Just as we have to assess why Jacobitism failed so too
will future historians try to assess why Scottish nationalism failed. It is to
be hoped that they will have information that is not available to us or at the
very least that they will be able to write more freely about these matters than
we can.
It is astonishing to realise that almost everything
that we have been through from 2007 to now did not need to happen. It is quite
likely in 2026 that the SNP will be the largest party at Holyrood, but without
a majority and indeed unable to form a majority. In this circumstance no one
think that John Swinney or his successor will become First Minister. The Pro UK
parties will vote for Anas Sarwar and informally keep him in power. The SNP
will be shut out even if it is the largest party.
But this is exactly the situation that obtained in
2007 when Alex Salmond won 47 seats one more than Labour on 46. He needed an
informal deal with Annabel Goldie the Scottish Conservative leader to become
First Minister. Can you imagine the
level of stupidity required to make Alex Salmond First Minister?
But it was a different world in 2007. No doubt Goldie
thought her task was to defeat Labour rather than protect the UK from Scottish
nationalism.
So, it might well have been that instead of Alex
Salmond as First Minister we could have continued with Jack McConnell. It may
then have been that Labour continued in power in 2011 and that there was no
independence referendum in 2014. The SNP may never have governed. Scotland need
not have had nearly twenty years of Scottish nationalism to deal with.
Alex Salmond changed everything. He used the power
that Goldie gave him to change the Scottish Executive into the Scottish
Government and he began the process of treating Scotland as if it were already
independent as a means of obtaining that independence.
If there is one figure responsible for the rise of
Scottish nationalism and the success of the SNP it is Alex Salmond. No one else
comes close. Nicola Sturgeon reached heights of personal popularity that
Salmond did reach, but if it had not been for Salmond she would have remained a
long-forgotten SNP MSP or perhaps not even that.
It was Salmond’s skill as a politician that first made
him well known in Scotland, much more so that previous SNP leaders. He and he
alone turned the SNP from a strictly minority party to a party of government.
He then used that power as First Minister to turn a minority into what ought to
have been impossible an absolute majority and this into the still more
impossible independence referendum. Sturgeon despite her undoubted skills and
ability to communicate emotion, did none of these things.
This is where we come to some unknowns. These unknowns
are the reasons why Scottish nationalism ultimately failed. They are to do with
the relationship between Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon and why they went
from being apparently the best of friends to the worst of enemies and I must
briefly digress.
There was at the time in Scotland a new university with a new history department. Solomon Alexandersen became head of that department, and his deputy was Stuart Nicholson. Now Solomon and Stuart were great friends and there was speculation that they might even have been more than friends. But Solomon found that he did not need Stuart anymore for recreational purposes as being head of department gave him access to all the girls he could require. This sort of circumstance has been quite typical in universities. The head of department has a certain attractiveness, and it can be quite useful to go to bed with him if you want some help with your exams or with a reference or indeed with a promotion. It may be sleazy, but such sleaziness goes all the way back to Plato’s symposium.
Now it might be that later when Stuart became head of department, he resented the success of Solomon and perhaps felt personally betrayed. Stuart might then have decided to investigate whether any of the girls were willing to say anything about what Solomon had got up to.
A powerful man who picks up young girls in part
because of his power is not uncommon, but it is very easy indeed to turn an
entirely consensual relationship albeit based on an imbalance of power into
something else.
Here we have another imbalance of power if Stuart put
pressure on these girls to discover that a consensual relationship was not
consensual. You just need to exaggerate a little. Who after all can know what happened
between you and the head of department in private years ago? That job you want
is just waiting for you or alternatively you will get nowhere.
This is the problem when some years afterwards there
is an investigation into the rather sleazy goings on in the history department.
Who is to know what really went on? There can be corruption both during the
reign of Solomon and during the reign of Stuart.
All we know is that no one sought to complain about
Solomon when he was head of department and that the complaints only arose years
later when Stuart was in charge.
But with such division in the department, with
investigations and charges is it any surprise that the history department lost
sight of its goal of investigating history.
Nicola Sturgeon led the SNP to perhaps its greatest
success in 2015 when it won all but three of the seats at the General Election.
But it was not her success. If Alex Salmond had remained SNP leader after
losing the referendum in 2014, he would doubtless have achieved the same
success in 2015. Indeed, if Nicola Sturgeon had been hit by a bus in 2014 and
any other SNP MSP had become leader this person too would have achieved the
same success.
Scotland in 2015 felt guilty that it had not chosen
independence when it had the chance. There was also a matter of momentum.
Support for independence had grown very far and very fast from around 25% to
45% and it was not surprising that it grew a bit more in the few months after
2014.
It was much easier to vote SNP to assuage your guilt
knowing that Scotland would not become independent and that the General
Election of 2015 was not about independence.
But what did Nicola Sturgeon do with her MPs apart
from stand in front of the Forth Rail Bridge with them? It is hard to point to
one significant thing that any of these MPs did.
