Repressed strategy questions haunt the SNP's leadership race

When I’m in pro-independence company, there’s a line I often use which goes down dependably badly with the crowd – “the 2014 independence campaign was a failure”.

This simple statement of fact prompts an almost visceral reaction from ­pro-independence audiences. You can see the body ­language growing defensive and the ­objections chasing themselves across people’s faces.

In fairness, there’s something to those ­silent protests. The 2014 campaign was ­characterised by important ­successes. While the abstract idea of Scottish ­independence has kicked around public life in the UK for decades, the referendum ­campaign planted it deep in the mainstream of public opinion for the first time.

Public attitudes to Scottish sovereignty at the beginning of the campaign and by the end were night and day. The process also contributed to a generational impact on the political attitudes of younger people which, if sustained, suggests the Union’s future is anything but secure.

The campaign also encouraged ­political participation on an unprecedented scale, ­often by people who were previously ­disenchanted with the emancipatory ­potential of politics. Social research has shown that independence campaigners’ word clouds about their recollections of the process are full of affirmative vocabulary: hope, excitement, change. (Unionists paint a much more negative picture).

But considering Scotland is not an ­independent country, considering the Yes campaign didn’t achieve its goals or win majority support, it’s deeply strange that this simple statement of political fact can arouse such antipathy from the losing side.

Sigmund Freud called it the “return of the repressed”. Bury them howsoever deep down, the uncongenial facts you’ve repressed will always creep back into your consciousness eventually. This is true of people, and it’s true of political parties too.

The political psychology of what ­happened to the SNP between ­September 2014 and the subsequent General Election of May 2015 always struck me as odd.

Considering Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership of the party rode this wave of public ­opinion, it’s worth reflecting on as she leaves office. Whoever wins out in the leadership race, her successor steps into a political climate where the ­repressed strategic questions have well and truly returned.

Cast your mind back to the morning of September 19 2014. Context: the SNP had tried – and just failed – to achieve their defining purpose.

At the very least, this represented a generational ­setback for the cause of independence. But it also raised challenging questions about how, when, and if the question would ever be ­revisited, as well as the prospect of a ­period of painful self-examination about what went wrong and who was ­responsible for this historic setback.

Undiscouraged by the UK’s near-death experience, some more blasé ­Unionists were not only content to bank the win, they rubbed their paws together and slapped their chops anticipating the ­collapse of an exhausted and ­disheartened SNP into infighting and recrimination, hastening the party’s eviction from Bute House and the restoration of what these children of the 1980s and ’90s still regard as the natural order of things – a return to Scottish Labour domination and the death of the national question as a subject of continuing relevance in British politics.

It didn’t work out that way.

The disappointment and grief of the party’s base transformed quickly – from chapfallen into broad smiles. While the support of 45% of the electorate wasn’t enough to carry a referendum, the SNP and their opponents rapidly had to reckon with the fact that it’s more than enough to run the political table in the winner-takes-all elections which still dominate British public life.

This momentum lifted the SNP off their knees, filling the void left by September 18 with a sense of immediately renewed political purpose, leaving Labour under their Better Together bunting to learn the lesson that even victors are by ­victories undone.

This breakneck reversal in the party’s fortunes didn’t just spare the SNP the ­anticipated acrimony and collapse – it ­indefinitely suspended the political ­autopsy of the 2014 campaign. With Alex Salmond’s immediate resignation and Sturgeon’s appointment as his ­successor, nobody had much appetite to explore the leadership’s strategic choices in the campaign and how a losing coalition could be turned into a winning one.

Why dwell on your grief and waste time on potentially damaging self-examination, when everything seems to be going so well? With the party and its new leader riding high in the polls, who wants to talk about the legal and political challenges of drawing the UK Government into a ­second referendum?

As an immediate re-run of the ­independence referendum was always ­implausible, these tensions didn’t matter at first. But the lack of self-examination left unresolved all those difficult ­questions of when – and more importantly, how – the independence question could be revisited after the defeat of 2014.

And in Holyrood, there was the ­urgent, ongoing business of government to ­contract and policies to implement. It’s been a long-standing tenet in SNP ­thinking that establishing and ­maintaining good government in Holyrood is an ­important factor in making independence not only imaginable but desirable – knowing the way, going the way, and showing the way. This approach also has its downsides – as the constitutional question gets looped into every screwup or scandal.

BUT the assertively repressed questions of 2014 were always coming back. It now suits Salmond to pretend that securing the first referendum was the fruit of his strategic nous. But more prosaically, he got lucky, finding in the Cameron-Clegg coalition a UK Government prepared to allow the first poll to go ahead, in great part because they reckoned they’d win handily.

If they’d dug in their heels, refused to recognise the democratic mandate, ­insisted that the constitution was a ­reserved matter, then the former FM would have found himself dealing with the same legal and political constraints Sturgeon has done her best to navigate through – and her eventual successor will find themselves tangling with.

What do you do when there is no ­legal route to a referendum, no sign of ­movement from the UK Government, and insufficient support in the country to break the stalemate?

The SNP have historically been ­uncomfortable discussing strategic ­issues like this candidly in public – in part ­because experience has taught them that looping the Scottish press into ­internal party debates about ­strategy only ­generates damaging headlines about ­division, in part because an honest ­reckoning of the current deadlock isn’t exactly a heart-grabber and vote-winner.

THIS political vacuum has been filled with a lot of unicorn chasing, leading some independence supporters to search for legal skeleton keys to unlock the Union, including imaginary international courts, unreported House of Commons debates, secret annexes to the Act of Union, or articles from the Claim of Right (sometimes the 1689 version, sometimes it’s 1989).

There’s nothing radical about demanding the impossible, nothing constructive about encouraging folk to chase after ­legal wisps. But in the absence of a candid discussion, this is how frustrations have often manifested.

It’s no secret that Sturgeon’s proposal to use the next general election as a “de facto” referendum prompted ­considerable doubts amongst a diverse range of ­people otherwise well-disposed towards her ­leadership. While the proposal had ­considerable mobilising potential, you don’t need a PhD in political cynicism to see how it could readily become a hostage to fortune.

If you were Alister Jack or Ian Murray, I reckon your script would go something like this: first, refuse to accept the idea of a de facto referendum, then wait for the SNP to achieve less than 50% popular support, then say “I hope you enjoyed your second referendum”.

Knocked back by the UK Supreme Court, stymied by continuing resistance by the UK Government, and above all – without translating these frustrations into a sustained and consistent majority for independence – the way forward demands strategic thinking.

As Nicola recognised in her thoughtful resignation speech, a change of ­leadership is an opportunity for a candid ­re-assessment, free from follow-my-leader ­deference, huckster’s promises of quick fixes and the doomed legal wheezes of barrack-room lawyers.