Scotland and Independence need a new approach and agenda
Sunday National, 27 July 2025
Gerry Hassan
John Swinney recently engaged in the latest relaunch of independence. Some people noticed; some even cared and thought it relevant. Mostly his efforts passed unnoticed, without any real impact.
Scottish politics, democracy, government and independence are not in good health and failing too many people. Some don’t see things this way. They measure the state of Scotland by saying we are not like the collective disaster of Westminster as if this is an effective measurement.
Others say we need independence now such is the imperative to breakaway from the UK. This ignores the lack of work on independence, the lack of public demand for an indyref, as well as the fabric and condition of Scotland – from politics to everyday life. This view also misses the fact that independence has never just been an abstract or a principle, but about charting a future course for Scotland which is as yet unclear.
Groundhog Day Scotland: The Story of the Past Decade
Scottish politics is now a Groundhog Day ritual. The SNP pretend independence is on the cards while unionists claim the union is under threat. The exhaustion of the political class and dearth of ideas is plain to see; while the bitterness of culture wars around the trans debate have affected the Greens and a generation of feminist campaigners.
Eleven years on from the 2014 indyref, there has been no strategic reset in independence. Nor has there been any strategic rethinking in the union. All of which means much of the debate is a predictable dance; while the SNP pretend progress to independence is continuing.
None of the basics have been done post-2014 by independence. There has been no analysis by independence on why it lost. No remaking of independence on the fundamentals: the currency, economics, EU, transition process and risks inherent in such a project.
The SNP approach is deliberate deflection. The invoking of independence keeps a significant section of the SNP quiet and not asking difficult questions. It prevents the main topic of the 2026 contest being the patchy record of the SNP in what will be nearly two decades in office. Independence, to the SNP leadership, has become a means of diluting accountability and truncating debate from the everyday issues affecting Scotland. All while not progressing the heavy lifting needed on independence. It is an act which works to diminishing proportions; but it can as one SNP member put it “keep enough of the base quiet long enough.”
Beyond this the SNP have morphed into a court party: shaped by patronage, privilege and dispensing of favours as Labour in Scotland did before them. Such has been the way that power has been exercised down the ages in Scotland and pre-union Scotland around the King or Queen’s Court.
There has been a historic transformation in the SNP. For decades they were the party of outsiders; people who stood outside the corridors of power and officialdom often at personal cost. Now after two decades in office they have become a party of insiders, the political class and establishment, whose main motivation at senior level is remaining in office.
Added to this the SNP has never been a party that encourages ideas and intellectuals. When it was a party of outsiders, thinkers like Neal Ascherson, Christopher Harvie and Tom Nairn were never associated with the party; the only exception to this was Neil MacCormick who in later years was a SNP MEP.
Similarly, the party has had little of originality to say on cultural policy or cultural nationalism. This has become more pronounced as its years in office have advanced. There is no SNP project celebrating cultural creativity and policy and linking it to Scottish representation and self-government. Rather there is tinkering around the edges on Creative Scotland and other funding underlying the policy exhaustion.
Post-War Scotland, Thatcherism and Social Change
Most of the above is accepted by many, but less examined are the big questions flowing from it. There is a long-standing conservatism of part of Scotland which is disguised by deflecting and externalising any problems we face by putting the blame on Westminster, the British state and the legacy of Thatcherism.
This aids political and other elites in discouraging any discussion about the nature of power, elites and the establishment in Scotland. Even the state of civil society, much cited in the 1980s and 1990s, is not encouraged whereas years ago it was referenced and seen as a source of legitimacy beyond party politics. A quarter century into devolution civil society feels hollowed out and some of its main institutions – trade unions, churches, voluntary sector – are in retreat or in the latter case dependent on the state for funding thus compromising their independence.
Wider cultural discussions have run out of steam. The recent Irish Pages Scotland issue edited by Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson in its introduction invoked a society of “elders” yearning for respect and recognition from younger generations and feeling marginalised. This seemed a very old version of Scotland being trundled out again marked by a lack of curiosity, and of questioning and scrutinising of values held by contributors and wider Scotland. There was an underlying assumption that this volume was an expression of “the good society”, yet in the words of sociologist David McCrone surveying its contents it has “a questionable, even simplistic understanding of the relationship of culture and politics which beggars belief.”
The above has a familiar generational story. It is Baby Boomer Scotland: the folk who were of age and status affronted by Thatcherism in the 1980s but saw it as challenging their cosy consensual way of how post-war Scotland was run. There was little comprehension that this is a generational story which must, like all such stories, eventually be replaced by new generational perspectives.
Scotland cannot be just one story in static. It cannot be reduced to being monocultural or essentialist. This used to be a key facet of how Scotland understood itself – the “multiform Scotland” of Hugh MacDiarmid and the “mongrel nation” of William McIlvanney articulating a polymorphous Scotland.
