At the end of last month, the Scottish Nationalist administration in Edinburgh announced that it intends to hold a referendum on Scotland’s independence from the United Kingdom in October 2023. SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon clearly hopes to capitalize on the current unpopularity of the government in Westminster.

Boris Johnson’s moribund administration responded that it had no intention of agreeing that such a vote should take place nor that its outcome should be in any way binding. The Scottish Nationalists therefore plan to take this question of legality and constitutionality to Britain’s Supreme Court, in an attempt to seek a resolution.

As the UK’s first ever ‘Minister for the Union’ – a title he grandly conferred upon himself in 2019 – and with republican sensibilities continuing to grow in Northern Ireland, Mr. Johnson must now, in the last days of his leadership, feel desperate to avoid provoking the fragmentation of this once proud United Kingdom.

Scotland last voted on its independence in 2014, when it elected to remain in the UK. At the time, this was heralded as a once-in-a-generation decision. Although Scotland’s life expectancy rates are slightly lower than UK averages, and its teenage pregnancy rates rather higher, we might reasonably conclude that the timespan of a Scottish ‘generation’ might normally be considered to exceed a decade.

Two years later, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. Prior to the poll, many ardent Brexiteers had suggested that, if they were defeated, they would push for another referendum in a bid to get their own way. Once they had won, they of course declared that the result was permanent and irreversible.

They were not wholly wrong in this. It is much easier to exit a political, administrative, and economic union than it is to join one. Such referenda mirror the entropic arrow of time: they only head in one direction. Thus, these systems tend towards disunity or chaos. It takes much more effort and energy to put something together than it does to rip it apart.

The possibility of multiple referenda makes the eventual prospect of Scottish Independence virtually inevitable. The nationalists just need to get lucky with their timing. Britain voted to leave the European Union as a consequence of the unpopularity of a smug Tory administration in Westminster, and a slick and often misleading advertising campaign which promised the hope of change. The morning after the poll, when many thousands concluded they may have acted in haste, a new term was coined: ‘Bregret’.

That is why such votes should, sensibly, only take place once in a generation: because once you’ve voted out, you’re never going to get back in. The Remainers or unionists will never have the chance to revoke that decision. And therefore, given sufficient opportunities, the separatists will always, at the last, win.

So, regardless of the rights or wrongs of independence, it may well seem far too early to be voting on it again. This appears to be a view shared by many in Scotland: a poll published by The Scotsman newspaper at the end of last month showed only forty per cent in favour of a new referendum during autumn 2023, and only thirty-seven per cent supporting a vote without the endorsement of the UK government.

Related News

News from Nowhere: The French Connection

News from Nowhere: You Turn If You Want To

Not all of the SNP’s voters themselves support the party’s proposals for their nation’s path to independence. Ms. Sturgeon has nevertheless gone on to argue that, if she cannot have her 2023 poll, the next British general election should be regarded as a ‘de facto referendum’ and that, if her party gain a majority of Scottish votes, that result should automatically trigger independence. Her increasing inconsistency and reliance upon false logic is strikingly reminiscent of other leaders, past and present, both at home and overseas.

Boris Johnson’s relentless attempts to worm his way out of taking responsibility for his actions – his repeated refusals to resign, despite all the evidence against him – reflected a similarly obstinate rejection of reason and fact. At the same time, a United States congressional committee has in the past few weeks heard increasingly damning testimony demonstrating Donald Trump’s involvement in the armed attack of January 2021 on the American Capitol, during which the defeated president’s supporters sought to overthrow his nation’s democratic processes to keep him in power. It seems that Trump, like Johnson, would have done anything to maintain his position, regardless of honour, loyalty and truth.

Though her politics are of course remarkably different, Ms. Sturgeon’s refusals to accept that, eight years ago, her party lost a once-in-a-generation referendum – and her accompanying feats of political sophistry – share the pig-headedness of those two pig-hearted men. 

The SNP is itself a strange beast of a political party. Having shifted further towards the Left in recent decades, it represents an ad hoc combination of nationalists and socialists (which can of course be a problematic mix). Since Ms. Sturgeon succeeded Mr. Salmond, it has also lately demonstrated a tendency to choose leaders whose names sound like fish. This may however just be a coincidence rather than a conscious choice.

Its former leader Alex Salmond has faced allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault (of which he has been cleared); and controversies have since raged in relation the current SNP leader’s role in the related processes of internal and independent investigation.

Last month, an SNP member of the UK parliament stepped down from his membership of the party when it was announced that police would be investigating complaints of sexual harassment raised against him. This followed his temporary suspension from parliament after he had been found to have made sexual advances towards a teenaged member of staff. When it emerged that the SNP’s Westminster leader had urged his fellow SNP parliamentarians to support the disgraced parliamentarian, calls for his own resignation had also been provoked. Then, at the end of the same month, another former SNP politician was jailed for two years for embezzling money from her own party.

We must, however, remember, of course, that the SNP’s scandals have paled in comparison to the UK government’s recent controversies, scandals that led to Boris Johnson’s agreement to quit. This crisis at Westminster might at first be thought to work out well for Scottish independence. The sins of the SNP may come to seem minor by comparison. But it could also play very badly for Nicola Sturgeon. Now that the honourable members of the Conservative Party have finally dumped their dysfunctional leader, a prospective political turnaround in the leadership and direction of the UK government might lead Scotland to rethink the attractions of going its own way. 

The SNP remains a highly controversial party, and its calls for a referendum are still extraordinarily divisive. The nationalists’ strongest argument for independence relies upon the fact that in 2016’s Brexit referendum sixty-two per cent of Scots voted to remain in the European Union. Sixty per cent of Londoners voted to stay in the EU, a proportion dwarfed by nearly seventy-five per cent of the citizens of Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh. Their argument is that the UK’s new constitutional arrangements – its new structure of rights and sovereignty – would require a new set of constitutional settlements with its devolved regions.

Much of Scotland’s electorate, however, remains unconvinced. The forthcoming months will show whether Nicola Sturgeon will be able to persuade the British government, the Supreme Court and her own people round to her arguments, or whether a more popular and less disastrous administration in London might eventually persuade Scotland to stay.

Ms. Sturgeon welcomed Boris Johnson’s decision to leave Downing Street as being the cause of a ‘widespread sense of relief’. Yes, there was relief across the nation, certainly, and also in his own party, but perhaps not in the private thoughts of Mr. Johnson’s political opponents, both north and south of the border, as that extraordinarily easy, bumbling. bombastic target of their broadsides began to fade away.