Billy Connolly, the SNP leadership farce and why the case for Scottish independence has collapsed

This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers.

In 1992 Billy Connolly was a superstar coming home when he returned to Glasgow for a 25th anniversary concert at the city’s Royal Concert Hall. For younger readers somehow unfamiliar with his work, Connolly was the working class comedian from Glasgow who in the 1970s and 1980s invented modern British stand-up, becoming in his own self-mocking terms “the darling of the chat shows”.

In perhaps his greatest performance, the TV special An Audience with Billy Connolly on primetime ITV in the mid-1980s, he produced a series of routines so ideally calibrated that the show stands today as the perfect British artefact from that era, mining social mobility, working class heritage, shipbuilding, the military, ludicrous social distinctions, the darkness of 1950s attitudes towards children, adverts, Scottish religion and culture. If I’ve watched it fewer than fifty times I would be surprised.

That night of the 25th anniversary show, June 4 1992, there was a crowd outside the stage door of the Royal Concert Hall after the gig, waiting for a glimpse of the great man and perhaps the chance to get an autograph.

I had turned up hoping, naively, to secure an interview, having been told by his press person there was no chance. With a friend that summer I was co-editing the undergraduate freshers week handbook at Glasgow University Students’ Representative Council, the institution a young Nicola Sturgeon had tried and failed to take over the previous year.

Emerging from the stage door, Connolly walked into a crowd of grinning Glaswegians eager for a word with their local hero who was back from Los Angeles. Connolly is kind and he played along. The joviality and posing for pictures went on for an age, so long it seemed there would be no chance to ask. I positioned myself at the end of the queue, just before he got to the limo.

Mr Connolly, I asked, might I interview you? He stopped, making me aware, suddenly, of how chiseled and powerful he was, back in those days. He was likely to be suspicious of journalists in general, and I was a student hack just starting out. Connolly still hated the media, or newspapers, after various run-ins and punch-ups in the 1970s. He looked sceptical. Who did I write for? For the student publications at Glasgow University, I said. Aye, he said, GUM, Glasgow University Magazine, I remember that, we used to hang about in the 1970s with that crowd, with crazy poets and students in crazy pubs, all singing songs. Okay, he said, call me at the Marriott Hotel at Anderston tomorrow, tell the front desk I said to ring, and we’ll see. And off he went.

The next day I rang and, to my astonishment, was put through to his room. Pamela Stephenson, Connolly’s wife, answered. Billy wasn’t there, though he had said I would call. He was out filming, I think for an edition of the South Bank Show, celebrating his quarter century as a performer. Could I call back in a few hours? When I did so, Connolly was a little wary. What did I want to talk to him about? Glasgow in the 1960s and 1970s and how his career started. Long pause. Aye, okay. Come to the hotel lobby on Sunday morning at 10am and we’ll go for some breakfast, he said.

On Sunday morning he did indeed turn up, wearing Levis, a black shirt and utterly wild shoes, and proceeded to give me almost two hours of his time, telling stories, rerunning material, testing new stuff, conversing, asking me questions about contemporary Glasgow and my time at university, and musing on politics and his then, contempt, for Scottish nationalism.

The point of telling this story, and apologies to any subscribers who may have heard it before, is that Connolly in that period embodied the widespread and completely normal Scottish cultural self-confidence that was completely at home with the idea of Britain and Scotland’s place in it. Scottish Nationalism was viewed as a ridiculous fringe movement and working class Scots generally regarded it as so.

There was rivalry with England, particularly in football, of course, but that was just sport. The Scots played in British public life such a disproportionate role relative to size of population, in politics and culture, that the idea of breaking up Britain just seemed obviously daft and weird for Connolly and millions of Scots. Separation was something advocated by people who could not see that far more united workers in Clydebank, Scotland, and workers in Coventry, England, than divided them.

And then something changed. A shift in the thinking of working class Scots that led to the rise of the SNP and Nicola Sturgeon becoming First Minister.

