[…] But the Yes campaign
is over. It was a creature of the referendum itself, and very different from the
electoral politics that made the referendum possible. Its furiously glowing embers
have no obvious outlet in the power dynamics of the post-No landscape, in which
Holyrood parties are likely to play a diminished role.
Does the stampede of new
party members suggest a deep appetite for the long haul, or a failure to appreciate
just how long and dreary it’s likely to be – and how very unlike the openness and
excitement of the Yes campaign? Here are five gloomy observations on Yes after No.
[…]
Since 1999 Holyrood politics
have set the pace of devolution. After the No result, it is the Westminster electoral
calculus that will determine the nature and limits of further constitutional change.
For those of us slowly emerging from years of indyref immersion, it is difficult
to grasp that the Scottish question is no longer a thrilling chessboard unto itself,
but one relatively ‘settled’ issue in a broader electoral picture. […] The fact
that constitutional policy (on enhanced devolution and the EU referendum) seems
likely to feature within the core ‘offers’ of the major parties for 2015 will thirl
the Scottish question all the more tightly to Westminster ‘positionality’ and calculations
of party advantage. […]
The less Labour have to
play for in Scotland, the less the Scottish question is a counter in Westminster
party politics – and the No result puts Westminster firmly in charge of what happens
next. That’s before we consider whether any other UK party has either the means
or the motive to ‘deliver’ enhanced Scottish devolution. […]
Barring something extraordinary
triggering a snap referendum (such as the UK voting to leave the EU), maximising
devolution and leveraging ‘the vow’ is now the only pro-independence game in town
– gradually accruing additional powers for the Scottish Parliament, and inching
toward de facto independence rather than achieving a (messy and protracted) ‘clean
break’ backed by a referendum mandate. Compared to the indyref this will be deadly
dull – or perhaps interesting in a different way.
[…] It will be extremely
difficult to sustain the indyref’s sense of participatory openness as the focus
of dispute becomes the financial implications – and indeed the technical feasibility
– of, for example, partially devolving housing benefit. The No result was a one-way
ticket to wonk-world, and only a tiny fraction of the electorate will maintain its
enthusiasm, or any sense of agency, on that terrain. The emotional tenor of this
grey new world replaces the blue-skies of Yes with a constant smirr of ‘constructive’
rejection: an endless refrain of ‘not good enough’ which – for fear of painting
the SNP as ‘spoilers’ of the devo-more process – must avoid the unconditional ring
of Yes.
[…] Yes bundled together
a range of attractive but contradictory aspirations, only some of which the individual
voter needed to endorse in order to feel part of a larger movement. The watchwords
of that wider movement, lest we forget, were ‘it’s not about the SNP’ and ‘I’m-not-a-nationalist-but’.
Both claims sound less credible after the flag-fest of the closing stages of the
campaign, and the dizzying rise in SNP membership. It is clear that the intensity
of the campaign, and the pain of the result, has transformed the nature of many
Yessers’ support for independence. Large numbers of people who entered the referendum
debate without regarding independence [a]s an end in itself would appear to hold
the opposite view today, and critical voices who warned that ‘non-nationalist’ Yes-ism
was a chimera believe they’ve been proven right. The stronger elements of the wider
Yes movement – Common Weal, Women for Independence, the Radical Independence Convention
– have their own plans and goals, and will remain attractive to those skeptical
of achieving real social or constitutional change via party structures. It remains
to be seen how (if at all) these bodies will mesh with the altered electoral dynamic.
New media platforms, think tanks and local campaigns will soak up a great deal of
pro-independence energy, but even as a network of pressure groups it’s difficult
to see how these groupings or extra-party activism will be able to shift the independence
agenda back onto the front burner of electoral politics. And there is no sign of
pro-independence politics deviating from its overwhelmingly electoralist and voluntarist
basis – both its weakness and its strength.
[…] Writing in the aftermath
of the 1979 referendum, James Kellas observed that:
"it is much more
usual for constitutional change to come about through ‘elite’ initiative; in particular,
from party leaders and civil servants working through Parliament and the Whitehall
machine. Until now, this elite has been most suspicious of devolution and has taken
action only when forced to do so through the apparent pressure of the masses and
the SNP. But now that that pressure has been removed, a section of the elite may
feel more secure in moving toward devolution, this time as an elite demand and not
as a concession to the irrational masses."
The long and thorny path
to de facto more-or-less independence seems likely to accord with this pattern:
the incremental achievement of Scottish self-government until a tipping-point is
reached where the trouble, energy and money it takes to keep Scotland nominally
and symbolically within the Union can no longer be justified, and ‘elite demand’
gives up the ghost. Crafty, multi-level party politics will be key to making this
happen, but in the absence of a credible threat I suspect ‘independence’ will only
be arrived at via a long trudge through closed committees and impenetrable reports,
rather than a second colourful burst of popular empowerment.
'No Face Paint Beyond This Point: Pro-Independence Politics After No', Scott Hames, SCFF Blog, 29 September 2014
http://www.scottishconstitutionalfutures.org/OpinionandAnalysis/ViewBlogPost/tabid/1767/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/4330/Scott-Hames-No-Face-Paint-Beyond-This-Point-Pro-Independence-Politics-After-No.aspx
