THE esteemed journalist Peter MacMahon wrote last week in The Times: “Picture the scene: a bright, crisp afternoon in Edinburgh’s New Town. Three podiums are set out in Charlotte Square.
"Out of a grand Georgian door come the First Ministers of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, who have just concluded a historic meeting of the emerging 'Celtic Alliance'."
John Swinney, Rhun ap Iorwerth and Michelle O’Neill proclaim a new era in constitutional politics, which, choosing their words carefully, they imply will result in the end of the United Kingdom.
They publish what they call the Bute House Accord, promising to work together in a joint project to effect radical change.
“A far-fetched scenario? It might not happen quite like that, but after the elections outside England, it is a vision SNP politicians are getting very excited about, and some UK politicians are already fretting about.”
What followed was a predictable bromide about how such an alliance is wracked with problems and tensions and is, ultimately, futile. It is true that the three parties represented have (very) different backgrounds, histories and outlooks. But MacMahon claims that “It is naive – both for those who see great opportunity and those who see great danger in a first ministerial troika – to believe their movements are homogeneous, or even share the same objectives.”
But they really do. They share the objective, from different places, of the breakup of the United Kingdom, which has been bubbling away since the Good Friday Agreement signed on April 10, 1998, that ended 30 years of violent conflict in Northern Ireland; since the Scotland Act of the same year, and since Plaid Cymru took Wales from Labour, only a few weeks ago.
Such is the intensity of the Westminster Bubble, obsessed with the Labour soap-opera of the Andy Burnham/Wes Streeting/Keir Starmer love triangle, that such historical undercurrents are underplayed or completely ignored.
The mantra within specifically Scottish media, that the SNP are dreadful, and that the election victory was a pyrrhic one, plays alongside this narrative.
Last week, we saw the Scottish Press Awards celebrating Kevin McKenna of the Herald winning the Columnist of the Year award, with Alex Massie of the Times being runner-up. The Daily Record’s Paul Hutcheon was named as the “political journalist of the year”.
Such awards and backslapping are great for the silo-community of Scottish journalism, and no doubt the three champions had a great election, but the awards don’t cover up the fact that they backed the losing ticket.
Russell Findlay and Anas Sarwar remain in post despite leading their respective parties to their worst-ever Holyrood results, compounding the impression of a political elite completely divorced from reality, wedded to managed decline and mired in hubris and self-deceit. This is a very slow learning curve.
The problem is both political and demographic.
The political problem is that an insurgent Welsh nationalism brings new demands to the table, as does the Northern Irish situation in quite a different way. The attempt to smear and demonise Sinn Féin works when speaking to the Daily Mail’s readership, but fails badly when speaking to the young people of Northern Ireland, or Scotland, who have no lived experience of the Irish Troubles.
As the Irish writer Emma DeSouza wrote in 2024: “A recent LucidTalk/Sunday Times survey showed that 57% of 18 to 24-year-olds in Northern Ireland would vote ‘yes’ to reunifying Ireland if a border poll were held today, despite there being no official campaign or unity plan in place.
“More than 600,000 people have been born in Northern Ireland since the signing of the Good Friday agreement, and they have grown up during a sustained period of peace that has given rise to a new set of priorities. This is a generation that wants more rights, more progressive change – and to confine the division of the past to the dustbin of history.”
The Unionist incantation to talk of a “generation” loses credibility as each day passes. As DeSouza explained, Jeffrey Donaldson’s recalcitrance had made a rod for his own back: “The DUP have enabled a stasis in which Northern Ireland’s devolved assembly has been non-operational for 70% of the past six and a half years, and repeatedly blocked attempts for more devolved government. This has forced many younger people to advocate for constitutional change as it feels like the only route to a functional political system.”
Some of this will sound familiar to readers of the Sunday National.
Everywhere we see Unionist politicians just saying “No”. No to a referendum, No to more powers for Holyrood. No to anything that breaks with the Internal Market Act.
