John Swinney: coasting to defeat

The biggest loser from this general election looks like being independence

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Where now for the independence movement in Scotland? Well, in the near future at least, the only way is down. John Swinney may insist that this election is “on a knife edge”, too close to call, but he is in a minority of one.

Cutting through the noise, this analysis from the  Centre for Constitutional Change confirms that the SNP trailing Labour by five or six percent.  The SNP is in line to return at best 18 MPs on Thursday against Labour’s 28. That would be its worst result since, well, since the days after John Swinney was SNP leader twenty years ago.

But you’d hardly know, given Mr Swinney’s optimistic demeanour recently. The FM has been exuding positivity as he parades around Scotland in the final days. At the weekend, he even staged a photo op in an SNP-yellow sports car wearing yellow-framed shades, like a P Presbyterian version of Miami Vice. Brought out of retirement to fight this election, Swinney seems determined to make the most of it.

He may be living the dream but it will be a rude awakening on Friday if the polls are to be believed. I don’t think the SNP are fully prepared for the coming reckoning. We may be seeing the death throes, not just of the SNP leadership, but of the Yes movement itself that erupted so spectacularly in Scotland after he 2014 independence referendum.  The fire has gone out. Everyone senses it.  It’s just over.

Independence has hardly figured in the last five weeks of wall-to-wall TV debates and interviews. Keir Starmer has been under zero pressure to state when or even if Scotland might have that repeat referendum, that “Indyref2” that everyone talked about back in the 2010s. There seems precious little demand for any kind of referendum in Scotland right now.

Independence has slipped far down Scottish voters’ priority list below  health, cost of living, education.  Indeed, in the latest YouGov poll, independence came lower even than immigration, which is remarkable given that this has rarely been a key issue in Scottish politics.  Perhaps Scotland is not so immune to Nigel Farage’s politics as everyone thought.  Reform is currently polling level with the Scottish Liberal Democrats and could overtake them on Thursday night.

What a turn up that would be. The party of progressive nationalism trounced while the party of populist nationalism establishes a beach-head in Scotland.

The SNPs dominance of Scottish politics began back in 2007, when Alex Salmond snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, and then went on to win a landslide in the 2011 Holyrood elections.  Nicola Sturgeon topped that in the 2015 general election by winning all but three of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats.  In times past that might have been regarded as a supermajority for independence.  Under Sturgeon, the  SNP went on to dominate politics at every level in Scotland - so much so that the nationalists succumbed, as all successful parties do eventually, to hubris.

In November 2022, the former First Minister, still riding high in the polls, claimed the SNP could win a majority of votes and seats in Scotland in this 2024 general election - something that has only ever been achieved once before, by the Scottish Unionists in 1955.  She said this result would constitute a “de facto referendum” and would trigger independence negotiations with Westminster.  That looks ludicrously optimistic now. What was she thinking?

John Swinney tried to extricate himself from her legacy by declaring at the start of this campaign that a majority of seats, not votes,  would launch “negotiations with Westminster”. But even that now looks like the rashest hostage to fortune.  If this was a de facto referendum on any franchise, then clearly the SNP has lost it. At least, that’s what unionist party leaders will be saying loud and clear on Friday morning.

Election strategists in the SNP had hoped that the threat of a Starmer supermajority might be enough to bring back some disillusioned nationalist voters.   After all, the adage that Westminster only listens to Scotland when it votes SNP is a pretty sound one. But that doesn’t seem to have saved the day for the nationalists.

As I pointed out in my Spectator column, Keir Starmer’s recent pronouncements on tax, immigration and Brexit don’t exactly chime with Scotland’s supposedly progressive sensibilities.  This may be why the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, has dangled the prospect of Scotland having a more liberal immigration policy than the rest of the UK under Labour.

One of the less remarked-upon failings of the past 17 years of SNP government has been the paucity of migrants coming to Scotland, despite chronic skill shortages in areas like social care.  Net migration to the UK in 2022 was 745,000 but only 20,000 of them came north, for reasons that aren’t entirely reducible to the weather.   

But if anyone thinks Keir Starmer is going to give the Scottish parliament control over immigration they have another think coming. He’s not likely to offer a migration back-door via Scotland.  Even Anas Sarwar says immigration overall is too high. If the Scottish government wants more migrants, it’s going to have to make it worth their while coming here.

However, the first Labour prime minister in 14 years will want to offer something  to Scotland, if only to assist Anas Sarwar translate this week’s expected victory into success in the Scottish parliamentary elections in 2026. Labour are currently third in Holyrood in terms of seats, after the Tories. Gordon Brown will no doubt be pushing his plans for turning the House of Lords into a Senate elected by the nations and regions. Though Starmer has avoided any mention of this manifesto promise in the past week. His body language suggests regionalism is headed for the long grass.

The reality is that Starmer is under no pressure to state any coherent policy on the constitution.  No one is interested, least of all Scotland, which has had a surfeit of constitutionalism over the pass decade and would really like a period of quiet consolidation. It is time to move on from all of that as Scotland enters a post-nationalist era.

This is all a hard message for supporters of independence. Far from being a springboard to a second independence referendum, as Nicol Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf had forecast, this 2024 general election looks set to draw a line under the wave of Scottish nationalism that has dominated Scottish politics for most of the last two decades. All passion spent.  The centre is holding after all. Indeed, the Union, written off but so many in the metropolitan commentariat only a few years ago, now looks almost as safe as it has been at any time in the past 300 years.