There needs to be an awareness of the importance of the past. Whoever tells the stories of the past, as George Orwell grasped in 1984, controls the present – and the future. The legacy of Thatcherism has held capture over the British political classes in recent decades and been the frame of reference of all who came subsequently from Blair and Cameron to Starmer.
Scotland is not as different as we think. For starters Thatcherism has been used as the watershed point where everything went wrong. “Thatcherism shut down our industry and destroyed large parts of Scotland leaving an industrial wasteland” as one observer recently put it. And doing so without a popular mandate hence making the case for the Scottish Parliament and self-government.
The other facet of Thatcherism is less explored. Namely, the radical nature of Thatcherism in breaking with the post-war statist assumptions which shaped the UK 1945-75 and Scotland. This allowed conservative opinion in Labour, SNP, Lib Dems and civil society to invoke a radical language while being anything but.
This is an enduring paradox of self-government. The dominant response to Thatcherism utilised a radical language but did so with a conservative impulse whose intent was to continue the managed society of 1945-75 and resist the winds of change not just of Thatcherism but other disruptive forces. This is the underlying strand of the devolution project: continuing the comfortable arrangements of public life in Scotland for professional groups, middle classes and insider forces; and it has become the main story of the SNP’s account of independence.
This version of Scotland has become increasingly threadbare in the face of the huge challenges society faces and the turbulent, unstable world we live in. It should be evident that the insider story of Scotland’s most well positioned groups presenting devolution and independence as a continuation of the present is not an adequate politics now, let alone prepared for the future.
Scotland and the Politics of Disruption
Such a critique is well-kent. But where do we go from it? From an acknowledgement of the inadequacy of present-day Scotland and the stories we have told ourselves we need to embrace radical thinking. There is no option here of continuing an easy life. If the forces of self-government do not do this, then the case for disruption and insurgency will be put without challenge by Farage and Reform.
Scotland is not as immune to this political offer as many think. There is an understandable impatience across society at the shortcomings of devolution; and it would not be surprising if Reform present a compelling offer for next year attacking the devolution class and sentiment, and proposing cutting it down in size, that may have wide appeal.
Scotland needs a new set of stories. Not only that we need a new language of how we think and do politics. We need to understand more thoroughly how we understand the choices Scotland faces, the challenges to democracy and the wider context of nations and states within which we live.
This terrain would include giving voice to new generational stories about past, present and future. We should stop going on about the Thatcherite 1980s and using it as a cover for conservative accounts of Scotland. Connected to this we must stop uncritically venerating the idea of a “society of elders” as a group who somehow deserve automatic respect.
Scottish public life should reject the narrow bandwidth of conversations we see so often. Time and again we witness the same hackneyed reference points about understanding contemporary Scotland. As the late William McIlvanney pointed out about our broad historical canvas too much of our past is presented as “a pop-up picture school of history” reducing it to kings and queens and fragmented, isolated events removed from their context.
This reinforces a narrow pantheon of heroes and heroines who we celebrate to the point of canonisation and exhaustion. It includes culturally the likes of Hamish Henderson and Hugh McDiarmid and politically the former Communist and UCS sit-in leader Jimmy Reid.
This doesn’t reflect the richness of Scotland’s radical and cultural traditions. A more nuanced history would have a place for the real-life Adam Smith, not the invented creation of right-wing think-tanks; it would celebrate Robert Owen, who in New Lanark pioneered a culture of enlightened industrial relations and gave voice to radical socialism in the 19th century.
It would have a place for storytellers such as Mary Brooksbank who championed worker solidarity in Dundee’s jute factories in the early 20th century. It would be generous enough to have a place for unlikely radicals such as Katharine Atholl, known as “the Red Duchess”, Tory MP for Perthshire 1923-28. She was one of Scotland’s most influential anti-fascists, translating Hitler’s Mein Kampf into English (to counter the sanitised German version) and supporting the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War against Franco’s fascists, for which she was deselected by local Tories.
Scottish politics needs a different political, cultural and intellectual context. The question is how do we aid this – rather than going along with the present unsatisfactory offer?
First, there should be an encouragement of agency beyond political party. Jonathon Shafi was tight in principle this week saying that time should be called on the idea of Yes. That will be hard for some but there does need to be a recognition that there is no linear road from 2014 and a new longer route map is required.
Second, the DIY platforms created post-2014 have been welcome but they are no substitute for long-term sustainable, properly funded platforms. Shafi talked about the need for “clearing houses” of ideas and the aspiration should be an ecology of initiatives.
Think-tanks have their drawbacks often buying into corporate logic. But an independence movement which has not seen the creation of one proper think-tank post-2014 is not serious about the project of independence. Yes, there are funding challenges while the hostility of the SNP leadership means they do not want to share the stage; but are we really saying this cannot be done? That the future of Scotland and independence should be left to politicians and civil servants? It is a frightening thought.
What would a hegemonic national story look like?
