The unanswered question of Scottish independence

Like most careful historians, Thomas M Devine avoids speculating about the future. “Not my period,” he says. But Devine is arguably the pre-eminent historian of Scotland, having produced around 30 books and scores of scholarly papers on his subject, so he is surely entitled to an educated prediction. Last year, during coverage of the coronation of King Charles III, he told a BBC interviewer that the new king will not have to endure his mother’s anxiety about Scotland. “The Scottish independence question is now dead for at least a generation.”

As an American with traces of Scottish blood and an interest in separatist movements (I covered the decomposition of the Soviet Union into 15 countries), I was curious to know whether the campaign for Scottish sovereignty was indeed moribund and, if so, why. After all, as Devine is quick to acknowledge, most polls suggest that popular support for independence has inched up in the 10 years since Scots voted, by a ratio of 55 to 45, to remain in the United Kingdom. The nation is split. Moreover, on the defining UK issue of this millennium (so far), Scottish voters overwhelmingly disapproved of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. Many Scots see Brexit as the kind of populist folly that independence advocates hope to escape.

The history of Scotland can be seen as a series of identity crises. It has been a medieval kingdom, a clerical autocracy and a constitutional democracy; a land of feast and catastrophic famine; a rural backwater and an industrial powerhouse. It has experienced periods of triumph, and periods of low self-esteem that some call “the Scottish cringe”. Renton’s cry in the film Trainspotting —“It’s SHITE being Scottish!”—marked the most recent nadir of morale, exacerbated by Margaret Thatcher’s evident scorn for any sign of Scottish self-assertion.

Scotland’s rebound from that particular low point was accompanied by a shower of scholarly adulation. Duncan A Bruce titled his celebratory 1996 book The Mark of the Scots: Their Astonishing Contributions to History, Science, Democracy, Literature and the Arts. A few years later Arthur Herman published his homage under the giddy title How the Scots Invented the Modern World: the True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It. Tom Devine’s rather more sober epic, The Scottish Nation: A Modern History, also established that Scotland’s contributions to western civilisation have been out of proportion to its size, might and wealth. That book was a popular success, briefly outselling the fourth in the Harry Potter series. National pride is back.

But the political path to independence has proved steep and obstructed. The Supreme Court has held that a referendum requires permission from Westminster, which is not forthcoming. The Labour government, like the Conservative one before it, firmly opposes another vote on the matter. And the party that champions independence as its raison d’être, the Scottish National Party, appears to have suffered a total meltdown—estranged from its Green allies, tangled in financial scandal, dogged by questions about its policies and its competence after 17 years governing Scotland, it lost 38 seats at Westminster compared with 2019. In May the party chose a new first minister, John Swinney, whose first cabinet shake-up abolished the minister for independence. Swinney assured reporters that he was no less committed to Scottish sovereignty, but the move could be read as a lack of resolve.

The remarkable thing about the marriage of Scotland and England is that it is still going. Other countries, including my own, long ago departed the British empire. Many European states have lived amicably after divorce, including Portugal from Habsburg Spain, Finland from tsarist Russia, Hungary from the Austrian empire and Norway from Sweden. Meanwhile Scotland and England have clung together for three centuries if you count from the creation of the United Kingdom in 1707, four if you start from the 1603 union of the crowns.

There have been strains in the relationship, to say the least, from the 14th century wars of independence to the 2014 referendum. Today’s nationalists don’t seem to have been mollified by devolution of some powers to a Scottish parliament, which marked its 25th anniversary in May. In the Scotland Act of 1998, which created the Holyrood parliament, Westminster kept control of, among other things, fiscal, monetary and economic policy; defence; international trade; immigration; broadcasting; energy resources (including North Sea oil); and constitutional issues (first and foremost the question of independence).

Enacting independence would entail unravelling centuries of entanglement: negotiating the division of shared resources such as oil and wind turbines, the fate of the 10,000 active British military personnel based in Scotland, the role (if any) of the royal family, the choice of a currency, the terms of trade and the enforcement of borders. Once free, Scotland would need to renegotiate its standing in the world, including its relationship with Nato and the EU. Would the EU welcome an independent Scotland? Probably, assuming Scotland’s departure from the UK was recognised as legal, so as not to stir up separatist camps in Spain’s Catalonia and France’s Corsica. (Might some Europeans welcome Scotland aboard as payback for the insult of Brexit?) Scotland’s future should be decided by Scots, but they should know what they’re getting into.

Freedom for Palestine!

Freedom for Scotland!

Freedom for everyone!

The quarter-mile-long congregation arrived in George Square to a hostile reception from a few score unionists bearing Union Jacks and blowing whistles in an unsuccessful attempt to drown out the separatist speeches. The rally concluded with a rousing salute by Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s first minister and leader of the Scottish National Party, promising “a fairer, greener, more prosperous and more equal Scotland”. A few days later Yousaf would resign, a casualty of the SNP’s inner turmoil.

The SNP’s troubles have not, so far, appreciably diminished Scottish support for independence, which has hovered around 50 per cent in recent years.

One intriguing quirk in the politics of independence is the role of the youngest voters. The voting age was lowered to 16 for the referendum (and for all Scottish parliamentary and local elections since), and a majority of teenagers told pollsters in 2014 that they favoured Scotland remaining in the UK. Unionists seized on this as a nice surprise for their side. But researchers who interviewed a large sample of teenage voters discovered their No votes were driven by concern that a separate Scotland would lose its membership of the EU. In other words, their No votes were actually meant to preserve both unions—the union with the United Kingdom and the union with the rest of Europe. The researchers concluded that “young Scots have a more international outlook than their elders”. Ten years later, in the aftermath of Brexit, those youngest voters are the most ardently pro-independence.

