MUCH of what we see, hear and read in the Scottish media this week will inevitably be dominated by the reflections of a former first minister, along with reactions from those who claim to speak in some regard for her immediate predecessor.
Readers may or may not be pleased to learn that I’m not planning to add to that. Frankly, to use the word of the moment, the future we all say we want for Scotland won’t be won as long as effort and energy which should be spent on persuading more of our fellow voters to back independence is wasted slugging it out over which former FM’s version of recent history we prefer.
Scotland needs to move on. And for those of us who want to see independence delivered in our lifetimes, we need the case for it to move on as well.
To get back to the substance of that, as John Swinney rightly said in his interview with this newspaper this week, “You can’t deliver independence unless your country has domestic and international legitimacy”. To which I’ll add that the only way to get that legitimacy is to have clear majority support, and the only way to get that majority support is to persuade more people of the arguments. Simple, really.
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The actions we take and arguments we make in order to achieve that have to be at the core of any strategy for independence worth talking about. But while arguments over process might excite some of the already persuaded, only political arguments have any chance of convincing the yet to be persuaded.
I touched last week on lessons which appeared to have gone unlearned from 2014. Being seen to be running the country well post-2007 was a key element in the SNP’s almost unnatural political strength at the time.
And while Holyrood remains far more trusted than Westminster, the narrowing of that gap is a problem right now for the Scottish Government and therefore, by extension, the independence cause.
Using the powers we have successfully was always going to be a key element in giving people the confidence to go further. Like it or not – and I certainly don’t – it’s also the route our fellow Scots chose to keep us on when they decided not to back the version of independence Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon placed before them in 2014.
(Image: PA)
Dismiss it as “managing devolution” if you like. But without governing well and being seen to do so, the chances of voters ever giving much of a hearing to why they should install the next-generation upgrade that is independence are always going to be much reduced.
And it’s here that there’s another lesson to be learned.
If you’re a reader of The National, you don’t need me to tell you how slanted much of the coverage of the Scottish Government and politics is. No government should expect to go unscrutinised and uncriticised but the way in which clickbait sensationalism drives so much broadcast content rather than just what appears in online bubbles, is something the SNP have struggled to deal with over several years now.
Westminster gets a free pass but not Holyrood. Take this week’s announcement that the UK Government is considering reducing the drink-drive limit in England and Wales to match that in Scotland.
The proposal has landed reasonably well, as well it might. However, it’s worth casting minds back to 2014 when the drink-drive limit was reduced in Scotland.
Whingers of a Unionist bent went into abject meltdown, croaking that it would mean the “end of the rural pub!”(Spoiler: it wasn’t). “There will be complete confusion!” (There wasn’t). “You could be driving legally in England and then get arrested as soon as you drive across the border!” (Well, don’t do it, then.)
Holyrood pushed on regardless. And despite the great wailing and gnashing of teeth, attitudes and behaviours changed. And there were few – if any – cases of “accidental” cross-border drink-driving, just like there were no traffic jams at Berwick involving white vans on a “booze cruise” to avoid Minimum Unit Pricing. But there’s the thing – practically all of the coverage at the time was predicated on the notion that Scotland by cutting the limit was somehow the outlier, when, in reality, that was the norm across the rest of Europe, leaving England and Wales as the outliers.
And don’t get me started on how the Deposit Return Scheme of the kind taken for granted all over Europe was deliberately sabotaged in Scotland and Wales by a malevolent UK government years behind in its own preparations but determined to spin it otherwise.
Rebuttal units are all well and good, but as Ronald Reagan once said: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
The Scottish Government needs to tell its stories up front and once again build up a narrative of success – of how it is making lives better and, crucially, how much better it is doing in comparison to yet another UK Government determined to pick thoroughly dishonest fights for the sake of it.
Gillian Martin showed the way a couple of weeks ago, hitting back at a useless Labour minister who thought it was more important to try to score a point off the SNP than it was to defend the principle of having water in public ownership. More of that, please.
