Shower of Scotland

“Work as though you live in the early days of a better nation,” wrote the Glasgow novelist and artist Alasdair Gray (quoting, it should be added, the Canadian poet Dennis Leigh). The words are often taken as the slogan of the early high period of devolution and were inscribed on the new Scottish Parliament building in 2004. In 1999, Professor Sir Neil MacCormick, the lawyer and son of “King John” John MacCormick, one of the most influential nationalist figures of the mid-20th century, argued that Scotland’s new devolved settlement would show the way, persuading Scots to substitute “new unions for old and to uphold them in place of old divisions”. Donald Dewar, in his speech at the opening of the Scottish Parliament, revived after almost 300 years, spoke of the new body as “not an end but a means to greater ends”.

So much for “greater ends”, “a better nation,” and “new unions for old”. The picture of Scottish democracy presented throughout the Salmond-Sturgeon affair is very far from the high-minded and optimistic atmosphere that surrounded the genesis of devolution and the years that followed.

Asked to pick an inspirational role model for a primary school project, I chose Donald Dewar. Above a little montage of photos of the (recently deceased) Labour politician, I remember proudly scrawling in my childish handwriting the founding statute of the new devolved settlement: “There shall be a Scottish Parliament…”

In the last couple of weeks, I have felt deeply ashamed of the state of Scottish democracy, ashamed both of the cruel way Salmond treated those who worked for him as First Minister, ashamed of Sturgeon’s carry-on, and ashamed most of all at how poorly the ruling party, the SNP, has served the Scottish people.

In 1884, the west-coast American socialist Henry George addressed an audience at Glasgow’s City Hall: “Here you have a great and rich city, and here you have poverty and destitution that would appal a heathen.” In relative terms, not much has changed – Scotland may well be a modern, developed nation, but its wealth is spread thinly. “Poverty and destitution” in swathes of Scotland’s cities express themselves in parallel epidemics – drug deaths, low life expectancy, and far higher rates of Covid-19 fatalities.

And looking out beyond the Kailyard, the assumptions of Scotland’s elites – both pro-devolution and nationalist – must be radically re-orientated to meet the realities of contemporary geopolitics.

The future direction of the European Union, which many “Indy-curious” swing voters feel reflects more closely their cultural sympathies than rule from “Tory” Westminster, is not, as was envisaged at the turn of the millennium, tending towards a post-sovereign ideal, in which federalising “member states” are free to pursue democratic experimentation, but rather it is a dysfunctional mess, with an arrogant, undemocratic bureaucracy at its centre in the form of the Commission, attempting clumsily to mediate between more and more fractious “nation states” pursuing their own priorities.

Whether Scotland would fare well in the new Europe is not at all clear. Furthermore, the high era of globalisation is coming to an end. It is no longer so straightforward to say that national borders are less relevant to the terms of economic life than “knowledge clusters” or “information highways”. An independent Scotland would face harder choices in a post-Covid world in which national resilience and defence of borders becomes a primary political goal.

The Salmond-Sturgeon affair is at once personal psychodrama and a reckoning for the SNP itself. Will it now forever abandon what David Torrance called “Nationalist Unionism”, a major principle underpinning the party’s “gradualist” orthodoxy? In 2014, the Salmond pitch that Scotland could go for “Independence-lite” – in effect, “new unions for old”, including a “social union” with “our friends in the South” – foundered.

But to portray the Salmond-Sturgeon affair as simply a psychodrama is to miss the deeper logic at work. Sturgeon is developing a distinctive nationalism of her own, while reshaping the political project Salmond spent decades developing.

Sturgeon appears to be fusing the old SNP trope of “Scotland in Europe” with the social justice agenda of the New Left. She has also successfully (if implicitly) put herself forward as “Mother of the nation” through her skilfully presented pandemic communication. Taken together, it’s a powerful cocktail.

But as the geopolitical situation I outlined asserts itself more visibly, public perceptions of security, the future of Europe, and the economy are likely to shift. At that point, Sturgeon’s vision may not look so plausible.