IF the past six years have taught us anything, it is that arguing against Scottish independence is a lot harder than its opponents think it ought to be. Defenders of the Anglo-Scottish Union often start from the position that Scottish nationalism is a simplistic ideology, a dream through which a large proportion of the Scottish electorate is inexplicably slumbering and from which they will shortly awaken if the shouting gets loud enough.

But as my book, The Case for Scottish Independence, shows, the appeal of contemporary Scottish nationalism should be taken more seriously, as the product of a much deeper debate about democratic self-determination hammered out over the last fifty years by a generation of intellectuals, politicians and activists.

An abiding weakness in much Unionist discourse is its lack of emotional intelligence in understanding why these ideals have become persuasive to many Scots in recent years.

Boris Johnson’s government is about to embark on a fresh offensive on behalf of the Union but a closer inspection of the details suggests that the Conservatives have still not grasped the nature of the challenge. The Conservative strategy is twofold: to refuse under any circumstances a second independence referendum, irrespective of the results of the Holyrood elections in 2021, and to rebuild a stronger sense of British identity by asserting a more powerful role for the UK state in Scotland.

For some years now, there have been growing murmurings of discontent from Conservatives that the New Labour and then Cameron governments had introduced a culture of ‘devolve and forget’ in Whitehall, disconnecting UK policy-making from Scotland and Wales to an inappropriate degree.

A new Cabinet Union Policy Implementation Committee chaired by Michael Gove, and including Rishi Sunak, aims to correct this. Plans to reinsert the British government into Scottish and Welsh public life were proposed in a significant 2019 report by the influential centre-right think tank Policy Exchange, Modernising the United Kingdom. Policy Exchange’s major suggestions were that the British government should fund more high-profile infrastructure projects across the whole of the UK, even if they formally fall within devolved policy areas, and that a greater effort should be made to foster British identity through shared public holidays and cultural activities.

Gove and his colleagues have apparently been perusing this blueprint, but it is difficult to know how seriously to take this strand of Conservative thinking. It would not be surprising if bullish media briefings do not in the end amount to much in terms of substantive policy.

READ MORE: Review: The Case For Scottish Independence: A History of Nationalist Political Thought

However, there are clear political as well as ideological incentives for the Conservatives to adopt a more confrontational stance towards the Scottish Government and the independence movement. A Conservative Party that is very publicly opposed to Scottish nationalism is well-positioned to enter the 2024 general election against a Labour Party that may have to rely on the votes of SNP MPs to take office.

Only this week, in a calculated display of muscular Unionism, the UK Government set out substantial changes to the regulation of the UK’s internal market without consulting the devolved governments.

It is unlikely that an abrasive relationship between Holyrood and Westminster will arrest the electoral progress of Scottish nationalism. If anything, it seems set to do the reverse and fuel support for independence. The chief shortcoming of this new unionism is that it does not actually provide an answer to the principal arguments in favour of a new Scottish state. While it may work in the short to medium term to protect the electoral prospects of the Conservative Party in England, it does nothing to address the reason that more Scots now support independence.

LIKE other major political movements, Scottish nationalism has ideologically been a house of many mansions, featuring dry economic technocrats as well as card-carrying members of the literati. But since the 1970s leading nationalist thinkers and politicians have built a case for independence that is primarily political rather than cultural in character.

Figures such as Neal Ascherson, Isobel Lindsay, Neil MacCormick, Stephen Maxwell, Tom Nairn, Alex Salmond and Jim Sillars made the case that Scottish history and culture, while essential for defining a distinct Scottish national identity, are not enough in themselves to motivate a broad-based popular campaign for a separate Scottish state. Instead, they drew on left-wing ideas about democracy and equality to argue for the independence cause.

Initially inspired by 1960s radical ideas about a more decentralised and participatory democracy, these architects of modern Scottish nationalism rejected the British state as an imperial relic that had failed to modernise and, crucially, saw the Labour Party as inescapably complicit in the dominant right-wing politics of Britain. As deindustrialisation accelerated under Margaret Thatcher, a more traditional social democratic layer of argument also emerged, presenting independence as the route to the recovery of an egalitarian welfare state. A new international dimension became central to nationalist thought in the 1990s, as major figures in the movement perceived that European integration offered opportunities for small states to benefit economically from the single market while enjoying an equality of political status with larger members of the EU.

