I was of the view, in 2014, that we were living in the optimum conditions for a successful Yes vote in the independence referendum.
The Conservatives were in government at Westminster and their power was clearly waxing (and so it proved as they won a further three elections), but they remained deeply unpopular in Scotland. The SNP, meanwhile, was broadly seen as a competent government at Holyrood, and it had momentum. In a relatively short space of time – three years – then First Minister Alex Salmond had taken the independence movement from little over one-quarter of popular support to the brink.
And, yet, no. They lost.
In the final analysis, that loss can probably be put down to their failure to convince a tranche of largely centrist, largely apolitical voters that the devil they knew was inferior, and that they should take a chance on the devil they didn’t. Those voters – with an eye on Scotland's relative economic weakness – did exactly as the pro-UK campaign asked them to do, and said No Thanks.
The 10 years since the referendum have not been sanguine for the independence movement. Yes, the proportion of the electorate who say they would vote Yes has remained in the mid-to-high forties, but the underlying weaknesses, far from being confronted, have been cemented. Far from placing a central focus on prosperity, growth and national wealth, as those potential No-to-Yes switchers want, the SNP Government spent a decade largely rejecting those concepts. Growth and wealth took a back seat in a political outlook dominated by the insular, unrealistic and rather naive view that high taxes and high welfare were a sign of national success rather than national decay.
Read more by Andy Maciver
A Conservative majority in 2015 was thought to be the game-changer. It wasn't. Brexit, they thought, would change the game. It didn’t. Boris Johnson would push the centrists well over the line, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t. Correctly, the Yes campaign felt that it had to be regularly polling at around 60 per cent before it could be confident of winning, but it was fairly clear that, far from a resounding victory, they could not even be confident of improving on the 45 per cent they won in 2014.
I was of the view that independence was moribund. Indeed, on July 5 last year, when Labour cruised into Downing Street having handsomely won both England and Scotland, I thought it was dead.
Today, a little over six months later, I have changed my mind. Two sets of two people have caused my conversion. The first is Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch, and the second is John Swinney and Kate Forbes.
I have written about Mr Farage’s strategy on these pages for over a year now; about the plan he copied from Canada to kill the Conservative Party and eat its carcass, and about the plan he copied from populist nationalists around the world to win the next General Election.
What the political mainstream amongst us must understand is that his plan, early in its cycle though it is, is working. And what Scottish unionists must understand is that the success of his plan could have profound implications for the prospects of an independent Scotland.
Mr Farage looks set fair to take the blueprint from Donald Trump and a crop of European leaders including Giorgia Meloni (Italy), Marine le Pen (France), Alice Weidel (Germany) and Herbert Kickl (Austria), and run a campaign propped on three simple pillars: anti-immigration, anti-woke and anti-net zero.
Sophisticated? No. Effective? Yes, very.
Effective enough that Reform UK won a poll for the first time this week, having begun to reconstruct Mr Johnson’s coalition of left and right by taking both Tory and Labour votes. It is having precisely the impact he wants, which is to pull Ms Badenoch’s policy positions towards his own, to sow seeds of doubt in the heads of her MPs as well as her voters, and to slowly consume her party. It is by no means fanciful to believe that, by the 2029 General Election, he will have manoeuvred Ms Badenoch into a position where she is forced to agree to work together in some way, but that she and her Tory party end up on the junior end of the deal.
That would go down like a double-skinned lead balloon here in Scotland. Yes, Reform UK is also polling relatively well here, but remains a minor rather than a major force. Ultimately, it is an English nationalist party, and once cannot expect an English nationalist party to prosper in a country in which two-thirds of the residents identify themselves as Scottish rather than British. Moreover, its most potent pillar – immigration – is a relative side-issue in Scotland.
Then, we turn to the second set of two people: John Swinney and Kate Forbes. Scottish Labour’s woes are, it is true, largely derived from events at Westminster. However we should not underestimate how much credit Mr Swinney and Ms Forbes can claim for the turnaround in the SNP’s fortunes at the expense of the rival which was, only six months ago, measuring the curtains in Bute House.
This duo is proving to be gold dust. The competent, assured leader who has turned chaos into calm, inside the party and out in the country. And the deputy (well, actually, almost co-leader) who has a vision and determination much more akin to the conquering Scotland of centuries past than to the turgid, depressed, pedestrian era of devolution.
Scotland’s problems are decades old, and so the solutions cannot be implemented in only months. However, it seems reasonable to consider the Swinney/Forbes government to have borrowed the name of its predecessor but junked everything else.
Scotland has spent a long time as a supplicant whinger of a country, attempting to apply the politics of the student union to the big, bad world. It could, instead, enjoy a future as a central, strategic player in the North Atlantic, exploiting its natural and geographical advantages and chasing prosperity.
Independence sentiment in Scotland grows when the unionist alternative is seen to be repulsive. And independence sentiment throughout global history has grown when the future looks more optimistic, prosperous and wealthy than the status quo.
What will Scottish voters have to say if it looks like both of these conditions exist at the same time?
Andy Maciver is Founding Director of Message Matters, and co-host of the Holyrood Sources podcast
