In what already feels like a different political era, but was really only last year, Nicola Sturgeon named this Thursday as the target date for a second referendum on Scottish independence. That proposal soon collided with constitutional and legal reality. It was superseded by a plan B, to treat the next UK general election as a “de facto referendum” on independence. Then the first minister abruptly resigned and her party was consumed by scandal.
Earlier this week, Humza Yousaf used his first Scottish National party conference as party leader and first minister to set out a new process for getting to the cherished goal of independence. The first line in the SNP’s general election manifesto will underline a causal link between voting for the SNP and getting independence. If a majority of Westminster seats is won, the result will be presented to Downing Street as grounds to negotiate a path to independence.
That is not exactly the model that Ms Sturgeon advocated, but it deploys a diluted version of the same tendentious device. It still tests the bounds of what can reasonably be extrapolated from a vote in a general election which, by definition, channels a range of different priorities through party allegiances. That’s what makes it unlike a referendum. Voters know the difference.
Mr Yousaf’s plan deftly sidesteps a political problem he inherited from his predecessor, but his solution is not practically conducive to resolving the independence question. If, as is feasible, the SNP vote share falls and the party loses Westminster seats but clings on to a majority, the claim to have settled an issue on which Scotland looks consistently divided would sound very hollow.
A lesson from Brexit is that founding a vast upheaval on a tight electoral margin and an ambiguous prospectus is a recipe for years of bitter political dysfunction. The underlying problem for the SNP is not a lack of constitutional levers but persistent public ambivalence. If opinion polls showed sustained, large majorities in favour of dissolving the union, the demand for a second referendum would be irresistible. Shifting that dial is also core to Mr Yousaf’s strategy.
This week’s conference has stabilised a wobbly position, and enhanced the authority of a first minister who inherited a party in meltdown. He has also, quite rightly, been afforded sympathy and some political leeway, given that he was functioning under extraordinarily testing personal circumstances – his wife’s parents are trapped in Gaza.
But stabilisation is not sufficient to meet the challenges. The SNP will be judged on its record as Scotland’s party of government. There is a gamble in conflating that question with the one about the constitution, especially since any credentials of competence were discarded in a run of financial scandals. Scottish voters are quite capable of liking the idea of independence more than they like a discredited SNP. Nationalists could perform badly in a general election as a function of ordinary political gravity weighing on an incumbent power, in which case they will come to regret having said the vote would be a verdict on breaking the union.
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