Independence won't vanquish the right – it could be the making of it

Vote SNP to save Scotland from Reform: that’s the new line being road-tested by John Swinney.

He took it for a spin last week at a conference run by think tank IPPR Scotland. Doing his best impression of a preacher predicting that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would be here by tea-time, he said the parliament wasn’t strong enough to defend itself against a future Farage government at Westminster, which he warned would attack Holyrood’s powers. The only route to salvation was, you guessed it, independence.

This isn’t subtle politics. The SNP has had past success converting anti-Tory sentiment into votes and are trying to repeat the trick with Reform. The fact that we have a Labour Prime Minister in Downing Street now – lease not up until 2029 – is simply overlooked. The SNP must have a Westminster bogeyman to rail against. With the Tories gone, strategists are forced to look ahead, half in horror, half perhaps secretly in hope, towards the possibility of Nigel Farage beating Labour on the cusp of the 2030s. Which, of course, has the benefit of distracting voters from the real issue at hand with a Scottish election approaching: the SNP’s record in government.

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This point came up during questions to the First Minister. It was put to Mr Swinney by journalist Sally Magnusson that according to polling there are so many people scunnered by the SNP’s overpromising and under-delivery that they have turned to Reform (latest Herald poll projection: 22 Holyrood seats to Reform in 2026).

A modicum of humility might have been in order, but Mr Swinney seemed to forget himself, brazenly pretending his government’s record was irrelevant. “I think what’s driving the issue around about Reform in Scotland are frustrations about standard of living,” he said, sporting his best concerned frown. Actually, Magnusson pointed out, polling shows people are particularly annoyed about the state of the Scottish NHS. We’re working on that, came the response, but no, it’s standard of living and that’s Westminster’s fault.

You have to applaud his chutzpah. This is what the SNP does, deflecting blame. Exasperating but entirely predictable. What was more interesting was the hint we got about Mr Swinney’s longer-term pro-independence strategy, namely reviving the old idea that independence represents an escape route from right-wing politics. That would indeed be a big attraction for many – if it were true. But in fact the reverse is more likely. Independence would probably be the making of the Scottish right.

The First Minister wants to present independence as the next step in an inexorable process of separation from a supposedly more right-leaning English electorate. He looked back to the 1990s, describing Scottish society coming together to “protect” Scotland from Thatcherism by establishing the Scottish parliament, suggesting that change now needed to go further, to independence, to “protect” Scotland from Reform. The underlying idea is that Scotland’s destiny is to throw off the albatross of the political right by becoming independent.

SNP leader John Swinney (Image: PA)

This is hugely misleading. Prof Sir John Curtice and Sophie Birtwistle’s recently published analysis of the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey shows, yet again, that Scottish exceptionalism is a myth. On all the typical measures – attitudes to taxation and spending, redistribution and liberal values – Scottish voters are only fractionally more left-leaning than English ones. There’s also been a big upturn in the number of Scottish voters who are unhappy about immigration levels. It seems pretty clear that in the right circumstances, Scotland would vote for a party of the right. It doesn’t cheer me to say it but it’s possible, indeed likely, that an SNP government under independence would be replaced by a right-wing one.

There are several reasons for thinking so. One is the economic challenges an independent Scotland would face and the backlash that would follow. Cast your mind back to 2014 referendum: the SNP made a series of glittering spending promises. There were generous pledges on childcare and benefits. They denied during the campaign that they were relying on optimistic tax revenue projections from North Sea oil to pay for it all, but strategists later admitted that had been untrue. The notoriously volatile price of oil fell dramatically during the campaign and by a few weeks after the referendum, it was clear that, had Scotland voted for independence, there would have been a giant black hole in the country’s finances which would have led to tax rises or spending cuts.

North Sea oil is in long-term decline and its revenues are even less reliable now. Scotland’s notional fiscal deficit is deepening. The SNP never acknowledges the difficult choices on tax and spending the Westminster government has to make, even though it would have to make even more difficult choices itself under independence, faced with national debt, a diminished tax base and spending levels it couldn’t maintain. There could be advantages to joining the EU, as the Scottish Government wants, but it would create non-tariff barriers to trade with the UK, which is much more important to Scottish business than the EU.

Independence would be a recipe, in the short- to medium-term, for economic turmoil. We don’t have to imagine the political backlash that would almost certainly follow: we’ve been through it. The Tories overpromised what Brexit would deliver and then presided over years of economic and trade hardship significantly caused by it, leading to widespread public disillusion. Look where the Tories are now.

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Meanwhile, the increasingly toxic issue of immigration would become Scotland’s responsibility. There is a strong rationale for a liberal immigration policy in Scotland, but you can easily envisage an unholy row developing about “soft-touch Scotland”. This too could drive people into the arms of right-leaning parties.

And then there’s the liberating effect of independence on the Scottish groupings of UK parties. The SNP would lose its unique selling point as the only party focused exclusively on Scotland while the other parties would experience a renaissance. The SNP’s excuse for failure would be gone and the other parties would be primed to take advantage.

It doesn’t add up to a guarantee of right-wing success, but it makes it considerably more likely. Independence, in short, would not deliver Scotland from the Tories or Reform; it would be more likely to boost them.

But we can come back to all this. First there is an election to fight – about the SNP’s record in power.

Rebecca McQuillan is a journalist specialising in politics and Scottish affairs. She can be found on Bluesky at @becmcq.bsky.social and on X at @BecMcQ