In a follow-up blog to his discussion on Whitehall's role in the 2014 Scottish Referendum, former Permanent Secretary at the Department for Exiting the EU, Philip Rycroft reflects on the decade since this pivotal vote on independence and asks whether the lessons of that campaign were learnt. He shows that there was no sign of that in the EU referendum and suggests, with the support for independence still around 45% of Scottish voters, that those lessons remain very relevant today.
It is now a decade since the people of Scotland went to the polling booths to decide whether Scotland should become an independent country or remain part of the United Kingdom (UK). After a long, vigorous and at times bitter campaign, they voted by a majority of 55% to 45% to stay in the UK. That result was a lot closer than most had anticipated at the start of the campaign and at times in the last frenetic weeks before the vote, it looked as though the Union might have been lost.
The UK government voluntarily ceded the possibility of a referendum in response to the winning of a majority by the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the 2011 Scottish parliamentary elections. This was a pragmatic decision taken by the political leadership of the Coalition to respect the democratic mandate secured by the SNP, albeit one tempered by the expectation that the nationalist cause would be roundly defeated in any referendum – support for independence had barely registered much above 30% in 2011 or previously.
A decision taken in haste, then, and almost repented at leisure. The British state had much to do to retrofit some order on that decision and to work out how to intervene effectively in the referendum 2014 campaign to persuade the people of Scotland of the benefits of staying in the Union. There was a lot of learning in that, but it was learning that was seemingly promptly forgotten.
On the very morning after the referendum, Prime Minister David Cameron jumped lightly off the moral high ground by switching the focus from a bruised Scottish electorate to a pitch for English Votes for English Laws, a move designed to placate radical English opinion, then nipping at the heels of the Conservative party through successful agitation by UKIP (UK Independence Party). While the ‘Vow’ — the commitment to further devolution for Scotland orchestrated by Gordon Brown in the dying days of the campaign — was delivered through the Scotland Act 2016, it was done so without enthusiasm in Whitehall and Westminster and with little thought to the implications for the wider constitutional settlement. My own experience of this period, as recorded in my (as yet unpublished) diaries, was of an almost willful amnesia about the whole referendum episode; it was as if the political leadership was somehow embarrassed about having embarked on the whole thing in the first place.
There was never a thorough retrospective review by the British state of its engagement in the Scottish referendum campaign. With the European referendum looming into view, this was at best careless. Indeed, it looks as though precisely the wrong lessons were learnt from the Scottish experience when it came to the European campaign. Cameron had ceded control of the timing of the Scottish referendum to former SNP leaderAlex Salmond, who, wisely, as the insurgent who needed to build momentum for independence, opted for a long campaign. Cameron, by contrast, decided that the campaign for the European Union referendum should be as short as possible, not appreciating that he was effectively the insurgent in that context and needed time to persuade a Eurosceptic public that leaving the EU would be a mistake.
Moreover, the perception seemed to have gripped the organisers of the campaign to keep the UK in the EU that the Scottish campaign had been won by Project Fear alone — the battering of the Scottish public by stories of the risks they ran by leaving the UK. Those stories were clearly there, but always tempered by more positive rhetoric about the benefits of the Union and how Scotland could thrive from being ‘Better Together’. The campaign to stay in the EU, on the other hand, was relentlessly negative, with very few politicians prepared to stand up to argue for membership of the EU as good in its own right, which in turn reflected a longer habit among British politicians of seeing EU membership in purely transactional terms.
At a deeper level, there was a failure to appreciate the power of the populist appeal that emerged in the Scottish campaign. Bizarrely, Alex Salmond managed to sustain momentum for ‘Yes’ by arguing that a ‘No’ vote would lead to a starvation of funds for the NHS in Scotland. This was despite health policy having already been entirely devolved and funding thereforea matter wholly within the hands of the Scottish parliament. Anyone watching that closely might have been better prepared to deal with slogans on a bus promising a bogus £350 million a week for the NHS after exiting the EU.
That is all behind us now. What of the future? Although the Nationalist cause currently lacks momentum, nearly 45% of those who voted ‘Yes’ in 2014 still support Scotland’s independence. The challenge to the Union has not gone away. As it reflects on the 10th anniversary of the referendum, can the British state demonstrate that it has finally learned the lessons from those fateful years?
Apparently not. With Scottish restiveness seemingly back under control, Whitehall’s attention is firmly on the preoccupations of the centre. The territorial periphery is once again consigned to the political periphery. Despite much prompting, work to buttress the Union remains under-resourced and politically underpowered. The prospect of a constitutional discourse to explore an alternative to the jaded binary of independence or status quo has retreated over the political horizon. That Keir Starmer has suddenly found a need for an ‘envoy’ to the nations and regions in the form of ex-chief of staff Sue Gray is entirely symptomatic of the ad hoc approach to Union issues at the centre of government.
The Union will hold, for now. But with close to half of Scotland still— despite the travails of the Nationalist movement — inclined to support independence, the equilibrium is unstable. A question once asked cannot be unasked. If the British state does not want that question asked again, it might, even now, reflect on the lessons of that fraught campaign that culminated in the vote in 2014.
Image: Scottish Government, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