Just Say No. Every time there is an attempt to institute change that affects in any way the neoliberal consensus, whether that be rent controls, a bottle deposit scheme, a minimum price on alcohol, or, more recently, the idea of making food more affordable, there is a cacophony of Unionist scribes howling against them. Many of them have just been given accolades in back-slapping ceremonies by their peers. But these are paltry, minor policy changes being proposed, and just rejecting them constantly because they don’t fit with Unionist ideology just seems increasingly ridiculous to large swathes of the electorate.
A more generous and confident Union would be fine with these sorts of changes and would benefit politically from such goodwill. If the Union is just something that can’t cope with any change, it just comes across as increasingly brittle, bitter and broken.
This relentless “No” is a disavowal of the future, and it speaks increasingly to a sullen and bitter minority, ignoring the youthful clamouring for some discernible future.
But now new fronts are appearing.
In January 2024, I wrote: “For the past 10 or 12 years, the independence movement in Scotland has seen itself as the lead or most advanced part of any one of the nations that might cause the break-up of the British State.
“We were in some ways the most developed and the most articulate in putting the case for independence, or so we thought. Another way to look at these relations, in the light of the foundering of part of the project north of the Border, is to look at the wider cracked edifice of the UK. The idea is to look at ourselves with less self-regard and instead look at the whole of the UK and Ireland. To look less at a binary Scotland-England relationship and more at the wider systemic constitutional failing.”
And this has a new dynamic. The emergence of Wales as an aspect of constitutional change has blindsided most of the British Establishment. Wales is a new front on the constitutional question, where years of economic neglect, cultural appropriation and social disregard have fed a political movement that less than twenty years ago wouldn’t have been treated seriously at all.
Now, people are asking, why does the entire Welsh Cabinet speak fluent Welsh and no-one in the Scottish Parliament speaks Gaelic? Of course, we are comparing apples and pears, or ùbhlan and peuran, but the point stands.
Issues of cultural status and anglicisation read across Scotland, Ireland and Wales.
Of course, these have different histories and contexts – we are a “three-voiced nation” – but the lessons and the markers resonate nevertheless. Even if the cultural and political histories are very different, it still leaves people asking: why aren’t our languages recognised and alive?
The problem for the Unionist media and political class therefore is not just political (constitutional), it is demographic and deeply cultural. These are not easy things to bat away but speak to deeper problems of shifting understanding of place and identity. This is the long game, and we’re here for it.
As Liz Loyd wrote in 2024: “The belief that Scotland should be independent is a sticky one. Continued high levels of support are not just a consequence of Brexit or Boris Johnson, but a mark of a longer-term evolution in the underlying thinking of the Scottish population.
“Importantly, that is not unique to those who voted 10 years ago. Two-thirds of under-25s, all of whom were too young to vote in 2014, support independence.
“Equally, the enthusiastic young voters of 2014 have not become significantly more pro-Union or conservative as they have entered their 30s.
“For them and many of the under-50s who consistently produce a polling majority in favour of independence, two ideas have been normalised: first, that Scotland should be independent, and second, that patience is a virtue.”
She continues: “For new young voters, the belief that Scotland should be independent is now the prevailing norm. The idea strikes a chord with a generation growing up in a political context that gives them more confidence in Scotland and less in the UK.
“A change of UK Government may temper support for a while, but unlike previous generations of Scottish voters, this generation will always know there is an alternative.”
That idea of “an alternative” is a powerful one – a generational game-changer – when the only option in the past was the election of some kind of social democratic Labour Government at a UK level to act as a bulwark against the predation of the Conservatives.
But all that has gone. Not only are young Scots not disabled by the crippling sense of cultural cringe and inferiorism that their parents and grandparents had – they look to and expect policy and change to come from their devolved government as much as they do Westminster.
You could argue that successive policy failures at Holyrood – take housing, drugs and land for starters – would undermine belief in devolution or independence itself. There’s no denying any of the grand policy failures of the SNP. But the point is that the prospect for change, despite historic and unforgivable leadership failures, remains in people’s minds.