We must address the intellectual vacuity at the heart of Scottish politics and society. “The SNP have not managed to craft a hegemonic national story” notes academic Michael Keating which is self-evident but also points to the limits of political parties.
What would a “hegemonic national story” look like and how can it be told? Clearly it should entail more than political parties and politicians, and involve thinkers and intellectuals, artists and creatives, to articulate a nuanced understanding of culture, politics and social change.
Such a national story and counter-stories entails understanding our past and present and desire to create a collective future. It would engage with the turbulent global times, the failure of globalisation and the permanent wars of late capitalism.
The art historian T.J. Clark in his recent book Those Passions: On Art and Politics observed that we are living in “a complex regigging of the balance of forces between nation and congregation” throwing into question some of the simplistic interpretations of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. This linked the rise of the nation-state to print capitalism, but now we live in an age of screen and image capitalism which will soon go through another age of transformation.
Clark observes: “A nation born out of opposition to Empire is different from one born from nostalgia for Empire lost.” This is a salutary point about the nature of the British state and its core characteristics. It reminds us that Scottish independence has little in common with national liberation movements, alongside the ambiguous position of England, and that any reawakening of an English national consciousness might be messy, even ugly.
Scotland needs stories beyond the simplicities of nationalism – Scottish or British. It must navigate a path between self-congratulatory accounts of “whose social democracy and/or nationalism is as virtuous as ours” and the miserablist, beating Scotland up of too many pro-union accounts and some maxi-nationalists.
An intellectual framing of where we are is needed – who we are and where we want to go – building on the shoulders of previous generations, thinkers and campaigners, but not trapped by them.
Debate post-2014 has been too narrow and truncated. It has tended to ignore Scotland’s complex, changing place in the world aiding a default Scottish exceptionalism. Yet in the 1970s there was a rich debate involving the likes of Scottish historian T.C. Smout and Immanuel Wallerstein about Scotland’s changing position in “the world system of capitalism” and how this nation went from the periphery of that system to the core and the consequences which flowed.
Project Scotland and the Power of Exit, Voice and Loyalty
We need a similar flowering today: a Project Scotland telling an account of past, present and future. We have more historians and there has been a rich debate on Empire and slavery led by the likes of Stephen Mullen, Geoff Palmer and Kate Phillips and others. Such debate should link up to political theory and sociology and a key analysis can be provided by Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty, published in 1970.
Hirschman’s book has become one of the most influential in the past two generations understanding not just individual and organisational behaviour but predicting the revolt of the new right. His three terms – loyalty, meaning solidarity and connection; voice referring to collective power; and exit meaning to leave any situation you disapprove of – offer a different perspective on Scotland.
There was the loyalty of high unionism; the voice associated with the Scottish lobby in the period of peak union; and the weighing up of the merits and downsides of exit as the cause of self-government and independence emerged. Hirschman understood the nuance in all three and the potential power of voice to remake a political realm, along with the need in exit to understand trade-offs and how people assess them. The different dimensions of Brexit and Scottish independence would have been very familiar to him.
With this Hirschman schema we should understand the journey we are on and the need for deep thinking and work. Abstracts on their own don’t work and merely emphasising the principle of independence shorn of detail is not enough. Dreaming of fantasy escapes through some UN safe road are delusional, and not understanding the conservatism and court party nature of the SNP gets in the way of seeing where we are.
In Hirschman’s troika the idea of “voice” needs urgent attention. Where are the avenues of self-determination and self-government? Where are the ideas, eleven years after the “Big Bang” of 2014, on what self-determination would like as a principle extended throughout society? Not just to the public sector and professionals, but communities and corporates. Why have we not created a Campaign for Self-Determination making explicit that wider canvas? Making independence not just about our nation’s formal status but bringing it home and changing how we run Scotland.
We desperately need new ideas on Scotland’s economy, democracy, culture and international profile. Breaking with the broken UK economic model and thinking which has prioritised finance capital over people and of which the likes of Andrew Wilson and Kate Forbes would like a Scottish version. We require a democratisation which empowers people and decentralises power; society which deals with the exhaustion, stress and mental health post-COVID and even tries to heal the aftermath of culture wars on trans rights. One which puts genuine creativity at its centre not as some instrumental extension of economic policy. And that has an ethical foreign stance – and doesn’t, as Angus Robertson has, see the summit of ambitions as being “a critical friend” of Israel.
None of this happens without action. But we need to be clear. Inaction and continuing as we have has consequences. The current path of the SNP and conservative Scotland is a cul-de-sac. The world is in flames. The vandals are gathering and everywhere barbarians are engaging in grotesque acts of violence.
We are at a watershed. It is time for a new Scottish revolution. Saying the present, treading water and mediocre politics and politicians will not do. Instead, advancing empowerment, disruption, welcoming the idea of living dangerously, and not telling comforting lies or beating ourselves up with astral pessimism. We can liberate ourselves and tell our own stories but we need to grow up and get serious. Build it and they will come. So they say. Why don’t we dare to test it?
