Anyone who has turned on, tuned in, and not dropped out of these early stages of the Scottish election can be in no doubt about the big issue that voters need to decide. It’s the constitution, stupid. And that’s according to the Conservatives, even more than anything being said by the SNP.
It’s plastered across the Tories’ literature and social media. In tones redolent of Kitchener, the message is clear: “YOU can stop another divisive independence referendum — but ONLY if you give your party list vote to the Scottish Conservatives”, to quote the Tory party’s current top tweet, with no emphasis added.
Leaflets dropping through letterboxes are even more blunt and to the point: “The SNP will hold another independence referendum early in the next parliament if they win a majority at May’s election — Nicola Sturgeon has said so.” It’s curious, and no doubt touching to the first minister, to see Scotland’s Tories agreeing with her about the inevitability of indyref2, which means implicitly rejecting the position of Boris Johnson that there is to be no repeat of the 2014 vote, at least not until long after he vacates Downing Street.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When the Tories squeaked ahead of Labour five years ago to become the main opposition party at Holyrood, there was every possibility of a change in the terms of Scottish politics and a re-ordering of the agenda away from the constitutional question. That’s certainly what Scotland’s then Tory leader Ruth Davidson and her colleagues were working towards.
I’m not saying the SNP wouldn’t always have sought to promote independence but the prospects for doing so in the immediate aftermath of the last Scottish parliament election, little more than a year and a half after the defeat of 2014, were limited.
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There is only one thing that resurrected independence, and transformed it from being over and done with into a live issue capable of garnering new-found relevance and enlarged support: Brexit.
Without that vote for UK withdrawal from the EU — countermanding Scotland’s wish to stay — and the chaotic process of leaving all of its structures, including the single market and customs union, we would not be where we are in this current Holyrood campaign.
In that sense, ardent supporters of the Union who voted for Brexit are more responsible for the resurgence of independence than even Sturgeon and pro-European Scottish nationalists. Who said Scottish politics isn’t funny? Equally, but in grim and disturbing terms, the strain that Brexit is imposing on the place of Northern Ireland in the UK is the underlying cause of the rioting by loyalists there.
My take, borne out by the polls so far, is that Labour and the Lib Dems are struggling to get the themes they want to concentrate on across in this election. And if Douglas Ross, the Scottish Conservative leader, is even trying to say anything else beyond expressing antipathy to another referendum on Scotland’s future, he would be as well saving his breath.
Last December I observed that the SNP had formed an “opposition to itself”, with the effect that the party, and the debates and divisions raging inside it, monopolise public discourse. Much of that internal dissent has since left to form the Alba party but the result is the same: independence frames Scotland’s policy debate.
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Since the Conservatives have chosen to make this election about the constitution, their case against indyref2 will be immeasurably weakened if that’s what people vote for.