How did the independence referendum change Scotland, and could another vote happen? Our panel responds

By Rory Scothorne- “The Guardian”:

Our panel reflects on the historic vote – and what comes next

In a way, nothing happened. It is easy to forget that despite all the upheaval that followed, 55% of Scottish voters decided to keep things as they were. Then, despite being on the losing side of the independence referendum, the SNP became unbeatable, the Conservatives staged a small but sturdy revival and Scottish Labour crumbled like loose shortbread in a handbag. Like those spooky bits of physics that threaten to overturn the whole discipline, the political consequences of the IndyRef seemed bafflingly disconnected from the actual result.

Look closer, however, and there was an obvious kind of gravity at work. The SNP’s landslide in the 2015 general election, in which it gained 50 seats and reduced Labour to just one in Scotland, came after a shock majority at Holyrood in 2011 that “broke” Scotland’s semi-proportional voting system.

But the SNP’s rise to power at Holyrood since 2007 was less of a movement towards independence – which rarely polled above 40% until 2014 – and more of a rejection of Scottish Labour.

The referendum campaign corralled Labour’s disenchanted voters into a new political vision with them at the centre: Scotland, said the SNP, was a sensible, centre-left country, defined by hard and dignified work, a community spirit, an open, internationalist heart and a burning hatred of the Tories.

It then lashed this to its nationalist project: independence would put these values back at the heart of politics. The idea was that the project wasn’t particularly radical. It was Britain that was radical, as the Tories wilfully trashed public services and allowed workplace exploitation and landlordism to rip across the country. We didn’t leave Britain – Britain left us.

The SNP’s cautious centrist approach provoked frustration from more excitable campaigners (myself included) who wanted a more radical break from Britain’s economy, politics and foreign policy. But there was a reason the SNP was in a position to exercise that power: it knew how to win elections.

It still wasn’t enough. While the arguments for independence kept time with Scotland’s centre-left heartbeat, the case against hitched a ride on the nation’s nervous system. The campaign may have been called Better Together, but the argument was anxious: we cannot afford all this dreaming.

I don’t envy the floating voter of 2014. I was, and remain, firmly pro-independence. But the subsequent 10 years have managed to vindicate absolutely everyone. The yes campaign told us that being part of the UK doomed us to either rapacious Tory governments or Tory-lite Labour governments.

Since then, the Conservatives have wrenched us out of the EU, bungled a deadly pandemic, pushed the economy off a cliff and driven public services into the ground. In its desperation to remove them from office, the Labour party has purged its own left wing, resigned itself to Brexit and accepted the masochistic “fiscal framework” that is strangling any serious public investment.

Yet all those changes have only emphasised how closely Scotland is entangled with the rest of the UK. Inside or out, we are shaped by it, a moon of 5.5 million people orbiting a planet of 61.5 million. Brexit has eviscerated the argument that independence would not meaningfully break ties with our biggest trading partner: “independence in Europe” would now seriously risk a hard border just above Berwick.

After 10 years of attempting to pursue a different agenda from England, the devolved system is in the doldrums. Scotland faces £500m of public spending cuts, which the Scottish Fiscal Commission attributes to homemade choices as much as Westminster austerity, and the political system is a farce, with the SNP mired in allegations of low-level financial misbehaviour involving campervans and unpaid debts. Scottish Labour, of all parties, now waits in the wings.

For a decade, Scottish voters reorganised their political behaviour around a referendum that had already been settled. Yessers surged into the SNP and the Greens, and no voters began to flow freely between Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats based on whoever best captured the unionist zeitgeist.

In doing so, voters declared a sort of spectral independence – a fantasy-system of our own, clinging to the ghost of our last attempt at something more real. Perhaps that was preferable to the more difficult task of bringing Scotland’s split consciousness together – ambition and reality, optimism and pessimism, hope and fear. But now, 10 years later, we seem to be realising that nothing really did happen. Hopefully something else can begin.