Burnham hasn’t changed the game, but he has taken to the field
Andy Burnham appears to have set a new and achievable target for Scotland to win independence but in reality the goal remains the same: convince the people of Scotland.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham took a significant step into the independence debate this week when, at PMQS, he was questioned by SNP MP Chris Law on the disparity between the constitutional mechanism for Northern Ireland formally seceding from the UK (contained within the Good Friday Agreement) and for Scotland to do the same (there isn’t one). Burnham replied that the mechanism for Scotland was “exactly the same” as for Northern Ireland.
That is, when it “seems likely” to the Secretary of State for Scotland (currently Douglas Alexander) that public opinion is such that a referendum would return a result in favour of Scottish independence, then such a referendum should be arranged.
There are a whole bunch of caveats to this constitutional clause. It is still, by far, nowhere near the democratic right to self-initiated, self-governance (c.f. Article 4 of the Constitution of Liechtenstein which allows any of the municipal councils to self-organise a secession referendum at a time of their own choosing). The clause that an independence referendum could only happen if it “seems likely” to succeed is subject to the Secretary of State not being stubbornly and wilfully blind to rising sentiment on the ground.
It has certainly been the case over the last decade of constitutional squabbling that the UK Government and successive Scottish Secretaries have been quite happy to tangle a target that they thought was unreachable only to yank it away when they realised that it might be. Is “once in a generation” the “not less than seven years” contained within the GFA? Or is it 25 years? Or is it not until every single person who voted in 2014 is dead and buried? UK Government has floated all of these positions at some point or another.
The Scottish Government is, with merit, now trying to bed the principle that Scotland should have the same constitutional right as Northern Ireland into law to make it harder for Burnham or his successor to backslide later.
It is certainly the case however that while Burnham has set a firm and reachable target now, the actual position of the goalpost hasn’t materially changed. The process of becoming independent was never path dependent on a constitutional arrangement and this remains true. The core argument should never have been “How do we get a new independence referendum?” or even “How do we bypass the need for a referendum with this One Weird Trick Lawyers Don’t Want You To Know?”.
It was always “How do we convince a majority of the Scottish population to support independence such that the pressure of their collective voice could not be ignored?”
It we win that consensus, the route to bringing Westminster to the negotiating table to agree and sign the required documents was always going to be a relative formality.
So how do we answer that important question? The key is to understand the demographics of independence. When support for independence rises, it’s not picking people up at random. It’s better to think of the kind of person who would be the next person to change their mind when support rises from X% to X%+1.
We can split Scotland into four groups of people. The “Convinced Nationalists” are those for whom independence is a core part of their identity and will likely always vote for it given the chance. It’s likely that you are one of them. The “Convinced Unionists” are the opposite – with an identity linked to the Union as a concept as strong as a Nationalist’s desire to break away. They will never vote for independence – though they may accept it as the will of the people afterwards in the same way as anti-devolutionists did after 1997. These two groups make up something between half and two-thirds of the population. Neither of these two groups are the target audience right now. Their votes won’t change.
Instead, think of the two groups in the middle – Converted Supporters who were the kind of people who began to support independence during the 2014 campaign as sentiment rose from its pre-2011 baseline of about 25% (the Convinced Nationalists) to 45% on the day. I’m part of that group. Most of this group are now pretty solid in their views. It’s a lot harder to get someone to change their worldview twice than it is to change once. I had to be convinced to support independence. Convincing me not to now would be a challenge. This is the primary reason that, contrary to some expectations, independence support did not fall back to the Nationalist baseline after 2014.
This means that the really important group are the people who sit in that realm of independence support rising from about 50% up to the Unionist ceiling somewhere near 70 or 75% and we really only need to win over about half of them.
“If an independence referendum happened this afternoon and returned a 60% Yes, are we, as a movement, prepared for that?”
When you examine the social attitudes of the Convinced Nationalists and the Convinced Unionists, they tend to be (though aren’t exclusively) quite different from each other. Support for independence is wrapped up in a lot of other fairly ideological policies such as being pro-Europe (if not always pro-EU), anti-monarchy, anti-imperialist, anti-nuclear, pro-immigration, Left-of-Centre and quite a few other topics whereas Convinced Unionists are much more likely to be opposed to many or all of these things (again, not exclusively – your individual experience may vary and there plenty of people in the Left of Scottish politics who agree with each other on almost everything except independence even if that one small difference prevents collaboration on everything else).
It’s not the Nationalists who are the isolated group though. The groups in the middle – even the Not-Yet Supporters – tend to be a bit closer in view to the Nationalists and especially to the Converteds than they are to the Unionists. In other words, the type of person who’d vote Yes at 60% is more “winnable” than the type of person who’d vote No at 40%.
We’ve talked about this phenomenon before. That the people we just barely failed to convince in 2014 weren’t ideologically against us. They actually agreed with the kind of Scotland they thought we were presenting. The problem wasn’t the vision, but the execution. They didn’t believe we’d fulfil our promises. And, frankly, who could blame them?
This is the main issue we’ve squandered over the past decade. We’ve been arguing process instead of policy. We’ve been hoping for “One Weird Trick” like a previously unknown legal route to indy or a Unionist politician standing up and say “Ah, go on then”. We haven’t really been preparing for what to do if that happened.
Seriously ask that question now. If an independence referendum happened this afternoon and returned a 60% Yes, what would be the next step? Are we, as a movement, prepared for that?
Not only do we need to be prepared, the act of the preparation is the thing that will convince the people who would bring support from 50% up to 60%. The act of preparation is the thing that will apply the pressure on Andy Burnham and Douglas Alexander that is needed for them to decide that independence “seems likely”.
In 2018, Common Weal produced our book How to Start A New Country which detailed the steps that need to be taken between referendum day and formal independence day in order to create a viable, independent nation state. It went through all of the institutions Scotland would need to set up or reform in order to take over the jobs currently being done “for” us in London. It’s still a powerful book but it’s getting on a bit and the world has changed a lot since it was written (the long version of the book is also almost entirely sold out, though we still have plenty of copies of the shorter version). It could use a bit of a refresh itself especially if it “seems likely” that it’s going to be needed sooner rather than later.
Next week, we’ll tell you what we’re planning to do about that.