You could say that Scotland’s greatest export is Scots

In their international outlook, young Scots follow a long tradition. Great Britain ruled an empire, so goes the aphorism, but Scots ran it. Scots were the army field officers, the plantation owners, the colonial administrators, the merchants and settlers. You could say that Scotland’s greatest export is Scots. Among the records of my own family’s Scottish scatterlings I’ve found Presbyterian missionaries in Egypt, Mormons in Salt Lake City (at least one of them a polygamist), abolitionists who helped runaway slaves in Ohio, and a manufacturer of automobile horns, along with prospectors, bankers, farmers and railroad workers.

Lindsay Paterson, emeritus professor of education policy at Edinburgh university, observes that the demography makes the Scottish question quite different from other nationalist movements, which tend to attract older people with less education and more conservative views. Scottish nationalists are disproportionately young and products of Scotland’s free university system. “Therefore, the trajectory of Scottish nationalism over the coming decade is not at all clear, despite the current travails of the SNP,” Paterson wrote in a blog post.

If the new Labour administration governs well, then it might persuade young liberals that radical reform is possible without secession. “But at least equally likely is the opposite,” Paterson notes. “Disillusion with a cautiously reformist Starmer government might entrench Scottish liberal opinion in its increasing scepticism of the UK state. The greatest threat to the Union might be yet to come.”

Dumfriesshire politicians tend to portray the nationalists, often with a hint of condescension, as sentimental, or tribal. “It’s obviously from the heart, not the head,” Alister Jack, the former Tory MP for Dumfries and Galloway and secretary of state for Scotland from 2019 to 2024, tells me in an interview. “We shouldn’t be complacent about it, but to me it’s not a factor anymore.”

Peter Landale, who farms livestock on the 5,000-acre Dalswinton Estate, likens Scottish nationalism to Donald Trump’s Maga mission, or Boris Johnson’s “Take Back Control” Brexit slogan—campaigns devised to create a veneer of unified purpose in a world atomised by social media. “Instead of tackling the problems of the day, which could be health, which could be education, which could be whatever, you end up with this rather trite ‘Let’s make America great again’, or ‘Let’s make Scotland independent’,” Landale tells me. He voted against independence and against leaving the EU and describes himself as “at heart” a federalist, favouring a UK that is intact but more decentralised.

To be sure, identity is one of the factors motivating the separatist movement. Census data released in May showed that 65 per cent of Scots regard themselves as only Scottish, a slight increase on 2011. The number identifying as only British has increased too, to almost 14 per cent. But those who identified as Scottish and British dropped from 18 per cent to just 8 per cent.

Tribal loyalty is hardly the only driver. Nationalists are animated by a sense that they are being short-changed, that the profits of their farms, oil rigs, fishing boats and distilleries are being siphoned off by London. It is an article of faith in the independence camp that the annual block grant Westminster sends to Holyrood falls far short of what Scotland needs—and deserves—to shorten the queues in the National Health Service, repair neglected infrastructure and build more housing. Unionists point out that public spending per head in Scotland is greater than the UK average, and blame the SNP government’s financial management for any shortcomings.

Beyond grievance, for many nationalists independence is about ideology—fashioning a more progressive Scotland. Lesley Riddoch, a former BBC presenter now devoted to the cause of independence, has produced a series of films making the case that Scotland belongs with its Scandinavian neighbours across the North Sea. Her latest film, Denmark: The State of Happiness, portrays that country as a green, egalitarian welfare state that suits Scotland’s values.

“Scots have been voting social democrat—for want of a broader term—for most of a century,” Riddoch says. Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde university and a leading scholar of Scottish politics, says that by the common measures of liberalism (support for progressive taxation, funding of public services such as healthcare and education, a more welcoming attitude toward migrants, equality and inclusion) Scots are more progressive than the English, though not as far left as the Danes. “Scotland is not as Scandinavian as the SNP would like,” he says, “but it is still a bit more egalitarian than England.”

MacIntyre-Kemp envisions a route to independence that frames the next Holyrood elections in 2026 as a “de facto referendum”. He hopes that if candidates declaring support for sovereignty win a majority, the Scottish government would launch formal negotiations with Westminster on the terms of separation. Westminster, confronted with a popular mandate, would have no choice. Swinney echoes this optimism. Asked by Sky News whether Scots could expect independence “within five years”, Swinney replied, “I think independence can be delivered in that timescale, because the arguments for it are compelling.”

So far Westminster seems unimpressed, and Holyrood has shown little appetite for outright defiance. “We are quite a tediously law-abiding bunch,” Riddoch tells me.

But as the Scottish journalist Neal Ascherson argued recently in the Observer, “independence usually falls out of the sky”, precipitated by an external crisis or a game-changing force. “The SNP leaders still believe that the Scottish public wants them to play by the rules,”Ascherson wrote. “So they will keep on demanding London’s permission for another referendum, while any foreseeable British government will keep on refusing that permission. So stalemate… unless a far more impatient and radical nationalist formation emerges, pushing the SNP aside as Sinn Féin pushed the old Irish Home Rulers aside in 1918.”

Short of a new Robert the Bruce emerging to resume the wars of independence, the near-term fate of the union rests to a large extent on Labour, according to John Curtice.

The future of Scotland depends on Labour’s ability not just to win a general election but to “win the peace”, he says—governing in a way that makes a convincing case that Westminster and Holyrood are “better together”. If Labour masters the economy, turns around the troubled NHS in England and Wales and generally restores a sense of competence, it might persuade at least middle-aged voters in Scotland of the merits of union. “You tell me how we solve the crises the UK currently faces, and I’ll tell you what are the prospects for Scottish independence,” says Curtice. “It might take a generation, but in another generation—unless unionists have actually shifted public attitudes in their direction—the union will be a minority enterprise.”