A former commenter on this blog from way back in the 2014 indyref period got in touch with a question a few days ago, and I've been so busy that I haven't responded to him yet - but it's an interesting and important question, so I thought I might as well turn my answer into a blogpost.
"Suppose Mr. Swinney really does win 65 or more seats (no longer a laughing matter). What if Mr. Starmer does not perform his usual U-turn?
What if he does not feel he can win a referendum? I'm thinking of possible successors who could fight a referendum, but the only one I can even see fighting indyref2 with any confidence is Andy Burnham.
What do you think is Mr. Swinney's plan?"
The first thing I should stress here is that I still regard a single-party SNP overall majority as a long-shot, simply because the AMS voting system is designed to produce hung parliaments, and it does that job very effectively. Unless the SNP's list vote recovers massively to 2011-style levels, the route to a majority essentially consists of winning 65 out of 73 constituency seats, and even though those seats are elected by the first-past-the-post element of AMS, it's still very unusual for first-past-the-post to produce quite such an extreme result. In the last hundred years, it's only happened once in a UK general election, when Ramsay MacDonald's Tory-dominated 'National Government' took 90.1% of the seats. That's the feat the SNP will have to emulate to hit John Swinney's target.
Nevertheless, when I was at the SNP campaign conference a couple of weeks ago, a number of senior figures did sound genuinely confident of a majority, and of course they have access to canvassing data. There are three possible explanations: a) it's a bluff, b) it's wishful thinking, or c) there might just be something in it. So purely hypothetically, let's imagine it's c) and work through what would happen if the SNP win a majority.
Would Keir Starmer immediately agree to a referendum? No, although of course his own days as Prime Minister might be numbered by then anyway.
Would any successor to Keir Starmer immediately agree to a referendum? No, unless it's someone we haven't given serious consideration to yet. Personally I would welcome Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband or Andy Burnham taking over, simply because they would probably represent a slight shift to the left, but I would expect all of them to be just as intransigent on the constitutional issue (especially Rayner, who seems almost robotic in her thinking).
Does that mean electing an SNP majority is pointless? Definitely not, because John Swinney has made so many promises about the effect of a majority that he would have to try to deliver - and that is the real value of the exercise, because no First Minister is actually powerless in the face of Westminster intransigence, unless they make themselves powerless by being too passive, which has been the recurring problem since the summer of 2017. Judging from the very few clues that were dropped last October, it sounds like a judicial review might be sought of any Westminster refusal to grant a Section 30 order - I can't see that going anywhere, but by the same token I can't see SNP members just accepting John Swinney saying "oh our application has been rejected, never mind, at least we tried". There would have to be a follow-up with a Plan B, which is where the legendary 'secret plan' kicks in, although by definition we don't know what that is.
The simplest option is the one that Believe in Scotland have proposed, which is to finally bring this matter to a head by using the Westminster election of 2028 or 2029 as a de facto referendum on independence. However, although Believe in Scotland are SNP allies and have close organisational links with the party, we know that John Swinney and other leading SNP figures like Stephen Flynn seem to be viscerally opposed to the whole concept of a de facto referendum. Maybe they would reconsider if other options closed off and they needed to show SNP members they were taking their mandate seriously. Or maybe they would be able to devise an imaginative alternative way of using the Westminster election to advance the cause.
One thing is for sure: if the SNP can win back their majority of Scottish seats at Westminster, they would have potential leverage to bring the UK government to the negotiating table as long as they are bold enough to use it. They could engage in parliamentary disruption tactics (which remember even the moderate John Smith did as Labour leader in the mid-1990s), or they could boycott the Commons for a period of time. The latter would create a genuine constitutional crisis: it wouldn't be considered sustainable for the bulk of one of the constituent nations of 'Our Pweshus Union' to go unrepresented in the national parliament for any prolonged period.
Again, Mr Swinney is so instinctively cautious that it's hard to imagine him going down that road, but the value of giving the SNP a mandate in May is that it opens these possibilities up and a conversation can at least be had about them.
On a semi-related point, I may actually have been proved wrong about something I said two years ago, although as with the French Revolution it's still too early to tell. I repeatedly said back then that losing the SNP majority at Westminster would be an unmitigated calamity, because it would lose us the main legacy of the 2014 referendum and we'd never get it back. Once Labour were the dominant party once again, there would be a sense of normal service being resumed and the SNP would thereafter only be able to compete in Holyrood elections.
That doesn't seem to be the case at all, and there's a real chance that Labour's 2024 victory will end up looking like a meaningless one-off. The real normal service will be resumed in 2028 or 2029 when the SNP return to dominance, the 2014 legacy will turn out to be assured, and that will be a massive psychological shock to the Scottish Labour Party. They thought they had established in 2024 that independence supporters would always sell themselves cheap by going back to Labour without any constitutional concessions whatsoever, but that was a mirage. There might eventually be some long-overdue soul-searching about what it will actually take for Labour to build bridges with their Yes-supporting former voters - and the two obvious potential answers to that question would be either a) greater flexibility on a referendum, or b) a significantly enhanced devolution package.
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