Sturgeon’s referendum ploy is desperate buffoonery

So, now we know: 19 October, 2023 is Freedom Day for Scots. That is the historic date set by Nicola Sturgeon for the referendum – the consultative referendum, on that she is most insistent – that will enable Scots to slough off the dead hand of the United Kingdom, emancipate themselves from the humiliation of having £2,057 more per head spent on them than on English people, and power ahead without being “held back” by the UK. Perhaps the occasion will even provide information for the nosier type of Scot regarding what currency would be in circulation post-independence.

O frabjous day! Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister and Matriarch of Scotland made the joyous announcement at Holyrood that, since the legality of an independence referendum held by the Scottish government without the permission of the UK government is “contested” (specifically, by the terms of the Scotland Act), she had asked the Lord Advocate to consider referring the matter to the Supreme Court, which the Lord Advocate had agreed to do. The “paperwork” was being delivered to the Supreme Court even as she spoke.

Such are the terms of the Scotland Act, it seems difficult to imagine the Supreme Court indulging Sturgeon; but we live in an era of judicial activism, so anything is possible. However, the First Minister, clearly resolved to keep her feet firmly on the ground, despite its being unfamiliar territory to her, did not hesitate to contemplate the possibility that the Supreme Court might say no. In that case, the SNP would fight the next general election on the single question of: “Should Scotland be an independent country?”

That hardly represents a dramatic change of plan by SNP strategists. Are we seriously meant to believe they would have preferred to fight the election on the shortage of leeches in Scotland’s basket-case healthcare system, or on education, after Scottish schools have tumbled 19 points down the OECD PISA league tables under SNP rule? Sturgeon’s government has failed more abysmally than any other administration in the developed world on all the vital policy areas that normally define good governance.

The SNP, despite being in power for a decade and a half, has never matured into a responsible government, competently addressing the issues that determine quality of life for the public. Ministers of varied competence, to put it charitably, rattle off statements prepared by civil servants at the despatch box, but there is no true governmental ethos within this administration. The elephant in the room, the looming distraction at all times, is the chimera of independence. It is student union politics, with all the airy indifference to fiscal realities that that milieu implies, fostering among the party’s supporters a football terracing, partisan chauvinism that trumps reality.

It was notable that Wee Krankie, in her historic declaration, repeatedly uttered the mantra “consultative referendum”, clutching it like a security blanket. This gave an insight into her intended strategy, in the unlikely event the Supreme Court might declare she had the authority to hold a legitimate referendum. By emphasising the term “consultative”, the First Minister would hope to reassure the more nervous sections of the electorate that nothing too drastic was occurring. So, she insisted that the referendum would be “consultative” and not “self-executing”.

By “self-executing” she presumably means a legislative referendum. At times she sounded as if she was proposing little more than a glorified opinion poll: “Firstly the purpose of the referendum as set out in section one is to ascertain the views of the people of Scotland on whether or not Scotland should be an independent country. In common with the 2014 referendum, indeed in common with the Brexit referendum and the referendum to establish this parliament, the independence referendum proposed in the Bill will be consultative, not self-executing.”

Yet the consultative Brexit referendum took us out of the EU. Still, Sturgeon tried to muddy the waters: “Just as in 2014 and recognised explicitly in the 2013 white paper, a majority yes vote in this referendum will not in and of itself make Scotland independent. For Scotland to become independent following a yes vote, legislation would have to be passed by the UK and Scottish parliaments.”

So what? Does anyone imagine that the SNP, if it got lucky once and secured a yes majority by half a dozen votes, would not be out the door at a great rate of knots? The things that Krankie comes out with boggle the minds of intelligent and informed people, as when she went on to claim that Scotland has “paid a price for not being independent” and that belonging to the United Kingdom is “holding us back from fulfilling our potential”.

Match that infantile “Here’s tae us, wha’s like us?” bluster against reality and the  extravagance of the SNP delusion becomes evident. Sturgeon chose to make the “holding us back” claim at a time when the Scottish deficit has reached 23.5 per cent of GDP. Independence would no longer even offer the dubious security of EU membership. It used to be a separatist axiom that Brexit would tip Scottish opinion in favour of independence. But circumstances are changing very fast, so that Brexit has become a double-edged sword for the SNP.

The eurozone economic crisis is worsening; the strain of having contrasting economies constrained within one currency is still a dangerous fault line within the EU and with countries such as war-devastated Ukraine, Moldova and, aspiringly, the West Balkan nations queuing up, Brussels apparatchiks must be asking themselves how many more basket-case economies they can afford to accommodate. Through no fault of its own, Ukraine, if admitted, would be a bigger burden on the EU than East Germany was to the reunited nation. These are not the conditions in which Brussels would think it ideal to admit Rockall’s poor neighbour.

Of course, prior to a putative referendum, Brussels would talk a good game, encouraging Scotland to precipitate the destruction of the United Kingdom; afterwards, the EU apparatchiks simply wouldn’t want to know.

A separate Scotland was always going to experience a sharp downturn in living standards; but in today’s alarming post-Covid, Ukraine war-devastated, inflation-stricken economic conditions, with the world heading for unknown depths of recession, the notion of detaching Scotland into exterior darkness – outside the UK, outside the EU, excluded from NATO (since it intends to subvert the Alliance by expelling its nuclear deterrent) – could only be entertained by people utterly indifferent to the well-being of Scots.

We know who those people are: separatist politicians for whom the trappings of power in a Third World sovereign state are more important than the health, wealth and life opportunities of their fellow countrymen. Fifteen years ago, that charge might have been dismissed as speculative and unjust; today, however, we have the empirical evidence of 15 years of SNP misrule to justify it: “Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.”

Nicola Sturgeon is implementing this legal farce to appease separatist fanatics by appearing to take some concrete step towards independence, on the assumption that the Supreme Court will save her bacon by interpreting the Scotland Act in its plain meaning: holding an independence referendum is a reserved power. She can hardly invoke any sense of emergency, considering it is less than a decade since such a referendum was held.

On the assumption of a negative verdict, she is already rehearsing the “We was robbed” rhetoric: “…what it will clarify is this: Any notion of the UK as a voluntary union of nations is a fiction, any suggestion that the UK is a partnership of equals is false”. As Sturgeon knows perfectly well, it would mean no such thing. It would mean simply that the Supreme Court, invited to interpret a section of the Scotland Act, had done so in its clear and obvious meaning.

The alternative, the Supreme Court giving a green light to her referendum, would deprive Nicola Sturgeon of her last ambition – retaining some kind of “legacy” in separatist mythology – since she would lose the vote. It was Sturgeon who once vowed not to trigger a referendum until Yes had consistently stood at 60 per cent in the opinion polls for a year. At present Yes is in a minority position in the polls.

Daily, the worsening global economic crisis makes Scottish independence more evidently an extravagant act of self-harm. Nicola Sturgeon and her party are a politician and a cause whose time has passed. Whatever verdict comes out of the Supreme Court, Scottish independence is a non-starter to any sane person.