Sturgeon wants a row, not a referendum

The SNP leader is picking a fight with Westminster to distract her grassroots.

Unionists scored a historic triumph in the local elections, though most have yet to spot it.

Not in Moray, where the Tories’ councillor tally went up and the SNP’s down. Nor in West Dunbartonshire — the People’s Republic of Baillieland — where Labour swept the Nationalists out of power and formed a majority administration. Not even the Lib Dems, who made gains in South Lanarkshire, Fife and all the way up to the Highlands. 

No, the truly breathtaking victory came when Nicola Sturgeon was asked whether her party’s 22 extra council seats would boost her campaign for independence. She told the interviewer: ‘This election was a local council election, I didn’t go into it arguing that it was all about independence, so I’m not going to come out of it and argue that somehow retrospectively it was all about independence.’

Pressed on the matter, she rejected the proposition that the council poll was ‘a referendum on a referendum’. Rather, she said, the public had voted ‘for a whole variety of reasons’ and, on this occasion, she believed they were ‘voting principally because they want more action on the cost of living crisis and they want to see the Westminster government step up’.

This was something of a first in that, traditionally, Sturgeon goes into an election reassuring swing voters they can back the SNP without backing separation, then trumpets the results as proof that Scots are champing at the bit for more constitutional argy-bargy. 

This sudden outbreak of candour from the First Minister might be disconcerting but Unionists should not be dazed into complacency. If Nicola Sturgeon is telling the truth, you know she’s up to something. 

What exactly is her game? Well, the numbers. The SNP and their adjunct party, the Greens, gained 38 seats between them, a creditable result for both. In percentage terms, however, their combined share of first preferences amounted to 40.1 per cent, or 40.8 per cent if you count votes for Alba, which wouldn’t take very long. 

Tote up the share of the pro-Union parties and you come to 49.9 per cent. That’s why the First Minister is sounding perilously close to magnanimous. If the local elections were about another referendum, the voters would have rejected it almost as emphatically as they rejected independence in the last one. 

Another reason Sturgeon couldn’t assert the local results as popular consent for a re-run referendum is that she already made this claim after the 2021 Holyrood elections. As she said over the weekend: ‘We won a mandate for a referendum this time last year, preparations for that are underway.’

Ah, yes. The famous preparations. Those are being made, the First Minister maintains, for a referendum on breaking away from the UK next year. The constitution is supposed to be reserved and the UK Government prefers to keep kicking this particular can down the road. The Scottish Government’s legal advice, therefore, is a key prop in this particular drama, hence why ministers refused to release it under the Freedom of Information Act. 

That snub was appealed to the Scottish Information Commissioner, who ruled that the public interest in any referendum outweighed ministers’ right to legal privilege. He ordered the secretive St Andrew’s House to release parts of the advice by June 10. The Scottish Government is yet to comply and can still appeal but disregarding the ruling altogether could see them up before the Court of Session. 

This is the sort of stuff Sturgeon loves. Process. Procedure. Legal eagling. She may talk about sovereignty and self-determination but in her heart of hearts, she’s a solicitor, not a freedom fighter. 

At risk of giving away the plot twist, Nicola Sturgeon doesn’t want a referendum anytime soon. Take a gander at the polling if you want to know why. Go now and it’s more likely than not that she would lose, so she would rather bide her time and build more support. She is familiar with the iron rule of referendums: you don’t hold one unless you’re sure you’ll win. David Cameron erred catastrophically by ignoring that rule in 2016 and it cost him his premiership. Sturgeon does not want to follow him down the same ignominious path. 

Rather than a referendum, what Sturgeon wants is an argument about a referendum. She wants the next 18 months or so to be about big, bad Westminster refusing Scotland another vote and how dangerously undemocratic that would be. Her argument is that the SNP and the Greens both stood for Holyrood in 2021 on a manifesto pledge to hold another referendum and between them won a majority of seats. That this contention isn't laughed out of any room it’s raised in is a testament to how fundamentally unserious Scottish politics has become. 

The problem with this line is not that the SNP failed to win a majority on its own or that the combined SNP-Green share of the vote failed to pass 50 per cent in either the constituencies or on the regional list. It’s much more straightforward than that.

The Scotland Act reserves to Westminster ‘the Union of the Kingdoms of Scotland and England’ and ‘the Parliament of the United Kingdom’. These are powers of the UK Parliament and the voters choose MPs to exercise them at General Elections. The Scottish Parliament is responsible for devolved powers and Holyrood elections are where the public express their views on how MSPs should use those powers. 

It is impossible to obtain a mandate for the exercise of one parliament’s powers at an election to another parliament. It would be like a party campaigning for the Montana state legislature on a platform of declaring war on Canada. It wouldn’t matter if 100 per cent of Montanans voted for that party; war powers are reserved to the federal government. (Incidentally, the US Congress would be infinitely less indulgent of such shenanigans from Montana than Westminster is of Sturgeon's mob.)

That Sturgeon would dearly love a cross-border constitutional stooshie is no reason for any clever-clevers in Whitehall to propose calling her bluff and letting her have a referendum. That would be too much of a hostage to fortune. But it is important to understand why she wants a stooshie: every minute spent talking about process is a minute she doesn't spend squirming over her currency plans, or the likelihood of EU membership, or what would happen to Scottish businesses after being dragged out of the UK single market.

She wants a debate about the terms of the debate, not the debate itself, for the very simple reason that she cannot yet win the debate. Stoking anti-UK grievance along the way is just gravy on top. 

Sturgeon can keep this up a while longer but what happens when no referendum materialises? Some of her supporters might be fobbed off that Scotland has once again been the victim of Westminster skullduggery, but others will be less understanding.

She can only continue stringing them out while poking the wounds of resentment so long before either the string snaps or the wounds gush open. At some point, a segment of her core support is going to demand she take matters into her own hands and defy either the UK Government or the courts or both. 

Sturgeon knows how that would end but she cannot admit that to the true believers. Once she concedes there is no lawful route to independence that defies the UK Parliament, it's over for her. All the bluster falls away and it becomes plain to the SNP grassroots that independence is not coming yet for all that. That she has been having them on. That 15 years of slog, sweat and sacrifice, and many before that, have led to a political dead end.

The UK Parliament could hasten this process with some nips and tucks to the Scotland Act, which would also head off any nasty surprises at the Supreme Court one day. Whatever happens, this much is true: Nicola Sturgeon is marching her men to the top of the hill and she's running out of hill. 

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Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on May 9, 2022.