From the confluence of these different ideological currents, a clear set of political arguments for Scottish independence emerged. Foremost among them was the democratic case that independence would guarantee that the government of Scotland would be elected solely by the Scottish electorate and would therefore reflect more directly Scottish interests and policy preferences. A second argument, related to the first, was that an independent Scotland would no longer be hindered from pursuing a broadly left-wing social and economic policy by the preponderance of Conservative voters in England.

The Thatcher years were fertile ground for discontent with Scotland’s governance since it became increasingly clear that the rightward trend of British public policy did not command the democratic consent of the Scottish electorate.

But to the chagrin of the SNP it was the Scottish Labour Party that was the principal electoral beneficiary of Thatcherism. In a shrewd piece of political positioning, Labour used essentially the same arguments as the SNP to argue for devolution.

While devolution went some way towards addressing the nationalist critique of Britain, another long period of Conservative government has revived the legitimacy problem faced by the British state before the introduction of the Scottish Parliament – since the Tories have lost each of the four general elections since 2010 in Scotland. Worries about legitimacy have of course been further compounded by Britain’s exit from the EU despite Scotland’s vote to remain. The emergent strategy of the Conservatives – essentially to increase the visibility of a UK Government that lacks democratic consent in Scotland – simply does not address this core democratic argument for independence and is poorly targeted as an effort to rebut Scottish nationalism.

A more intellectually curious Unionism might do better to focus on the ideological tensions within Scottish nationalism itself, since there are evident divisions within the SNP and the wider national movement that must be resolved before a second independence referendum. The list is a formidable one: an independent Scotland’s currency, whether/how to rejoin the EU, how to build a generous Scottish welfare state on a Scottish tax base … yet underlying the specifics of these issues is a more general philosophical debate.

One long-standing distinction within the SNP in the years before devolution was between ‘gradualists’, who saw devolution as a necessary staging post before independence, and ‘fundamentalists’, who argued that independence could be achieved without this intermediate stage. Gradualists thought that the struggle for Scottish self-rule should be conceptualised as an open-ended process, whereby ever greater powers could accrue to a Scottish Parliament as Scottish public opinion demanded it, with the ultimate goal of independence representing a distant objective that would be reached (if desired by the voters) across a long-time horizon. In this sense, gradualism became the dominant force within Scottish nationalism even after the Scottish Parliament was established in 1999. The major ideological victory of the gradualist wing of the SNP was a growing acceptance before 2014 that ‘independence’ would require a pluralistic sharing of sovereignty between Edinburgh, Brussels and even London, with for example certain macroeconomic powers resting with the Bank of England. Nationalists assumed the guise of hard-headed advocates of a redistribution of powers between these three decision-making centres rather than proponents of a more traditional Scottish nation-state.

The overall political strategy adopted by leading Scottish nationalists after the 1990s was in fact to downplay how radical a break independence would be from the economic and social status quo under the Union.

To win over a cautious Scottish public opinion, the policy stakes were gently lowered so that independence became a gradual process that would continue and deepen Scotland’s place in the international economic order. While successful in building support for the SNP electorally, the whole tenor of this nationalist argument was averse to a once-and-for-all transformational moment in which Scotland would suddenly return as a sovereign state.

YET historical circumstances unexpectedly presented the SNP with the opportunity to run an independence referendum after the party’s sweeping victory in the 2011 Scottish Parliament election. Nationalist leaders found that the rhetoric and the popular mobilisation of the referendum overran the cautious positions they had staked out (perhaps even in terms of their own personal convictions about whether independence was more plausibly regarded as a process or an event). The 2014 referendum created a nationalist movement that was deeply committed to the symbolism of a popular vote for independence and saw the transition to Scottish statehood as a decisive rupture from the British model of politics and economics.

Can this more muscular nationalist support base be reconciled with the cautious and gradualist outlook of the SNP leadership? As an organisation the SNP has historically not been very hospitable to ideological debate – it is striking how many of the innovative thinkers about Scottish nationalism mentioned earlier have had a semi-detached or even at times antagonistic relationship to the party.

Yet a more open discussion among Scottish nationalists about independence – its possible forms, its limits, its potential – is an important task if the case for a Scottish state is to be refreshed to face the new political landscape that has been revealed in the wake of the financial crash, Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic. Movements that cannot articulate the goals of their leaders with those of their activists and supporters usually find that victory brings disillusionment rather than gratitude.