Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. Swinney’s 10,000 men are marching up the hill again, and when they were only half way up they were neither up nor down. The Grand old Duke of Bute House has a new face and a new suit but the strategic pattern is the same. The political signature of the failed Sturgeon era all over it. If anything, the only surprise here is it has come as far out as a year from the 2026 Holyrood election.
Under pressure from his own party activists and independence supporting voter base ahead of SNP conference, this latest attempt by Swinney to give the pretence of another independence referendum being just one more SNP vote away is as pathetic as it is deeply cynical. Not withstanding the obvious inherent flaws in the prospectus offered in 2014 that led to defeat, flaws that haven’t been subject to any form of proper analysis and scrutiny since – the credibility gap here is the size of the Grand Canyon. No one buys this as anything other than party political game playing. Pro independence activists across the national movement can see through it, most of his own activists and supporters deep down in their heart see through it and most importantly so do the voters.
We’ve all collectively seen this movie before, again and again. We know the plot, the main characters and most importantly we know the ending. I’ve written here for Conter before about the abject state of the Independence movement today and the wilful deception and false promises made by the Sturgeon team of which Swinney was a central actor. The huge missed opportunities and strategic blunders made on their watch since 2015 with a British state lurching from one crisis to another and an unrivalled political hegemony for a decade.
Without labouring those same points again, this weeks so called major announcement by Swinney – roundly lauded by the likes of Stephen Flynn and Neil Gray – amounts to a gaslighting bordering on offensiveness to anyone with even a semblance of understanding of the material political state of play. The shift of the dial needed to deliver pressure on the British state on a referendum comes from sustained demonstrable majority public support for Independence over a significant period of time. No amount of attempts at parliamentary shortcuts or pressure through Holyrood alone will bend the will of the British state to accepting a referendum that they know from experience they could potentially lose.
To establish such majority support requires a rejuvenated, refreshed and recalibrated independence movement that sits outside the direct control of the SNP leadership and with a credible programme rooted in the material concerns of the working class majority in Scotland. It will also require as part of its strategy an engagement of civil society and when necessary acts of civil disobedience which are anathema to the thinking of the current SNP leadership constrained as they are by strict liberal orthodoxy and a parliament only strategy. I deeply wish this was not the case but pretending otherwise and going ahead in good faith and wishful thinking is simply not an option.
The task of rebuilding the national movement in Scotland and reasserting the question of independence as a central plank of our politics is both urgent and increasingly necessary. Scots now see the reality of a right wing Labour government in action. Slashing benefits for the long term sick and disabled, freezing our pensioners, impoverishing children into a life of poverty and inequality – all to appease Rachel Reeves self imposed fiscal rules and treasury economic orthodoxy.
A housing crisis which increasingly leaves a generation stranded on exorbitant rents and deepening income inequality. Roll back after roll back on manifesto pledges and a duplicity that leads straight to increased support for the populist right seeking as they do to exploit any and every opportunity to lay the blame for society’s problems on the most vulnerable. A British state foreign policy infrastructure the world over which sees its role as protecting Western imperialist interests and which actively assists in the mass slaughter, ethnic cleansing and deliberate starvation of innocent men women and children in Gaza – under both Tory and Labour governments. A Labour Government that rips apart the domestic social contract to appease Donald Trump on a drive to 5% of GDP spending on defence. Spending tens of billions of pounds on new American nuclear & conventional weaponry and offering British boots on the ground to sustain a self-confessed proxy war in Ukraine that’s seeing thousands of young working class conscripts slaughtered in conditions akin only to First World War trenches. A government utterly beholden to the interests of capital and multi-national corporations.
These are the stakes and the material reality of the devastatingly destructive role of the British state in world affairs. As sharp a reminder as any – this is the nature of the state we seek to break. It’s not and never has been the gift of any British politician left or right to dictate the terms of Scotlands relationship to the UK – it’s the responsibility of the movement for national sovereignty to chart a course that ties the demand for independence with the struggles of anti imperialism, international solidarity and radical wealth redistribution. A movement which is not used as an afterthought or point of reference for yet more meaningless political theatre and parliamentary dramatics but one which is a serious and actively campaigning force that defines the structures of political debate in Scotland. That’s the task before us – urgent and more necessary than ever.