It had been stirring in the late Thatcher period. Jim Sillars had won the Govan by-election in 1988, taking an inner-city Glasgow Labour stronghold. Sillars is another interesting figure I turned up to ask for an interview as a student, in his constituency office in Ibrox, next to the Rangers FC stadium. Like Connolly, he was generous with his time, and tolerant of a student journalist having the cheek to ask questions. Labour’s John Smith was similarly helpful, twice, as Shadow Chancellor. Just turning up and asking for an interview is elementary journalism and people will say yes a surprising amount of the time. Or perhaps it was easier then before public figures were surrounded by agents and the contemporary protective thicket of numerous press officers and advisers.

Sillars was an autodidact who rose through the trade union movement. He had started out as a Labour man and then led a breakaway Scottish Labour Party in the 1970s, before joining the Scottish National Party in the 1980s. His belief was that working class Scots were being conned or taken for granted by Labour. Scotland needed to go its own way to reconstruct the economy, he argued, and his by-election win in 1988 was an early sign working class Scots in the populous central belt were prepared to consider voting Nationalist in a more serious way. There had been flirtations in the late 1960s and early 1970s that faded away.

Sillars lost Govan when the seat went back to Labour in the 1992 general election. New Labour under Tony Blair became very popular, initially at least, in Scotland. Nicola Sturgeon stood for the SNP in Glasgow Govan in the Westminster election of 1997 and she lost, to a Labour opponent.

Blair and Donald Dewar introduced the devolved Scottish Parliament and in 1999 Sturgeon stood in its first elections, for Govan. Again, she lost, though the devolved parliament operated a system with a top-up regional list for MSPs. Although Sturgeon lost first past the post, she got into the Edinburgh parliament and her extraordinary career, first under SNP leader Alex Salmond and later as leader in her own right, was up and running.

Her mentor Salmond knew that to take power and break out of the rural areas in north east of Scotland where the SNP had built its base, he needed to win both the left-leaning working class voters of West Central Scotland, in seats such as Govan, and also middle class professional voters in the leafy west-end of Glasgow clustered around the University. Dundee was another target that required similar tactics.

To win, Salmond, coming from the left-wing of the SNP, made a left-wing pitch that New Labour was a bit right-wing and too often careless of Scotland’s needs or complaints. Even though there were many prominent Scots in New Labour, Salmond called it London Labour, to indicate it was remote, almost anti-Scottish.

The Union had been weakening as an affiliation for a while. Historians will argue about why this happened. Perhaps it was the unpopularity of Thatcherism, or the changes to industry and the welfare state, or distance from the common endeavour of the Second World War. Or after the end of the Cold War the need to stick together to defend European security no longer mattered. Since Ukraine that has turned out to be an illusion.

The best underlying explanation for the rise of the SNP is, I think, that Scotland was an early warning sign on the rise of identity politics. As the novelist Allan Massie has observed, Scotland in the 1950s looked quite distinct from England, as did Northern Ireland. Towns had their own family-owned department stores and shops, and thriving newspapers reporting local news. This was replaced in globalisation 1.0. Shops, shiny plastic branding, new civic architecture, housing, all started to look the same pretty much everywhere. Everything was blanded out. In such circumstances is it a surprise that many Scots, living in a nation within a nation state, the UK, wanted to declare they still exist as a distinct entity? As Massie says, as Scotland came to look more like England, many of my fellow Scots wanted to emphasise the points of difference, and politics was one of the ways they did it.

Initially, after devolution it looked as though this wouldn’t work for Alex Salmond. Scottish Labour ran the parliament in Edinburgh in coalition with the Lib Dems. Salmond pushed for a while and then gave up the leadership in 2001.

Then came the trigger, the Iraq War.

This was an intervention that became deeply unpopular in Scotland, traditionally a warrior nation. Working class and middle class Scots recoiled as Iraqis died and British soldiers were killed. Scotland came to dislike the war intensely. It had been dragged into it by London Labour, said Salmond. Scottish Labour began to collapse.

In the wake of Iraq, Salmond returned as leader and in 2007 won the Holyrood election. In those elections Nicola Sturgeon won first past the post in a constituency seat – Govan.

