Scottish nationalism was decisively defeated in July
2024 when only 30% of Scottish voters chose to support the SNP and it won nine
seats. Alba won 11,000 votes. But there are those who wish to revive the corpse
with a form a necromancy called setting the goal posts for a second referendum and
turning Scotland into Northern Ireland.
The truth however is that Scotland has already had its
second referendum. The SNP announced on numerous occasions that the General
Election was a de facto referendum. The terms of victory were various.
Sometimes the SNP had to win a majority of seats, at other times it just had to
be the largest party, at others it had to win more than 50% of the vote. There
is little doubt that if it had won any of these it would have demanded a
referendum on independence. But it lost whatever variant of the de facto referendum
it might have chosen. So, it is reasonable for the rest of us to point out that
you have now lost two referendums so it is now the settled will of Scottish
voters that Scotland remain part of the UK.
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But Scotland is not like Northern Ireland. There is
one reason and one reason only why there is a Belfast Agreement. The IRA
engaged in a three-decade long campaign of terror with the goal of forcing
Northern Ireland to leave the UK. The IRA knew that it could not win militarily
so it settled for being able to achieve its goal by means of the ballot box
rather than the Armalite.
The British government made a major concession and
chose to reward terrorism because it hoped for lasting peace. Nowhere else in
the world where there are territorial disputes between nation states is there
such a mechanism to change sovereignty by means of referendums.
Hungary does not get to argue that Transylvania should
be ceded by Romania on the basis of a referendum. Austria does not get to argue
that it should get back South Tyrol from Italy by means of a vote. Mexico
cannot obtain the states that it lost in the 1840s by hoping that Mexican
Americans will one day be a sufficiently large group that they will chose to
leave the USA.
There have been numerous border changes following both
the First and Second World Wars, but only in the case of Ireland is there
supposedly a justification for reunification. No one thinks that Germany has
the right to reunite with Elsaß–Lothringen [Alsace–Lorraine] or to regain the
lands lost to Poland.
In the whole of Europe, the only border that can be
changed by means of a vote is that between Northern Ireland and Ireland.
I have always felt dubious about the Belfast
Agreement, because it is a concession to terrorism and a reward for bombing.
Ireland has no more legitimate a claim on British territory than Russia has a
legitimate claim on Ukrainian territory. It matters not one little bit that
Crimea used to be part of Russia. One state ought not to seek to annex the territory
of another.
But the idea that the future of Northern Ireland would
be decided by means of a referendum was put to Northern Irish voters in a
referendum and the majority chose to accept the Belfast Agreement. Irish voters
agreed.
For a similar situation to obtain in Scotland
therefore it would be necessary to have a referendum on the conditions needed
to obtain an independence referendum and for it to succeed both in Scotland and
in the other parts of the UK.
But the very act of doing so would itself undermine
the sovereignty of the UK just as it has already been undermined by setting out
the conditions for secession in Northern Ireland.
In Europe no part of any nation state has the right to
leave by means of a referendum. It matters not one little bit whether that part
was once itself an independent country. In every European state there are parts
that at one point were independent countries. None of them have the right to
leave. No one thinks that this is undemocratic.
The UK is gradually moving towards the same position.
The Supreme Court decision after Nicola Sturgeon asked for the Scottish
Parliament to be given the right to vote for a referendum is clear. Scotland is
not a colony. Rather despite being called a country it is constitutionally a
region of a unitary state called the UK in exactly the same way that Normandy and
Burgundy are regions of a unitary state called France. If they don’t have the
right to vote to leave France, then neither does Scotland. The legal position
in international law is identical.
The UK has traditionally allowed a loose way of
talking that treats its parts as separate countries, but we have discovered
that it is just this that fuels nationalism. The danger of setting out the
conditions for this nationalism to succeed is that it both undermines the
correct view of the UK that it is unitary nation state and fuels nationalism by
giving it a goal that it can work towards.
The idea that this would somehow make the
constitutional issue in Scotland go away is preposterous. Having decisively
defeated the SNP the one thing that might revive it is to give it victory conditions.
Secession was defeated in the USA not merely by force
of arms but intellectually and legally by making clear in a way that was
unclear before 1860 that states’ rights did not include the right to secede.
After the Civil War the United States became “one Nation under God, indivisible”
and precisely for this reason never again faced the threat of secession or
civil war. Setting out the conditions for state secession in 1865 after defeating
secession would merely have provided necromancy for the dead corpse of the
Confederacy.
It is precisely this that certain voices want to do
now in order revive the dead corpse of the SNP.
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