September 18, 2024 - 12:00pm

Imagine going back 10 years, to the immediate aftermath of 2014’s close-run referendum on Scottish independence, and telling people that the Conservative Party would be in power for the next decade, during which the SNP would win all but three Scottish seats in the House of Commons and the UK would leave the European Union. Imagine telling them that, in that time, the cause of separatism has got absolutely nowhere.

Better still, Nicola Sturgeon — who in 2014 was poised to succeed Alex Salmond as leader of the SNP — has come and gone. Not only did she twice fail to replicate his achievement of an overall majority at Holyrood, but her legacy lies in ruins, both her and her husband caught up in a criminal investigation into the Nationalists’ finances.

Judging by the mood of the coverage 10 years ago today, many people would not have believed you, especially if you added that a Tory Scottish Secretary would have used never-before-wielded powers to strike down a flagship Scottish Government bill, and that Westminster would have legislated to overrule the devocrats and keep vast swathes of former EU powers in London. Yet First Minister John Swinney is set to claim today, against all evidence, that the independence vote has changed Scotland for the better.

The 2014 referendum was much closer than it ought to have been. This was down largely to David Cameron’s gross mishandling of the negotiations — a preview of 2016, if only he knew it. On the advice of civil servants such as Ciaran Martin he took the path of least resistance, yielding to Salmond on nearly everything except the wording of the question.

His hope was that this would produce a decisive outcome. In reality, it simply gave the SNP more time to make its case, and we are wiser now about the reality of loser’s consent after a close-fought referendum.

Nearly everyone, not least Sturgeon herself, seemed to expect that the Nats would get another go before too long — especially after Brexit. Not only did the First Minister rush to declare a change of circumstances, but many English commentators suddenly converted to the cause of Scottish independence — or at least the belief that it was inevitable — as a just and inevitable consequence of England’s foolishness.

Yet even with a large section of Britain’s political class all but willing it to happen, the separatists have spent 10 years going nowhere. As some of us said from the start, the Union is not nearly so fragile as conventional wisdom claims.

Despite a decade to work on the problem, the Nationalists have not been able to come up with a compelling or even plausible economic case for breaking up Britain. This is especially pertinent post-Brexit, when independence would suddenly mean a hard choice between integration with the European market and frictionless access to the rest of the UK, with which Scotland does vastly more business.

Worse still, a historic success in the 2015 general election proved a trap for Sturgeon. The SNP received a transformational boost by effectively rolling the “Yes movement” into its party (plus the Scottish Greens, with whom they gamed Holyrood’s two-ballot electoral system). But independence was the only thing holding that ramshackle coalition together.

The former first minister kept the show on the road as long as she could; not a year went past without another increasingly implausible claim that the next big push was just around the corner, all while her party’s litany of failures in government lengthened by the week. The SNP had precious little talent, and that talent was not focused on improving life for Scottish voters.

All the while, the cracks were growing, and now the movement is split along all sorts of lines. There are gradualists versus hardliners on independence, Left versus Right — as seen in the bitter fight between the Greens and Kate Forbes’ supporters — and trans issues, where Sturgeon tried to build her legacy.

If someone, anyone, could make the numbers add up for independence, it wouldn’t matter. But nobody can, because they don’t. The future of the Union is secure. That of the Nationalist movement is much less certain.


Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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