Scottish independence supporters should pay close attention to Tory tactics

IT should neither be a secret nor a surprise that the UK Government is actively trying to prevent Scottish independence. Their campaign never really stopped after 2014, even if ours did.

It certainly didn’t stop despite their protestations that people shouldn’t be discussing constitutional affairs during Brexit and a pandemic (the former being the creation of the UK Government and the latter greatly exacerbated by their failure to deal with it).

With news this week that they are ramping up their efforts to dissuade Scotland from leaving, we in the pro-independence campaign should take note of what we’re seeing and certainly should not dismiss those moves even if they appear to us to be awkward, ineffective or outright laughable. After all, first if we ignore them, then only laugh at them, we might forget to fight them, and then they’ll win.

READ MORE: Scottish independence: How the UK Government aims to stop a referendum

The broad thrust of the incoming pro-Union campaign was laid out by Ben Riley-Smith of The Telegraph. My warning to the pro-independence campaign – particularly those within the Scottish Government who will be the faces of that campaign in the media – is that we should be prepared to answer and counter each one of those campaigning tactics and we should be ready to do so before they are deployed.

The first and most obvious one is the delaying tactic of simply saying no to any further Section 30 order regardless of whether the upcoming election returns an SNP majority. This is within Johnson’s power – indeed, his own electoral mandate – to do and no amount of calling for him to “respect our mandate” will dissuade him. He gains power and votes from his own base by “talking tough to the Scotch(sic)”.

He will not agree to a sanctioned referendum until that changes, and needn’t accept the results of any other democratic event (an unsanctioned referendum, or electoral plebiscite for example) until that changes either. My recent paper for the Scottish Independence Convention, featured in The National yesterday and published today, outlines an important aspect of separation negotiations between Scotland and rUK but those negotiations rely entirely on rUK coming to the table to negotiate.

To counter this we don’t need a stronger mandate than he has, we need the prospect of Scottish independence to be less “painful” for him than to continue to say no to it. This means a comprehensive and multi-pronged pressure campaign of the kind outlined in my joint series with Ellen Hofer.

There will be specific “unanswerable” questions on things like currency, borders, pensions, EU membership etc. All of these questions have been answered in detail by various groups within the pro-independence movement, but we are still lacking a comprehensive White Paper published by the leadership of our movement which draws these answers together into an accessible and widely available format.

READ MORE: Scotland's Covid vaccine rollout seen as success by overwhelming majority

We also need to reverse this challenge and demand answers from the UK. Why has their obsession with borders destroyed our fishing sector? Why does the UK have such a high rate of pensioner poverty? How can we create a Green New Deal when the UK is busy fracking, building coal mines and slashing taxes for the airline industry?

The next point in The Telegraph article is that UK spending in Scotland will be increasingly branded as a “benefit of the Union”. The rolling over of devolution aside, even the Financial Times has called out Johnson’s Government for their pork-barrel, party favour-focused spending with the vast majority of newly announced Levelling Up funding going to Tory seats. Is loyalty to party and flag now the determinator of the Union’s beneficence?

Institutions like the Scottish National Investment Bank could easily be scaled up to meet investment demands in Scotland, but is currently being prevented from doing so by the UK Treasury refusing to allow it to borrow to that capacity. Similarly, the DWP and HMRC are refusing to allow Scotland to proceed with pilot studies of how a Universal Basic Income could help people in poverty and/or affected by the profound impacts of the pandemic and relative lack of support from the UK’s meagre “benefits” system - which the United Nations found in 2019 has caused the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population”. Will we demand that pro-Union campaigners defend this as a “benefit of the Union”?

Many of the tactics being deployed by the pro-Union campaign look like short-termist solutions designed more to get through the next round of opinion polling than as a long term strategy, but the same can easily be said for too many on our side. We must stop those fudged soundbites and instead start making concrete, deliverable promises. We must hold politicians on both sides of the debate accountable for those promises and focus on tangible results.

The most important aspect of our movement as we present it to folk outwith Scotland is that our independence campaign is founded on a basis of solidarity. Many of our complaints are felt throughout the UK but the message to them from the UK Government has often been that they should resent our devolution and calls for “more powers” when they get nothing. That, too, must be reversed. Why has the Union failed them even worse in some respects than it has Scotland? And why should Scotland stay and suffer together when we could leave, lead and show a better model of governance not in unity but in solidarity?

The self-delusion of innate British superiority cannot defend the injustices and inequalities of this Union. No amount of money spent in Scotland by the UK will buy off voters outwith Scotland suffering those injustices. Scotland can and must turn the tables on Westminster and make Scottish independence not an end in itself but a tool to help end those injustices wherever they occur.

Dr Craig Dalzell is the Head of Policy & Research at the “think and do” tank Common Weal