In a world in which actual futures, of jobs, or affordable housing or food (!) or planetary survival are derided as utopian or radical or “woke” – the idea of transformative change has an allure despite the politicians’ determined failure to provide leadership or direction.
Critics of this analysis will say that Starmer is not under real threat, or that Burnham and “Manchesterism” are just around the corner.
But these ideas were undermined last week by a truly brutal article for the Starmer project from one of Britain’s great living historians, David Edgerton, in the New Statesman, of all places. It was in a piece called, rather uncompromisingly: “The Labour Party is dead, and Starmer has killed it”. It was more of an obituary than a feature article.
Edgeron wrote: “The question is not whether Labour values have been usurped by Starmer’s faction. It is what kind of party could be built out of the corpse of Starmer’s party.
“One option is clearly a more Blairite party: pro-tech giants, the US, and privatisation. But are there any serious options to create a progressive party, one that dares speak out on the issues of the day, that actually communicates with a progressive electorate?
“It is hard to see at the moment whether the ambition or capacity exists within it. It is worth noting that Starmer’s Party is only barely the official party of the organised working class.
“Whereas Labour had affiliated to them nearly every major trade union, today only just over half of union members are in party-affiliated unions. And even then, some may leave.
“This is hardly surprising: as it stands, its policies, Starmer’s party’s political instincts, are far closer to those of the Tories and Reform than to the progressive parties that are eating it up. And that is not accidental, or the result of a lack of vision. It was the whole point.”
The consequences of this abject collapse and surrender haven’t yet been processed by the recipients of the Scottish Press Awards, nor will they.
But the idea, as Starmer’s political project recedes into the rear-view mirror of history, that, somehow, improbably, the solution is “Andy Burnham” is far-fetched. But it does make sense if you are caught only in the soap opera of politics.
Burnham’s project is undeniably tied to the failed and oddly still alive Morgan McSweeney project, but the idea of a transference across from Starmerism to Manchesterism is being nurtured.
This is a sort of deep denial, akin to the Sarwar groupie belief that actually this was brilliant.
Revelations come in the most surprising places. Here’s Andy Maciver talking about a “process, an event and a decision”.
Maciver writes: “Political trends move at pace nowadays. To paraphrase Lenin, decades now happen in the space of weeks. There are only three things required for Scotland to be independent within the next 10 years: a process, an event and a decision.
“The process is John Swinney running a better government. I am absolutely certain that, within himself, Mr Swinney knows that he took over a failing administration. He now has his own strong mandate from the country, and complete authority over his party.
“If he can use that to reject high taxes and embrace high growth, to reject more welfare and embrace more work, and genuinely reform the public services, then he will force lots of open-minded, non-tribal centrists to ask themselves whether an independent Scotland is a better prospect than remaining in the UK.
“However, there is another side to that coin, and that is the event. Because as well as running Scotland better, independence also depends on Nigel Farage becoming Prime Minister at Westminster.
“Although Reform UK’s policies have good traction in Scotland, Mr Farage does not, and he never will. He is an English nationalist.
That is perfectly reasonable – as reasonable as being a Scottish nationalist – but it places a very low ceiling on his popularity in Scotland, and it means that his ascendency to Downing Street is a material risk to the UK, particularly at a time when nationalists are in control in Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff.
“This, the event, is linked to the decision, which is to grant the Scottish Government a Section 30 order allowing another independence referendum to be held. Unionist parties comfort themselves in the decision by the Supreme Court that the power over a referendum resides at Westminster, combined with repeated promises from Tory and Labour Prime Ministers that they would never grant one.
“They may not. But Mr Farage will. Scotland is a drag on his ambitions for a majority at Westminster – he’s likely to win, at most, a handful of Scotland’s 57 seats. And he’s not a Unionist anyway. For him, what’s not to like?
“A process, an event and a decision. That is all that sits between Scotland and independence.”
This may not be as ridiculous as it sounds. The reality is that as Celtic alliances coalesce, there is no answer to the question, what is the democratic route out of the Union? It’s evocative of what Peter MacMahon conjures. “Picture the scene.”
