If the price that we needed to pay for the SNP to be
reduced to a handful of MPs was a Labour government with a large majority, it
was a price worth paying. I am more optimistic than some people about Labour,
but whatever Labour does and however long it rules, it will be temporary. What
the SNP was trying to do since 2011 would have been permanent. The UK would
have been broken up and that would have been final. That is what we were fighting
for all these years. That is the victory that we have just achieved.
When Labour used to win nearly all of the seats in
Scotland, it did not gather them together in front of the Forth Railway bridge.
Nor did it claim that if it won more than 50% of the votes in Scotland it would
give it a mandate for anything. There was an arrogance about the SNP when it
was at its peak that deserved the fall that has now taken place, not only a
fall in the number of its seats, but a fall that amounts to a trip and lying
face down in the sharn [dung].
The task for us is not to be conciliatory as people
like me tried to be after victory in 2014, but rather to grind that SNP face
into the dung so that it fully tastes it and until it admits the scale of its
defeat.
It has been a long fight for those of us who have been
there since the beginning. It felt like a long campaign in September 2014, but
the result although decisive needed to be by 20-30% rather than 10%. There was
still hope for Scottish nationalism and so we had to endure ten years of
talking about nothing but Scottish independence, marches in fancy dress and SNP
misrule. I have a sense of relief, but also a sense of exhaustion. But it was
worth it.
The scale of the SNP’s defeat means that there is now
every chance that it can be defeated at Holyrood too. If this is VE day, that
will be VJ day. All that will be left will be a lone piper dressed up as a Jacobite
somewhere in the jungle singing about sending someone homeward to think again,
when it is really he that will need to think again if indeed he is still capable
of thinking at all.
Was it really sometime in 2022 that Nicola Sturgeon
put forward the idea of the General Election being a de facto referendum on independence?
Did we really spend the past couple of years modifying this by claiming that
the SNP would be able to negotiate independence if it won a majority of seats
in Scotland and then merely if it won more than any other party? There were
still mutterings of subversive talk of a unilateral declaration of independence
(UDI) as recently as a few months ago.
Well, the SNP cannot unsay what has already been said.
To have a de facto referendum on any terms there has to be the concept of
winning it and also the concept of losing it. The SNP has lost by any measure
and so it has had its second referendum. The only unilateral declaration
required from the SNP is let me up from the dung I surrender.
I wonder if there will be any more marches. Scottish
nationalism is going to have to come to terms with this and that will be
psychologically difficult for many. When you have told others for so long that
independence is inevitable it will be tough to take to realise that it will not
happen in your lifetime, probably not in your grandchildren’s lifetimes and
more than likely not at all.
There were moments of genuine danger in the past decade.
The level of support for the SNP looked permanent and a second referendum if it
had occurred would have been a coin toss at best for the Pro UK side. Too many
in England were willing to tell us how wonderful Nicola Sturgeon was not
realising that she cared about Remain only insofar as it would destroy the UK,
too few in Scotland were willing to make any argument against the SNP.
There was genuine fear of the consequences of
disagreeing with the SNP. We must get to the bottom of SNP corruption and
intimidation and never ever let it happen again. Labour’s eventual task will be
to fully investigate SNP misrule in Scotland.
I never foresaw
this moment. It looked like trench warfare forever. But then there was the
unexpected breakthrough.
The oddest thing is that we still don’t really know
what caused Sturgeon to resign nor indeed what caused the SNP’s support to fall
so far so fast. I can point to scandal. I can point to Humza Yousaf being more concerned
about what was happening in Gaza than in Scotland. I can point to John Swinney
being no better than he was when he last led the SNP only this time having less
hair. But none of it is enough to fully explain the steepness of the decline.
If you had predicted this result two years ago, I
would have told you it was impossible.
I think it was really that the moment passed. The
independence referendum caused Scottish nationalism to reach a peak that it had
not reached before in the past three hundred years. It blew like one of those
gales in November that blows down all the trees, but then the moment passed.
If Scotland were going to achieve independence it
would have done so in the past ten years. The fact that it has not means that
it will not. We have returned to the norm of voting Labour. There is no longer
any need to complain that Scotland voted for Labour but got a Tory government,
which was the root of the soft nationalism that gave us the Scottish parliament,
and which eventually gave us the hard nationalism that almost destroyed the UK.
If the SNP is wise, it will admit that independence is
not happening, cease talking about it and devote itself instead to improving
Scotland by cooperating with the British government and by focussing its attention
on improving the lives of Scots rather than turning our neighbours into
foreigners. If so, it may still have the political role of trying to get the
best for Scotland.
But I doubt that the SNP will be able to concede
defeat for which reason it will end up like one of those Jacobites toasting the
king oer the water long after he is dead.
The root of the problem was and still is that too many
Scots fail to have an identity that matches their passport. This has now become
more of a problem in Wales, Northern Ireland and England too. This is the soft
nationalism that thinks that it is unfair if Scotland votes to Remain, but the
UK votes to Leave or that it is undemocratic if Scots vote one way but the UK
votes another.
The UK almost alone in the world has subnational
nationalism because we persist in maintaining that the parts of the UK are
countries in the same way that France or Germany are countries. This is intellectually
incoherent. It would make the UK some sort of confederation. It is simply
ignorant to suppose that it is.
The key is to admit
that the word “country” can be used in different senses and that Scotland has
not been a country in the sense that the word is usually used since 1707 and
Wales has not been a country since it was conquered and then merged with England
in the Middle Ages. Playing international football is an oddity but it does not
change this.
The only way to defeat hard nationalism finally is to
defeat the soft nationalism that causes it. The hope is that Labour does
something to make the UK more united, more like France, Germany and the United
States where people don’t think that the formerly independent countries that
make up these states are still countries and don’t unless they are nutters want
them to be independent again.
This has been a devastating defeat for the SNP. The UK
briefly was threatened more by Alex Salmond and then by Nicola Sturgeon than either
the Kaiser or the Führer, but now it is as if we have reached 1945 again and
with it safety. There will like then be a Labour government, but it won’t be forever.
I am worn out and will need to find new topics to
write about but will do so for as long as people want to read what I write and
encourage me to do so. Lately I have been getting fewer readers than normal, which
is disappointing when the only object of writing is to be read.
Enjoy the moment. Whatever else happens in the next
few years at least we will be able to look back on this moment. Rejoice. Rejoice.
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