This is Part One of a two-parter. Part Two will be later today, with luck.)
The independence question, on the back-burner while the unionists thought Labour was going to win on May 5th, rapidly returned to their agenda when the polls started to move in favour of the SNP, and reached a hysterical crescendo when the Scottish opposition leaders were trying to claw back the initiative in the last two weeks of the campaign, reducing Tavish Scott’s campaign to a broken record reiteration of the horrors of independence if Alex Salmond was re-elected.
The Scottish electorate were either entirely unmoved by these scare tactics or actually moved towards voting SNP by them.
The ensuing landslide victory left the unionist opposition in Scotland stunned, demoralised and swiftly thereafter, leaderless. Their independence bogeyman had failed to frighten the voters and had been revealed as a rather tattered, turnip-headed scarecrow, clad in intellectual rags.
But further south, the Westminster politicians, grubbing furiously in the Union trough, snorting, squealing and squabbling among themselves, suddenly stopped, as though a great bell had sounded. They looked up, looked north and realised that something of enormous significance to them had occurred, and that they were threatened. The pale dancing spectre of an independent Scotland had in a moment become a terrifying threat to their status, power and privilege.
And in that moment, independence moved to the centre of the stage of British politics.
Baron Forsyth of Drumlean, the Cassandra of the North, ran about in all directions, kilt flapping, screaming to the four winds “I told you so - I told you! Why didn’t you listen.” Great metropolitan media beasts shook off the trivial minutiae of the Westminster Village and recognised the smell of a real political story for once, salivating, their nostrils flaring.
And the proprietors of at least one Scottish newspaper became aware that the party they had belatedly and expediently backed, the SNP, had won more decisively than they had ever expected it to, in a devolved Parliamentary system designed to neuter them, but which had inexplicably failed to deliver the unionist goods.
A referendum on Scotland’s independence, instead of being something to campaign against, was now inevitable. The NO campaign started in that moment, initially incoherent and reactive, inchoate, but rapidly coalescing into a recognisable narrative, centring around a demand that the referendum be called now, rather than mid-term, and a focus on the exact nature and form of independence. The Scotsman strained and grunted and gave birth to Independence Lite, a feeble infant, immediately claiming Alex Salmond as the father, but nodding and winking knowingly in the direction of a minor SNP figure, lasted elected in 1992, Jim Sillars.
So the NO campaign has started, even though the referendum will not be held by the SNP Government until mid-term, unless the senior unionist politicians, currently contradicting each other daily on the question, get their act together and force an early referendum.
The SNP and Alex Salmond have only two real options in face of this - ignore the furore, and continue with the serious business of getting more powers from Westminster to stabilise and energise the economy and put more people in work, or recognise that the great game has already started, and start the YES campaign.
There is an old negotiating maxim that negotiations start when the announcement that there will be a negotiation is made, not at the date in the future when the parties sit down to talk. Negotiations start the moment you know you must negotiate, and for the referendum, that moment is now.
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
The tide to be taken is not the referendum date, but the referendum debate. Two years is not too long for a great debate that will determine the future of Scotland and the Union. I’m with Gordon Wilson - The YES campaign must start now.
Agreed.
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