"MAKING a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg. It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else.” That was president Lyndon Johnson’s putdown of John Kenneth Galbraith’s suggestion that he needed to talk more about what was happening in the American economy.

In just three weeks, our new Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer have managed to get everyone talking about the economy. Before scurrying off to prepare for their party conference – and no doubt speeches about the economy which will be scrutinised widely and deeply – they amply demonstrated their intention to be radical.

Kwarteng’s fiscal announcement last Friday was economic vandalism, unprecedented in most people’s lifetimes.

There have been some references to Anthony Barber’s “dash for growth” in 1972. At the time, that was seen as risky but initially successful. In part, that was because the UK economy was subject to much more control by government.

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In the 1970s, the chancellor was effectively able to set interest rates. Keeping them low while “pump priming” the economy, Barber oversaw a burst of economic growth, which subsided into inflation, forcing up interest rates. The 1973 oil crisis added substantially to those problems. The failure of that political experiment led directly to the rise of Thatcherism.

It is too soon to know just how much damage Kwarteng – already known on Twitter as #KamiKwasi – will do before the Prime Minister decides she needs to change policy and ditch him. But he is now seen as an untrustworthy steward of the economy and cannot have long to repair the reputational damage he has already caused.

One outcome of this crisis should be a political reconfiguration of these islands. For this very unconservative government, that means greater centralisation and the weakening of the devolved institutions. For Sinn Fein, it means a border poll and an Ireland of 32 counties. For the Labour Party, still listening to Gordon Brown, reform should involve “near federalism” and, just possibly, the introduction of proportional representation.

For Scotland, it could well involve a democratic process which leads to independence.

The hashtag #YouYesYet suggests that it is entirely natural for people to support independence and that once persuaded of the case, they will not change their minds about it. Among the readers of this fine newspaper, that may well be the case. Across the wider electorate, who rarely think about politics, such beliefs are likely to be vague and fluid.

At the start of the pandemic, we saw a burst in support for Scottish independence in opinion polling, which has since reversed, suggesting that something like half-a-million people might have changed their voting intentions twice in 18 months.

OPINION polling on a hypothetical question tells us very little. People are responding quickly to a question to which they might have given hardly any thought. During the pandemic, it was easy to look at the First Minister and feel she was much more competent and reassuring than the bumbling liar then in Downing Street.

There is much more solidity to the research, directed by John Curtice, for the National Centre for Social Research. His team’s recent findings on the attitudes towards the constitution across the UK made The National’s front page last week, trumpeting the statistic that 52% of a Scottish sample of around 1000 voters chose independence over devolution and “no Scottish Parliament”. That question has been part of the British Social Attitudes survey in almost every year since 1999. On the 20 occasions in which it was put, only in 2019 and 2021 did a majority of respondents favour independence. In 2014, when 45% of votes in the referendum were cast for independence, 33% of the BSA sample’s respondents chose the independence option, while 50% chose devolution.

This does not demonstrate that the survey is badly designed. The question on the ballot paper in 2014 was very different – “Should Scotland be an independent country?” That makes it easy to reconcile the referendum and the survey results.

All that it requires is for a large fraction of the BSA sample to take the “devolution” option as meaning some form of “devo-max”, so that, faced with a binary choice between Scotland as an independent country or Scotland under the devolution settlement – whether agreed or vowed – independence would be preferable to actual devolution.

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Since 2012, the BSA has never reported a statistically significant decrease in the proportion of the population whose preference is Scottish independence. We cannot yet tell whether there is a substantial proportion of the devolution supporters who might be willing to vote for independence in a referendum – this research deliberately does not ask voting intention questions, although there is the interesting statistic that about 40% of Labour- identifying participants favour independence. Only Conservatives are firmly Unionists.

This research suggests that Brexit has driven the change in Scottish constitutional preferences, with large jumps in the share of respondents choosing independence in 2016, around the time of the EU referendum, and in 2019 when it had become clear that Brexit is the English word for bourach.

This captures the changing political identity of people in Scotland and the increasingly widely held belief that Scotland is a northern European country.

Put that offer to voters at the next referendum and it should be easy to build a coalition which wins Scotland her independence.