Why 2023 brought the end of Nicola Sturgeon's political consensus

The then first minister gave a lecture at the Brookings Institution – describing Nato membership as the “cornerstone” of an independent Scotland – and was greeted in Washington DC by Nancy Pelosi.

The US Speaker heaped praise on Sturgeon as the two appeared for a photocall in the Capitol Building.

A reward for Sturgeon’s warm embrace of Atlanticism, this welcome represented the peak of Scottish politics on the big stage. That was then and this is now.

In November, Humza Yousaf cut a dejected figure in Dubai during COP28. Reduced to celebrity hunting in the corridors of power, it felt like a lifetime ago that Scotland’s first minister had enjoyed Washington’s hospitality.

Yousaf discarded principle as he clumsily sought the relevance his predecessor had once enjoyed. Having admirably led calls for a humanitarian ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, Yousaf snatched a photo opportunity with Ursula von der Leyen, whose European Commission had attempted to cut all aid to Palestine as Israel began its genocidal war.

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There was also a handshake photograph with Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in spite of his unrelenting assault on the Kurdish people. Such behaviour is but one example of how Scottish politics shrunk in 2023.

The decade that followed the 2014 independence referendum saw the blurring of the lines between the Scottish Government and the ruling party. The SNP’s dominance was so assured that it was not always clear where one stopped and the other began.

Their fusion into the architecture of the “Scottish state” had consequences for politics in Scotland more generally.

Any political ambition the Scottish Government possessed evaporated with power secured. Where the SNP had once looked to an insurgent independence movement for motivation, they now fell into malaise, reliant instead on the trappings of government.

The politics of reports, consultations and working groups substituted for delivery. Depoliticisation spread throughout Holyrood as the Scottish Parliament was de-fanged by dreary managerialism.

The prospect of class confrontation was neutralised by Sturgeon’s appeals to a unified, singular national interest and the occasional minor adjustment to the status quo. Catering to all interests but siding with no-one, Sturgeon rose above the fray and set her own path – one which took her as far as the Capitol Building.

Combine this with the SNP’s promise that independence for Scotland always lay just over the hill and, for much of the last 10 years, Scottish politics looked like something it was not.

This settlement quickly began to unravel when its architect resigned from frontline politics in March. The structurally determined challenges that the Sturgeon project staved off have returned to haunt Yousaf.

The passivity which civic nationalism brought to Scottish politics could never be permanent. There was only so long that the mirage of a second referendum could disguise failing infrastructure projects, falling wages and collapsing services.

As this reality dawns and the SNP fumble for some semblance of a strategy for independence, the debate that has dominated for so long has gone quiet.

That’s why at the end of 2023 Scottish politics felt smaller and our political discourse seemed more parochial. Take climate change, for example.

Much ink was spilled last year on debates surrounding the botched Deposit Return Scheme. Meanwhile, Lorna Slater quietly signed Scotland’s largest-ever PFI deal for nature restoration, privatising a key component of the just transition.

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Such an example reveals the insular face of Scottish politics that Sturgeon sought to disguise by her efforts to play stateswoman – councils starved of funding barely capable of providing their statutory services; a defeated Parliament that struggles to pass legislation; and the total absence of an industrial strategy.

This year marks a quarter of a century since the Scottish Parliament was re-instituted. George Robertson’s 1995 remark that the advent of “devolution will kill nationalism stone dead” has been deservedly derided for years.

As we begin 2024, however, Holyrood poses less of a threat to the politics of the British state than at any point in its history.

Two of the Scottish Government’s December endeavours reaffirm this analysis. The first was the appointment of Michael Russell, the former president of the SNP, as chair of the Scottish Land Commission.

Land reform is one of the most urgent tasks for the Scottish Government, with swathes of our landscape concentrated in the hands of a wealthy few. This job will now fall to the man who wrote Grasping the Thistle, a how-to manual for Scotland’s privatisation. Harking back to Sturgeon’s integration of state and party, there are few greater indications of the Scottish Government’s reluctance to actually do anything.

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Appointing someone from outside their tent would risk a confrontation that might force the Scottish Government to abandon its resolute commitment to class neutrality, which benefits only the wealthy.

Shona Robison’s draft Budget represented similar sympathy for the prevailing economic consensus. Hamstrung by its own cowardice, the Scottish Government announced swingeing cuts to public services while claiming to be shielding Scots from the worst of Westminster’s austerity.

However, Holyrood is not doomed to manage decline. The challenge of the forthcoming year is to expose the Scottish Government’s efforts to preserve Sturgeon’s crumbling consensus that has served Scotland’s political class so well but its people so poorly.

This will hinge on resisting the alienating and narrow debates that have come to fill the space vacated by the SNP’s unattainable promises, but which serve the same purpose – the maintenance of the status quo.

Failure to do so will see politics return to its bubble and what’s left of the mass politics that dominated the popular movements of 2014 confined to history.