In the intervening sixteen years, the SNP has come very close to achieving the break up of the Union, losing only 55-45 in the 2014 referendum and wiping out Scottish Labour in the Westminster elections that followed. It has ruled at Holyrood and stoked grievances against the rest of Britain every day.

Now, it is popcorn time. The quarter century of Nationalist ascendancy has gone into reverse and the party is disintegrating as it attempts to find a replacement for Sturgeon, who resigned a few weeks ago.

The acrimony is spectacular in its intensity. Peter Murrell, husband to Sturgeon, resigned today from his post as chief executive of the SNP to spend more time consulting his lawyers. The party is facing calls, from among the three contenders, to appoint a proper, independent body to oversee a leadership election that is descending into farce with allegations of chicanery.

Murrell’s resignation statement sounded like a parody. He denies any involvement in the leadership election and said Scotland is closer than ever to independence. It is not.

The party’s head of press resigned on Friday, because he was misled by Murrell’s party headquarters into denying the SNP has lost more than 30,000 members since 2021. It turns out recent press reports were correct. Tens of thousands of Nationalists have left the party. Murrell’s team had initially declined to say how many party members there are now, or how many were voting in the election. How many voting papers have been sent out? There is confusion. How reliable is the contest? It may have to be rerun if there are legal challenges.

Kate Forbes, 32, is the more talented leadership contender. She is, on the economy at least, a member of the reality-based community. The more conservative-minded candidate may yet win, but even if she does it is likely she will as First Minister have trouble persuading her colleagues. Religious Forbes opposes the gender-recognition reforms that got Sturgeon into so much trouble. The contender has public opinion on her side, but many of her colleagues disagree. It will be difficult for her to get any public service reforms through too.

The SNP isn’t disintegrating just because of a row over personalities, however amusing it is. The infighting looks like displacement activity by the party to delay engaging with the reality that it is over, because the case for independence has collapsed under the weight of global events.

After the invasion of Ukraine, European security and defence are back as a central concern. This will be the case for decades, meaning leaving the British armed forces is an even more terrible idea than it used to be. Trying to launch a new currency and central bank in an era of great power competition and financial danger? Also a terrible idea. Putting up a hard border with England, Scotland’s main trading partner, while inducing a huge deficit post-independence that would mean major cuts in pensions and welfare north of the border is equally a non-starter. In addition, Boris Johnson (a type Scots are raised to despise) is gone and an air of normality is returning to British politics. A substantial chunk of Scotland, perhaps 40%, will continue to vote SNP on a tribal basis. Yet the Nationalist movement looks likely to split further. Alex Salmond already has his own party. This fracturing creates opportunities for Labour to convince Scots that a devolved parliament within the UK is honestly the model to stick with rather than breaking up Britain.

A few years ago, Billy Connolly changed his view on independence. This was when Westminster was engaged after the Brexit referendum in an extended period of tomfoolery. Scotland would be best uncoupling from Westminster and the rest of the UK, Connolly said, deeming it a “good idea”. I wonder for how much longer he and many Scots like him will continue to say it is a good idea, with the SNP sinking rapidly back to national joke status.

Banks for the memory

After all that, the last thing you need is a long item from me on the emergency in global banking prompted by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. I’ll probably return to it next week, and there’s been a lot of great stuff to read about it on Reaction and on Engelsberg Ideas, the site our team runs for the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation.

Is this bank run the next financial crisis on the scale of 2008? I hope not, as the effects of that have rippled through politics and the economy ever since. After SVB, I’ve never known opinion so divided among banking experts I respect. One expert Reaction subscriber tells me it will be fine. The underlying assets were junk in 2008, now that is much less the case, he says. Banks are well-capitalised. Another says this will cascade through sovereign debt and the wider economy, killing confidence and investment. Banks, he points out, are only well-capitalised until suddenly mid-panic they are not. Panic can be contagious. Let’s see. More of this next week.

What I’m watching

Today is a day of Six Nations Rugby on television, with three cracking contests to decide the outcome of the championship. Scotland v Italy is well underway, then it’s France v Wales (14:45), concluding with Ireland hosting England (1700). That’s it, enough of thinking about politics this week. Come on Scotland, and England and Wales.