort for all progressives in Scottish politics that the xenophobia, prejudice and anti-immigration sentiments of Reform reached a lower tide mark here than elsewhere.

But it’s not zero percent.

Yes, there may be some long-standing coherence in Scotland that makes it more resistant to such politics. Yet one priority I would like indy strategy to address – and pretty immediately – is how to keep it that way.

The brilliant young political scientist Rory Scothorne wrote a few weeks ago: “In struggling post-industrial communities, the left often talks about ‘community wealth building’.

But what places like Scotland – rich, unequal, but with a strong sense of itself – really need is more like community wealth capture.”

By this, Scothorne urges us to find “a means of grabbing hold of the resources that flood in and out, and using them to improve our resilience and self-confidence in the face of capital’s flattening power”.

What this implies is a strengthening of local powers in Scotland – but not in any merely technocratic or municipal way (though all that can be done, under the existing powers of Holyrood, should be done).

Scothorne wants to connect up the machinery of community resources with the “radical and popular, national and cosmopolitan” sensibility of Scottish nationhood, as established by cultural creators from the 70s to the 90s.

So “independence”, rather than being a distantly achievable constitutional state, is the practice of autonomy and self-determination in the here and now (and next door).

(Image: NQ)

What does this imply for the relationships between communities and their land, taxes, and buildings? All the things (and humans) they grow and nurture? It should also, Scothorne implies, be embedded in a rich, active, vivifying cultural practice. This is something that may be a hidden resource for Scotland.

Is this “living culture” a way of keeping Scots from being misdirected and exploited in their passions, by sub-fascists and populists? May the “makars” also be making resilient and capacious citizens?

Again, arts and culture are powers reserved to Scotland.

How can we innovate new structures for them, under this soul-saving imperative?

I seem to have written myself out of despair and into the sunlight of possibilities! The party’s party may not yet be over, after all.

But I believe the SNP need to think clearly and differently about the macro- and the micro-levels of their cause. About the personal, local, national and planetary dimensions of what “independence” might mean in our everyday lives. Indy’s not dead. Indeed, its profoundest moment may well be nigh.