The Scottish Referendum 2014 - some instant reactions

In the run-up to the 2011 Scottish general election, former politician turned television presenter Michael Portillo began to shadow Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond on the campaign trail for a BBC documentary.  Portillo, a man who witnessed at first hand public political humiliation in an unexpected United Kingdom general election defeat in 1997, seems to begin the programme snapping at Salmond’s heels.  Here was a man whose entire being was founded on an impossibility; Salmond wanted independence for Scotland.  A faint pipe-dream before the 2008 financial crisis, the idea of Scotland joining a happy band of small, rich northern nations like Iceland and Ireland was truly risible by 2011.  Portillo was going to have fun skewering Salmond’s pomposity.

Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) was First Minister of a deeply divided Scottish Parliament.  The previous election in 2007 had left the SNP with the highest number of seats, but no overall majority.  There had been no majority control of this reconstituted parliament since it sat again in 1999.  Scottish politics being the tribal affair that they are, a coalition was not a possibility. The SNP decided to form a minority administration with Salmond as First Minister

The administration struggled through until 2011, watching the goings-on at Westminster in May 2010 when the Labour Party (in government in the UK since 1997) was swept out of office, but without a majority for the Conservatives.  This must have looked familiar to those north of the border, except that British politics are not actually as tribal as they sometimes seem. What followed was a surprising, but not totally unexpected coalition between the nominally right of centre Conservatives and the nominally centre of centre Liberal Democrats (neither of these definitions truly explain the machinations inside these parties) at Westminster.

Exactly a year later, the Scottish general election was held.  Given that the previous votes had failed to give a majority of seats, this was not expected in 2011.  Somewhere in the campaign, however, something changed; something that is noticeable in Portillo’s documentary.  Obviously there will have been careful editing, but part way through the programme, the presenter’s demeanour changes.  Portillo suddenly seems to realise that the public are on Salmond’s side.   The tone changes and the remainder of the programme is a more sombre appraisal. Salmond is suddenly treated more like a statesman and less like a rabble-rousing Celtic joke.

The result of the election was stunning.  The SNP didn’t simply win; they trounced the opposition, taking sixty-nine seats to the fifty-seven held by the other parties.  This can in part be explained by the falling away of support for the Liberal Democrats (a successor party to the Liberals, who were traditionally popular in the non-conformist Western Isles and Highlands).  Their traitorous behaviour in London with the Conservatives (never popular in Scotland and without a member for a Scottish constituency at Westminster) cost them all but five of the fifteen seats they held previously.

This was a stupendous result for the SNP and for Salmond personally it was a magnificent comeback.  Originally party leader as far back as 1999, he endured four years in the wilderness between 2000 and 2004 before returning to the role. Outside the ‘Holyrood bubble’, it was assumed that although the SNP had always stated independence as their sole objective, the result of this clear victory would be to consolidate their grip on the Scottish Parliament for generations to come.

Salmond, however, smelt blood. It was clear that the UK government in Westminster was at its weakest since the dying days of the Major administration in the mid-nineties.  It was perhaps in a similar self-mutilating state as in the dire days of 1974 when two elections were needed to separate Heath and Wilson. With the dust settling over the financial crisis and Westminster under the coalition government of Cameron and Clegg in no position to deny them, Salmond and the SNP set out a timetable for independence. In hindsight, it seems a ridiculously short timescale for such potentially momentous events.  A referendum would take place in September 2014 on a simple Yes/No question. If the result was ‘Yes’, then Scotland would leave the United Kingdom, with all the formalities completed within eighteen months. 

There were precedents, not least the ‘Velvet Divorce’ between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, although a veil seems to have been drawn over the lake of economic development in the latter – could that have been a portent for an independent Scotland.

Much can be made of Scotland’s history as an independent nation and that its Royal family was far more in cahoots with France than a country it saw itself as merely geographically rather than politically connected too. This was the time of the ‘Auld Alliance’, Pretenders of varying ages and the romance of Scottish statehood.  There was the defeat of the clans at Culloden and the terror and indignity of the Clearances – a Scottish genocide if you will.  As the countries were bonded together in Union, Britain’s empire boomed. Those in favour of Scottish independence will be keen to remind you of Scotland’s role in empire – how Glasgow was the ‘Second City of Empire’. Scottish ‘traders’ (actually drug dealers, but in a far more industrious way than characters in the works of Irvine Welsh) established the great trading companies that founded Hong Kong and  Scottish diaspora spread around the globe.

Salmond ws sometimes mocked as ‘Barry Braveheart’, after a risible Hollywood film starring an Australian-American in a bad wig as William Wallace, Scotland’s great homegrown hero.  This is possibly where the cracks in the ‘Yes’ campaign begin to show.  Salmond seemed to believe that there was something inherent in the Scottish psyche that craved, even demanded independence.  In a craven piece of opportunism (or a widening of democracy, you decide), the age limit for participation was reduced from 18 to 16, thus enfranchising a whole tranche of romantic sixth-formers.  They would definitely vote yes.

Something needed to be done with the upstarts in Northern Britain, so a brains trust was formed in Westminster.  The Labour and Conservative parties may not like each other particularly, but they get somewhat riled when their traditional duopoly is challenged.  This is not without irony, given that the Westminster government contains Liberal Democrat MPs as ‘coalition partners’.  Thus an organisation was created under the faintly uninspiring name ‘Better Together’. 

Better Together needed a strong, messianic figure at its head, ready to go into battle with Salmond and save the Union.  It got Alistair Darling, who is certainly Scottish but could never be described as being imbued with zeal and charisma. For the chattering commentators in London, this didn’t seem to matter particularly. Scotland was a ‘little local difficulty’; nothing too much to concern you over your over-priced craft beer in Hoxton.

