The questions Sturgeon must answer

The SNP leader insists there will be another independence referendum next year.

It may not surprise you to learn the Scottish Government has sought legal advice on holding a second independence referendum.

It certainly won't surprise you to learn it has been refusing to disclose this advice to the public. Now the Scottish Information Commissioner has instructed ministers to comply with a freedom of information request and release parts of the document. Although the Commissioner is only requiring partial disclosure, demanding any level of openness or accountability from the Scottish Government is pretty ambitious. This lot have so many bodies buried, you don't need the Freedom of Information Act, you need Burke and Hare.

What the Commissioner cannot do is compel ministers to answer the many more urgent questions about independence than even the legality of an unsanctioned referendum. Yesterday morning, Nicola Sturgeon reiterated to Sky's Sophy Ridge the line she has been retailing to her grassroots: that there will be another referendum before the close of next year. That is, at the very most, 20 months. The 2014 White Paper, the 650-page blueprint for a separate Scotland, was published almost 10 months before polling day. The window of opportunity to present the case for separation is growing narrower. 

Which begs the question: where exactly is that case? If we believe the First Minister, the Scottish people are on the brink of being asked to make the biggest decision in the country's history. Her desired outcome is what the SNP was founded to achieve, what it has spent 88 years campaigning for, what she joined it to help bring about. Why, then, is she not bothering to persuade us? 

After all, the questions are legion.

What currency would a breakaway Scotland use? Would we hold a referendum on joining the EU? Is the Scottish Government confident the EU would be open to our accession? What is the estimated commercial disruption and economic cost of leaving the UK single market? What contingency planning has the Scottish Government made for potential capital flight? 

Scotland's deficit stands at £36bn, more than a fifth of GDP, a shortfall the Fraser of Allander Institute calls 'the largest ever seen in terms of the notional deficit'. How does the Scottish Government plan to plug that gap?

Scotland is the highest-taxed part of the UK. How would it attract entrepreneurs and skilled, high-earning migrants?

The Union Dividend — the net benefit of remaining in the UK after higher public spending and lower tax receipts are taken into account — now stands at £2,200 for every Scot. How would an independent Scotland make up for the withdrawal of this advantage? 

Is it still the SNP's position that a separate Scotland could expect the rest of the UK to pay its pensions? The Nationalists assure voters they have ‘paid in to the pot’ and the Treasury will have no option but to pay up, but there is no pot, pensions are paid out of general taxation, and there is no legal obligation on the Treasury to pay pensions for a foreign country and no mechanism to compel it to do so.

Some Unionists point to polls showing little appetite for a re-run of the 2014 vote. This is true and important. They also note slipping support overall for secession. Again, a welcome development. Where I dissent from other critics is in their certainty that Unionists need not worry because the economic case for independence has been thoroughly debunked. I'm not sure how much it has in the minds of the voters and, even so, I believe debunking it is insufficient to prevent the break-up of the UK. 

For many years it was a truism of British politics that the electorate voted with its pocketbook in mind. The EU referendum was an abrupt break from this convention, with Leave voters citing sovereignty and immigration as the motivation for their vote, a vote they cast despite near unanimous political, commercial and academic messaging that it would make them poorer. 

Voters north of the border may have voted to remain in the EU but Scotland is not immune to these changes in electoral priorities. Economic and practical questions still matter a great deal but so does the political personality trio of culture, values and identity. On all three, the nationalists have a distinct advantage. They have largely annexed Scottishness to their cause and their brand. What remained of visible or institutional Britishness in Scotland has faded further. Divergence in policy and public opinion between England and Scotland, although complicated and often overstated, is now embodied by the convenient bogeyman of Brexit. 

This kind of political sociology is all very interesting but does it really matter? I’m afraid it does. Unionists comfort themselves that polling shows Nicola Sturgeon still failing to convince a majority of Scots on the merits of separation. True, and very gratifying. Dig a little deeper, though, and the picture becomes much more concerning. While those 45 and over say they oppose independence, younger voters say the opposite — emphatically. If a referendum was held among only those aged 16 to 34, independence would not merely win, it would bury the pro-Union side. 

If these voters retain their views on the constitution — and there are credible reasons why they might not — we could be one generation away from separatism holding a consistent majority in public opinion. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily translate to Scotland becoming independent but it would give secessionism a privileged place in the national psyche. No matter how far into the long grass another referendum is kicked, these trends will have to be confronted and Unionists will have to come up with a way of countering them. The battle over culture, values and identity will have to be joined. 

If one side of this debate is waving a flag and the other a calculator, it might seem obvious who will win in the end. But just as Unionists have to make more than a pounds-and-shillings case for the Union, nationalists shouldn’t bet it all on rhetoric about self-determination and progressivism. In a referendum, the Union only needs to win 50 per cent plus one; independence needs so much more. Making a long-term success of independence would require the commitment of a sizeable majority of Scots, including substantial buy-in by the losing side, to weather the political and economic upheaval of transition out of the UK and its single market. 

Nationalists should be at the front of the queue in demanding answers about independence. If those answers are the wrong ones — or simply don’t exist — it raises the risk of the ultimate indignity: winning a referendum, losing the peace, and returning to the UK. The rest of us must ask the same questions because it is in our personal interests and the interests of our country. There is another reason, too: Scottish politics has become fundamentally unserious. 

The SNP has presided over 15 years of demonstrable failure and incompetence, and yet a snap election would assuredly return it to government. Independence continues to be spoken of as a viable policy, even though we are no clearer today than eight years ago what a separate Scotland's currency would be. Nicola Sturgeon swears another referendum is coming, even as Westminster continues to say No, and orders her troops to be battle-ready, an eve-of-hostilities speech she has repeatedly delivered only to pull her men back. 

The First Minister's political script now consists of humble-bragging about her anguished handling of the pandemic, scolding the UK Government for wreaking economic chaos with Brexit, and intoning solemnly about the dangerous new world we live in following Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. It is considered impolite to point out that her management of Covid was as hapless as Downing Street's, that Brexit is a bad day at the bookie's compared to the economic hari-kari of independence, and that splitting from a nuclear-armed Security Council member-state while a dictator redraws the map of Europe is perilously naive. 

We must regain our seriousness because we live in serious times. Domestically and internationally, new risks are emerging every day and we will need strategic thinking, planning and resilience to face them. A government asking us to go it alone in this dangerous world could, in theory, be a serious government. But a government planning to ask us within the next year, and without even beginning to address any of these questions, is not only unserious — it is utterly reckless. 

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Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on May 2, 2022.