In 2016 the UK voted to leave the EU. Although the SNP
had not made any great contribution to the Remain campaign it tried to use the
fact that Scotland had voted by 62% to remain in the EU to justify another
referendum. How close did Nicola Sturgeon come to achieving this goal? Not
very.
The route that Sturgeon chose to go down was to try to
pressurise the British government into granting her a referendum based on the
support that the SNP obtained either at a Scottish parliament election or a
General Election. But this route turned out to lead merely into a cul de sac.
The independence referendum of 2014 changed the
circumstance that had existed prior to then. This is something that the SNP did
not realise at the time.
In the 1930s it was impossible for the King to marry a
divorcee, but by the time we arrived at King Charles III not only was it
possible for Charles to marry a divorcee it was possible also for him to be one
himself. No one suggested that he needed to abdicate.
So too what the SNP needed to obtain independence or
even a referendum on the subject changed from the 1980s when a simple majority
of MPs would be enough to frankly nothing being enough at least not now,
because you have already had your referendum.
The British Prime Minister whether Theresa May or
Boris Johnson discovered that it was quite possible to say No to the SNP leader
without a new Jacobite rising occurring. Nothing very terrible happened when
Nicola Sturgeon banged on about her party having a mandate and there was
nothing much she could do. Her impotence merely showed that she did not have a
mandate.
Most Scots were happy about this. A few Remainers
flirted with Scottish nationalism, most Pro UK people were delighted, and many
independence supporters were in the make me holy camp God but not yet.
Scottish nationalists marched, but not in large
numbers. The marches were a good-natured chance to dress up and play bagpipes,
but they never persuaded anyone that there was some hidden majority of Scottish
nationalists just waiting to overthrow the UK. The marches merely demonstrated
the paucity of support for independence and so were really marching for counter
productiveness rather than secession.
Support for the SNP fell in the 2017 General Election
which rather undermined hopes that Brexit could be used as a lever to separate
England and Scotland. Scots might have been angered about being outnumbered by
English people, but it wasn’t entirely clear what if anything the English
should do about this? Perhaps Scotland could have as many MPs as England
despite having a tenth of the population. Perhaps there could be a cull of English
people to reduce them to the population of Scotland. The SNP argument amounts
to England is a big boy and we are a wee boy and it’s not fair.
Nicola Sturgeon fatally undermined her own argument
when she campaigned for a Second “People’s Referendum” on Brexit. She didn’t
realise that if the SNP ever won a referendum on leaving the UK there would
immediately be a campaign for a second chance. Worse she allowed her SNP MPs to
conspire with Labour and the Lib Dems in Westminster in attempting to thwart
the Brexit vote.
We discovered at this point for the first time that a
referendum was merely advisory and that it was up to parliament to decide
whether it wished to be advised or not.
Fair enough this was implicit in our understanding of
parliamentary sovereignty, but it stuffed the SNP because it meant that even if
it won a referendum on independence a parliament in which the SNP was always
going to be outnumbered could overrule it. If it could do so with Brexit it
could equally well do so with Scexit.
Sturgeon became more popular during the pandemic, but
the substance of her argument became worse. Scotland received its furlough
money from the hated Tories and its vaccination too. Sturgeon made her Scottish
rules different from the British ones, but these merely caused confusion rather
than saved lives. About as many Scots died proportionally as everyone else in
the UK and all we got from Sturgeon was the usual emoting rather than anything
that made a difference.
She kept pushing the line each year that next year
there would be a second referendum, but it is entirely unclear if by this stage
she herself believed it any more than the rest of us. It became merely a way of
keeping the party faithful happy like Labour singing the Red Flag without
anyone believing that there would be any red flags next year let alone any
revolution.
Sturgeon felt the need to keep pushing it by devising
schemes such as a de facto referendum at a General Election but finally pushed
herself into the “cullest” of cul de sacs by demanding that the Supreme Court
give her the right to hold a referendum on independence.
In a devastating ruling the Supreme Court denied that
Scotland had the right to self-determination and made clear that Scotland was
to the UK as Aberdeenshire is to Scotland. Neither have the right to a
referendum on independence. Scotland is not a colony. It is not even really a
country. That is merely a way of talking. Scotland was a country in the same
way that Burgundy was a country, but this has no political significance either
in France or in Britain.
Again, I must return to the unknowns. Please excuse the
digression.
When Stuart Nicholson realised the pointlessness of
studying history, he decided to play a game. He would tell the students that
they would all get wonderful jobs if only they studied at his department, but
what he would really do was fleece them as much as he possibly could.
The problem with dishonesty and trying to get Solomon Alexandersen
arrested for what was at best an exaggeration of his misbehaviour was that once
you have crossed the dishonesty threshold the temptation to use your power
dishonestly becomes still greater.