As the referendum date got nearer, the spats became more tetchy affairs. The London establishment seemed to think that the only thing that was necessary to bring in a ‘No’ vote was to terrify the Scots (a nation known, in comedy at least, for being excessively parsimonious) about what would happen to their money after a ‘Yes’ vote. Pre-2008 there would have been a simple answer, Scotland would join the Republic of Ireland in the Euro-zone.  Post 2008, the Euro was a junk currency that would be a burden to a fledgling nation.  The pound, therefore, needed to be kept. London made it very clear that the Bank of England would not be supporting an independent Scotland using sterling as  currency.

This led to a certain amount of floundering from Salmond and his colleagues, who pointed out that many countries around the world use the US dollar as their currency, without backing from the Federal Reserve.  Unfortunately the image this conjured up was of Scotland as a post-apocalyptic narco-state running on endlessly recycled ten pound notes.  Perhaps Scotland could have its own new, independent currency? Newspapers began running competitions for a name – some wags suggesting that the ‘Tunnock’ should be minted, named after a popular confectionary company.

This, again with hindsight, is probably where the wheels fell off the yes campaign the most spectacularly. Even the disorganised and ineffectual ‘Better Together’ team were able to chip away at the simplest of concepts and realise that Salmond and the SNP hadn’t really thought much through at all. 

There is one key ingredient of the Scottish independence debate that has not been raised here. Oil - this inflammatory (in more ways than one) substance has been at the heart of the SNP’s success since the nineteen seventies.  Indeed, it was the discovery of North Sea oil in the sixties and its exploitation that marked the shift of the SNP from a conservative (not the lower case ‘c’) party seeking devolution and ultimately independence to a force in Scottish politics.

The narrative is that the Westminster government (and particularly the Thatcher administrations from 1979-90) stole ‘our’ oil and ‘wasted’ the money they earned from it.  Particular attention is given to the situation in Norway – a similarly large country with a small population that discovered oil at the same time.  Norway stewarded its oil windfall wisely and is all the better for it.  Cynics might also look to the behaviour of those in charge of oil-rich states in the Middle East as an alternative view on an unexpected fossil fuel windfall.

One of the fundamental tenets of the argument for independence was then ‘our oil’. A big problem is that no one can reliably tell exactly how much oil and gas is left beneath the North Sea. Proponents of the ‘peak oil’ theory explain that we have already passed the high water mark for oil, whereas flag-wavers for an independent Scotland seem to think there is an unlimited supply to soothe all Scotland’s ills.

So, with summer 2014 on the horizon, opinion polls were showing ‘No’ voters to be slightly ahead despite the lacklustre performance of Better Together.  An event loomed on the horizon that could potentially make or break the ‘Yes’ campaign.  Glasgow was to host the 2014 Commonwealth Games, that strange relic of empire (they were formerly the British Empire Games) that comes around every four years.  The last time the honour had fallen to Scotland was in 1986 – an event with a very mixed legacy set against the background of the Olympic boycotts of 1980 and 1984 and (more pertinently given those involved) the height of sanctions against apartheid South Africa.  The event also haemorrhaged money and had to be ‘saved’ by that great man of the people Robert Maxwell – but that is another story.

In the event, the games went well, giving a bounce to the ‘Yes’ camp. Suddenly, with just a few weeks to go, the mainstream media in London suddenly seemed to realise that there was something happening.  Rabid pro-Union sentiment appeared in the quarters that you would expect, spouting bile about the potential end of the world should ‘Yes’ succeed.

The week before the vote, Westminster suddenly realised that there was an outside chance that ‘Yes’ might prevail and decided that ‘something must be done’. David Cameron could not, up until this point, be described as an emotional politician, not even in the faux-sincerity Blair style.  However, he shot off up to Scotland, crumpled his face up and used (in a way that only an Old Etonian trying to convey that he was ‘street’) the word ‘effin’ in a speech to show how much he cared.

Ed Milliband was also dispatched on a whistle-stop tour that stopped literally when he ran into  a crowd of marauding ‘Yes’ supporters.  This treatment was mildly less humiliating than that doled out to UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage. On an earlier visit to Scotland, he was trapped inside a pub for several hours while a mob bayed outside – probably a situation he did not find too distressing.  Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg may have put in an appearance, but if he did, there seems little need to record it.

Finally, the day of destiny came.  Opinion polls posted in the pro-Yes and pro-No media gave suspiciously high outcomes of +8-10% leads for both sides. Voters voted and there was an anxious wait for results.  Whilst many aspects of the campaign and potential outcome may have been troubling, one fantastic outcome was the turnout.  Participation on British elections had reached a nadir in recent years with the turnout for European and Police & Crime Commissioner elections (the latter in England and Wales only) dipping as low as 10-15% in places.  A great surprise, then, was an average turnout of over 80% of eligible voters.

And so, the actual result.  There was no electoral college or weighting of constituencies, it was a simple Yes vs No result administered along local authority lines. A vote in Kirkcaldy was therefore as powerful as one in Kirkwall of Kirkcudbright.  There had been much talk before the vote of the urban poor – particularly in Glasgow – rising as one to embrace independence. And indeed, Glasgow did vote ‘Yes’, albeit on a significantly reduced turnout of 75%. Dundee also voted ‘Yes’, by a tiny margin. 

But that was it, in pure statistical terms, the result was 45% for ‘Yes’ and 55% for ‘No’; a resounding victory for Better Together and a devastating defeat for Salmond personally and the SNP as a party. A day after the result, Salmond announced his intention to step down at the party conference in November 2014.  He has been knocked back before and come back, but was this one defeat too many?  Perhaps Michael Portillo is waiting in the wings with a camera crew to discover what he plans to do next.