Throughout the Brexit years, one of the journalists I’ve most valued has been Ian Dunt. There have been few better at combining sharp analysis with wholly deserved ridicule of the politicians responsible for driving the UK off a cliff.
And yet when Dunt and some other London-based centre-left journalists write about the SNP, you sense an inner conflict. Forced to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that SNP politicians can often sound quite sensible and progressive, they quickly – as a kind of ‘mea culpa’ – remind their readers that those same SNP politicians are still, at heart, grievance-ridden Nats.
There was an example of this at last week’s debate, where Stephen Flynn was so warmly applauded for his blunt, and very welcome, comments on the disaster of Brexit and the need for inward migration. As he often does at such events – very entertainingly – Dunt was live-tweeting on X and was full of praise for Flynn’s comments. Later in the debate though, his tone changed: “And there’s Flynn’s *bs right there, for all the decent talk on immigration and Brexit. When it comes to his government’s failure, he blames Westminster. The same message of grievance and pass-the-buck irresponsibility as the populists”.
It’s a classic illustration of the mindset I describe above that in a single tweet Dunt can both acknowledge the damage of Brexit and imply that Westminster bears no responsibility for anything that’s gone wrong in Scotland.
All parties blame others, but only the SNP gets accused of “grievance”
Of course, the SNP should be held accountable for their shortcomings. Of course, they will always blame someone else. But so will the Labour government in Wales. So will Labour shadow ministers in Westminster when talking about their colleagues in Wales. So will all political parties. That is what political parties do.
The difference is, when it’s the SNP, and when it’s seen through the lens of constitutional politics, it is dismissed as the politics of ‘grievance rather than as just the usual cynicism of party politics, or – dare I say it – legitimate complaint. Almost as if there were nothing to feel aggrieved about.
“Scexit” and “Brexit” – are they really that similar?
A close relative of ‘the politics of grievance’ is ‘Scexit is the same as Brexit’. Both are uttered routinely as truisms by otherwise thoughtful people. They come into the category of what I call ‘superficially profound but profoundly superficial’.
Of course, there are some similarities between Brexit and Scottish independence – not least in the massive disruption one has caused and the other would cause (the latter greater still). But there are also multiple differences.
Suffice to say that if you really want to argue Brexit and ‘Scexit’ are the same, you’d have to argue that the nature of the UK’s relationship to Brussels when it was an EU member state was exactly analogous to the nature of Scotland’s relationship to Westminster today.
To take a glaring example of why that’s not the case, there is no instance of Brussels taking a decision in the face of UK objections which turned upside down the lives of millions of UK nationals, denying us our rights and decimating our economy. Yet, that is exactly what Westminster did with Brexit to Scotland, having first denied it the right of veto. You might argue that that’s just the UK’s democratic system, and that the whole of the UK suffered the consequences. But you can’t argue that Brussels ever had the power to inflict something similar to the UK.
When the SNP say things you’d expect to hear from Labour
I don’t say any of this as a lifelong or passionate independence supporter. As recently as 2014 my unquestioning sense of Britishness led to my unquestioning ‘No’ vote in the Scottish referendum. But at that stage Brexit hadn’t happened, I hadn’t yet lived in Scotland for long, and I still had a frankly naive view of the relative health of our democracy, underpinned by a Whitehall career.
I also hadn’t yet seen for myself the way in which sensible words from the SNP – about refugees, about Brexit, about various issues, would make (some) Labour people spit blood at their ‘opportunism’. Especially when those words were far more progressive and truthful than anything Labour politicians were allowed to say by their own leadership.
We’ve had another bout of that this week in the wake of Flynn’s provocatively enlightened comments. “How dare those nasty Nats pretend they actually care about any of this stuff as if they were normal people like us?”, is how you might sum up the outrage.
To say all this doesn’t make me an uncritical SNP supporter. But, to give one example, when I read the transcripts of recent Westminster debates on refugees, it’s the SNP speeches, not the Labour ones, that remind me of those Labour ministers gave 15 years ago when I worked for DfID. No aping of the deliberate Tory conflation of asylum seekers with “illegal immigrants”. No shying away from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)’s condemnation of the UK’s behaviour. No reluctance to emphasise the main reason – above its impracticality and cost – for condemning the Rwanda policy – namely its sheer immorality.
There is a difference between aspiring to independence and aspiring to it enough to try to overcome the multitude of barriers – in terms of the politics, the process and the practicalities – to bringing it about. Swathes of Scottish voters will, I suspect, choose Labour at this election without losing the aspiration to independence.
In fact, anecdotally, talking to and listening to people far younger than me, it’s not even a question of aspiration. It’s an assumption that independence is the natural order of things; borne not out of anti-Englishness but out of a lack of affiliation to the UK; out of a sense that when your politics and your electoral system are as broken as this, there must be a better option. Especially if, unlike some of your elders, you’re unencumbered by a long-held loyalty to the UK state (and frankly, if you’re growing up now, why should you feel that loyalty?).
Losing belief in the Union
If all this makes me sound like a dyed-in-the-wool Nat, it can’t be helped. In practice, I’m deeply conflicted, and I understand and empathise with both the cause of independence and the Union.
But what I am – and I know I speak for others – is someone who has lost my belief in the Union as a properly functioning entity, who fully gets what drives the aspiration for independence, and who sees through much of the propaganda I probably used to believe myself. And if I’m honest, I find it hard to imagine myself in the voting booth at a future referendum – if that ever comes – and putting my cross against ‘No’ again.
It may well be that the UK holds together for much longer than some imagine, with a strange entity called Scotland where many people don’t feel anything much for the UK but not enough of them think the effort and disruption required to bring about independence is worth it; especially in the face of increasingly ‘muscular’ Unionism. (That includes Labour – to listen to some of their candidates you’d think they were representing the DUP).
I’ll say one thing with confidence, though. Every reference to ‘grievance’, every invented example of anti-Englishness, every ludicrous comparison of the mainstream Scottish independence movement with the worst of Faragesque nationalism, will only tend to push people away at an emotional level. Even more so, when they come from people with a professed love of a country called the UK, but a startling lack of curiosity as to why not everyone on this island might share that love.
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