Stuart ran the department. He had along with his husband
absolute power over the finances and the accounts. He could buy what he wanted
and there was no one to check. If the history department raised funds to study
in this archive, it could instead decide to study in that archive, or indeed
not study in any archive at all, because studying in archive was pointless if
history was pointless.
No one dared question Stuart and his husband over the
department’s finances. He cautioned that any questioning was detrimental to the
department and liable to discourage fee paying units (students) from paying
fees.
And so, the history department only pretended to be
interested in history but became a sort of racket to con the students into
studying history while really its only goal was to provide now vice chancellor
Stuart Nicholson and his husband with whatever they wanted charged to the
department and indeed to the university.
But unfortunately the fee paying units noticed and so
they stopped paying fees and they stopped choosing to study history.
The immediate cause of the defeat of Scottish
nationalism is the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon. If she had not resigned and
was still First Minister, it is likely that the SNP would still have won a
majority of MPs at the General Election.
We have no good explanation for Sturgeon’s
resignation. She claims that she didn’t know what would follow. But in that case,
we are left with nothing as a sensible explanation. Did she really want to
spend more time with her family? Was there a job vacant as Prime Minister of
New Zealand or UN Secretary General? No such job has followed. So why resign?
Humza Useless was useless, but it would not have
mattered if the SNP had chosen Kate Forbes. She would have split the party and
although she is much more intelligent than Yousaf it is not clear the result
would have been any better.
But the immediate cause hides the deeper cause. The
deeper cause is the loss of Alex Salmond.
The SNP requires above all for Scottish independence
to be a realistic goal. This gives Scottish nationalists a reason to vote for
the SNP. But if independence ceases to be a realistic goal, there is no point
voting for the SNP. The SNP without independence is not dissimilar to Labour,
so in that case why not vote Labour which at least has a chance of forming a UK
Government as it just did.
It was Salmond who turned Scottish independence into a
realistic prospect and gave Scots the chance to either make it happen or not.
Sturgeon at no point did anything similar to what
Salmond achieved. She did not bring independence closer. Instead, she pushed
and pushed until a point after the Supreme Court ruling where it is harder to
achieve than ever.
Would Salmond have done better? We will never know. We
don’t really know why he resigned in 2014. I wonder sometimes if he was
pressured.
But what we do know is that the Sturgeon Salmond split
divided the independence movement and severed its best asset (Salmond) from the
SNP.
Worse the independence movement was turned into true
believers (Alba) versus pretend believers (the SNP). Sturgeon destroyed the trust
that they SNP had in 2014 by the perception that she was in politics for
herself and her self-interest rather than for Scotland. No one thinks that of
Salmond. It is the loss of trust that destroyed the SNP in 2024. SNP members
became fee paying units who donated for a referendum that never happened and
then the money was all gone.
Sturgeon achieved little despite the adulation that
she received. It went to her head and made her think that she was better and
more talented than she really was. It made her think she could do anything and
get away with anything.
Salmond has a record of achievement that far surpasses
Sturgeon’s. It does not mean that he could have achieved independence after
losing in 2014, but if he had continued in the SNP and if the independence
movement had remained united like it was in 2014 it would have had a far better
chance.
The great mistake of Scottish nationalism is Alex
Salmond’s unnecessary resignation in 2014.
The fuss about transgender and male bodies in women’s
prisons merely distracts from the real reasons for the SNP’s decline. It is not
the reason Sturgeon resigned nor for what followed that resignation.
Ultimately, the reason for the failure of Scottish
nationalism has to be that when Scottish voters were offered a free and fair
referendum that would have led to independence if they had voted Yes, they
instead chose to vote No. The SNP never had the numbers and still does not.
Ours is a fake nationalism that fades like mist when
the sun shines and the wind blows or we might not be able to watch Strictly
come dancing. It is like the shops that sell tartanry and Jimmy wigs on the
High Street in Edinburgh. Such things have nothing whatsoever to do with how we
live. And so, when the Tartan Army comes home it puts away its nationalism
along with its kilts.
Scottish nationalism is all huff and puff but without
substance and that is why we voted No and blew their house in.
Once that had happened it was always going to be
difficult to have a second chance because the UK Government knew that any
second referendum would be a coin toss. There was no chance of a second David
Cameron deceiving himself that he could win easily. Even if Scottish nationalism was a bubble that
could go pop, it could go from 25% to nearly 45% and who would want to risk it
going further?
In the years since the British government and the
courts have shown a willingness to say No to the SNP. It is still possible that
if 60% of voters chose the SNP at an election this would lead to a second
referendum. Even then the British government could say No. But support for the
SNP at the last election was 30% which is about where support for independence
was when we started. After all these years Scottish nationalists have declined 15
points for all their marching. They merely marched up to the top of the hill
and then marched down again.
This feels like another lost cause like the
Confederacy or Bonnie Prince Charlie. We can hope that Scotland doesn’t spend
the next decades regretting Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg or wailing will you
no come back again.
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