FOR an SNP member and independence supporter, living in Greater London as I do can be frustrating. But it also gives an interesting, semi-outsider perspective on Scotland and the independence campaign.
Over the past two years I’ve been a delegate at the SNP conferences in Aberdeen and Glasgow, campaigned in Edinburgh during the 2017 election and visited family in Scotland. Some of what I’ve seen disconcerts me, even more so after viewing Theresa May’s transparent desperation to get a trade deal at any cost from a US president interested only in his “America first” power base.
Two main things have struck me during my trips to Scotland. Firstly, the lack of appreciation of just how much the SNP government has protected Scots from Tory austerity policies. Secondly, the complacency of independence supporters who seem to believe that the direction of travel is all one way and that, eventually, No voters will come round to independence as they realise how much the Scottish Government is doing for them.
The two issues are linked, but let’s look at the first point. It’s easy to list the Scottish Government’s greatest hits: no tuition fees; NHS still in public hands; no prescription charges; Queensferry Crossing; Borders Railway; fracking ban; free personal care for pensioners; world’s first floating wind farm and so on and so on.
But people don’t actually notice it – if you live in Scotland, then all this either seems to be the normal state of affairs or doesn’t have any direct impact. Tuition fees were scrapped in 2008, prescription charges in 2011, free personal care has been around since 2002 and the NHS is essentially operating as it always has. These things have become normalised.
And while it’s nice to know that Scotland has the world’s first floating wind farm and that the Scottish Government has overseen a world-class project at Queensferry that came in on time and under budget, it doesn’t have a direct impact on the everyday lives of most Scots.
Likewise, the complacency of independence supporters. Yes has been around 45% in the polls since 2014, despite no actual campaigning going on and a disappointing 2017 election result. Add to this the visible shambles of Brexit, the resurgence of the grassroots Yes movement and a steady trickle of No-to-Yes narratives and a feeling of inevitability about the eventual success of the independence movement has also become normalised.
We’re used to hearing of the “metropolitan bubble”, but the overall effect here is the creation of a sort of “Scottish bubble”. I believe independence supporters need to step outside it and understand that what is currently seen as normal is under real threat. For example, while a fully public NHS and free personal care may be normal in Scotland, they are not in the rest of the UK. I live in an area where Keep Our NHS Public is a growing campaign.
We now have something concrete to run away from as well as a vision to head towards and we should be getting that message out there. The normality of public service provision in Scotland is an illusion – if the current UK Government gets its way, there will be considerable diminution of the Scottish Parliament’s powers, and a real danger of deterioration in Scottish public services, particularly if sold off to US-based multinationals.
Scots as a whole need to understand clearly what they could lose. The SNP’s “David Torrance” video and the Commons walk-out are welcome signs that the SNP leadership and the broader independence movement are beginning to take these threats seriously, to act more assertively and to look outside the Scottish bubble at what they have to do to fight back against Westminster.
This is an entirely separate issue from the more familiar discussions about converting soft No voters to Yes, but it is vitally important and I think that it’s time for it to get a lot more attention than it currently does.
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Callum Baird, Editor of The National
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