It was Sturgeon wot lost it

The former SNP FM was the Union's secret asset

Nicola in happier times.

Alex Salmond says that Scotland is now “worse in every possible respect” than it was in 2014 when he left office. That is a pretty devastating critique of the Sturgeon years from someone who is not, admittedly, her greatest fan. But you might have thought the former First Minister would’ve had at least something positive to say about the last decade of SNP governance. He led the party for thirty years, after all, before he handed it over to Nicola Sturgeon, his greatest ally and closest political friend - or so he thought.

Looking at the wreckage left by the Sturgeon years, which her successor, John Swinney, is trying to clear up, it is hard to disagree with Salmond’s assessment: health, education, policing, ferries even roads are in bad shape. But perhaps the greatest damage of all has been to the cause of independence. When the historians come to write the story of how Scottish nationalism lost the plot in the 2020s, Nicola Sturgeon will surely emerge as the prime mover - or rather UNmover.  The former SNP First Minister has arguably been the greatest asset that the Union never possessed.  She somehow kept a lid on the explosion of independence passions after the 2014 referendum and sat on it just long enough for it to dissipate. 

Sturgeon diverted the energies of the leading nationalist party into “progressive” causes like Self ID for transgender people that proved to be devastatingly unpopular.  Then she departed in pique after the Isla Bryson affair February 2023 leaving the party in chaos and with an inadequate replacement in the form of “continuity candidate” Humza Yousaf.  Oh, and her husband was charged with embezzlement in Operation Branchform. The SNP went on to have its greatest electoral defeat in July, when it lost 39 of the Westminster MPs that it returns in 2019. You’ll have had your repeat referendum.

But was independence ever really a threat to the integrity of the United Kingdom, you ask? Or was it just a passing psycho-drama, a bit like football mania: here today gone tomorrow? Well, history isn’t written in advance and I believe that there was a serious threat to the continuation of the United Kingdom as a unitary state in the 2010s. 

There was genuine and enduring frustration in Scotland at governance from Westminster under Blair, and then under the Tories.  There was widespread discontent at the return of austerity after 2010 which revived the anti-Englishness, I use that term advisedly, which had originally been associated with the personality and politics of that icon of nationalist angst, Margaret Thatcher.  Devolution had just not delivered and Scots wanted more. 

Remember, the SNP won all but three seats in the 2015 general election - that would in times past have been regarded as a supermajority for independence.  Brexit in 2016 seemed like another casus belli, as Scots voted to remain but found themselves out of Europe. Had the SNP thrown up another insurgent leader like Alex Salmond at that conjuncture, then history might have been different. The Scottish parliament could have become a platform for secession and Westminster might have granted the least-worst option: a repeat referendum.

A number of Tory politicians in Westminster had been saying privately, and civil servants like Phillip Rycroft openly, that some form of independence for Scotland might be inevitable. There was a growing consensus, not least among the metropolitan intelligentsia, that the break up of the UK was imminent. But it never happened. Scots are just not a revolutionary people. The UK’s departure from the EU single market changed the indy prospectus out of all recognition by making a hard border inevitable.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Gone is the heady enthusiasm of 2014, the Festival of Politics, when so many Scots became somewhat intoxicated with the opportunities presented by constitutional change. Many Scottish voters decided to throw their support to the SNP even though a majority of Scots were not convinced about leaving the UK. In the referendum, 55% voted No to Scotland becoming an independent country against 45% voting Yes. But as was said at the time, the losers won it all in the Tsunami of 2015.

That will be remembered as the high tide of Scottish nationalism. It may come again, but not for a long while and next time there will be a much more hard-headed appraisal of the realities of becoming independent. And a much more sober assessment of the SNP as a party. The chaos of the past few years, the policy failures, the gender reforms, the scandals, and the general want of competence of the SNP leadership has made its mark on the national psyche. They don’t get the benefit of the doubt any more.

John Swinney persists in his attacks on Keir Starmer for following the “Tory fiscal rules”. These rules, that public spending can only increase by 1% in real terms until there is adequate growth, is not a million miles from the plans outlined by the SNP’s own Sustainable Growth Commission Report of 2018. If Labour is embracing austerity, then so was Nicola Sturgeon when she endorsed the post independence formula of increasing spending by 1% less than GDP growth. That was supposed to eliminate Scotland’s notional 8% deficit in one decade. That deficit is now nearer 10.4%, or £22billion, double the level of the UK deficit.

During the general election campaign, John Swinney attacked Labour for failing to explain how it will fill the £20bn black hole identified by the Institute for Fiscal Studies in the UK accounts. Yet the same IFS calculate that Scotland’s notional deficit upon Scotland becoming independence would be considerably more than that. It is only because no one seriously believes independence will happen that the nationalists get away with this fiscal nonsense.

With 800,000 Scots on waiting lists and record numbers going private, the NHS, not independence, is the number one issue in Scotland right now. The Scottish government has blamed Westminster for the failure of the National Health Service, even though Scotland has enjoyed record funding from the Barnett Formula, which it could have spent on health. In fact, the SNP’s dirty little fiscal secret is that has chosen to do the opposite: squeezed health spending and diverted much of it to public sector pay and costly social policies. The Institute for Fiscal Studies records that spending on the NHS in Scotland in 2000 was 22% higher than in England; in 2020 this had fallen to 3%.

Funding is not the problem with the NHS in Scotland. As the IFS also point out, Scotland still has at least a 20% premium in spending on overall public services. Yet it has maxed out its Barnett credit card and has had to rush through an “emergency” £500m cut in spending last week. This is not because of Westminster perfidy but, as the Scottish Fiscal Commission pointed out, because of choices made by the Scottish government. It chose to award higher than inflation pay settlements to public sector workers in Scotland.

If only Scotland were independent, John Swinney says, Scotland could rejoin the EU and become as rich as Denmark, Ireland or Sweden. Though even he had to confess that there would be challenges. “Success is not guaranteed” he conceded.  But look to the shining uplands. Independence he said would mean “bairns not bombs” - the SNP is the last major unilateralist party in the UK - and the end of child poverty. Yet ending child poverty is something the SNP has signally failed to achieve in the last 17 years.  People are beginning to notice.

Nationalists insist that nearly fifty percent of Scots still say they support an independent Scotland in principle. But in practice many have lost any enthusiasm for the only party that can deliver it. Everyone knows that a repeat referendum is not going to happen so there is more focus on what the SNP has done in the here and now rather than in the future. And as the nationalist tide recedes, voters see who hasn’t been wearing a swimsuit.

You should never say never in politics. But we can now say with some confidence this week that the Union between Scotland and England is probably as strong now as it has been at any time in the last 300 years.