Watching the Westminster commentariat over the weekend reminded me of a lesson I learned from my pet hamsters when I was nine. There is something particularly sickening about seeing a mammal eat its own pups.
As it became clear that a majority of MSPs elected in Scotland would be from parties who had committed to an independence referendum, the cheerleaders of the Westminster system started to invent new tests for whether there is a mandate for such a vote.
‘The mother of parliaments’ claims to have parented parliamentary democracies around the world. And in a parliamentary democracy, a mandate for doing something is derived from securing a parliamentary majority for those promising to do it.
But now, mother was scoffing her young to save herself.
Yesterday, Andrew Neil, a leading courtesan of the Palace of Westminster, declared “a majority in the Scottish Parliament is not the same as a mandate from the people”.
Apparently it wasn’t a parliamentary majority that mattered. It was an SNP majority alone, irrespective of the Scottish Greens also having a commitment to independence in their manifesto. “During the campaign,” he wrote for the Daily Mail, “the Greens assured voters they could vote for an environmental agenda without endorsing a second referendum or independence.”
That’s a particularly odd claim given the Scottish Green Party literally spent money advertising its support for independence on Facebook, and talked about it repeatedly in each of the televised debates. Of course, many Green and SNP voters will, on balance, oppose independence just as many Labour and Liberal Democrat voters will, on balance, support it. But in a parliamentary democracy, voters weigh up manifestos, and choose or not to endorse the programmes they contain.
For some in Westminster, a majority of the popular vote was suddenly what mattered. But then it transpired that, while pro-independence parties got 49% of constituency votes they got 50.1% of regional votes. Which one is it?
A distraction is what it is. We live in a parliamentary democracy. A majority of MSPs in the new Scottish Parliament ran on manifestos committing them to an independence referendum. That’s the mandate. That’s how it works in the system that Westminster birthed.
The Claim of Right
On 30 March 1989, 58 of Scotland’s then 72 MPs gathered at the General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland, along with church leaders, local government and trade union representatives, and signed ‘the Claim of Right’.
“We, gathered as the Scottish Constitutional Convention,” it said, “do hereby acknowledge the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine the form of government best suited to their needs.”
All but one Scottish Labour MP signed, as did every Scottish Liberal Democrat MP.
Ten years and two months later, another now-famous sentence echoed around the same hall: “The Scottish Parliament, adjourned on 25th day of March in the year 1707, is hereby reconvened.”
The constitutional convention had won. The devolution era had begun.
In the coming weeks, the new generation of Scottish Labour and Liberal Democrat parties will need to decide if the principle their parties supported 32 years ago is one to which they still subscribe.
Both parties ran in this Scottish election opposing an independence referendum. But the question now isn’t whether they want one. It’s whether, having elected a majority of MSPs who do, the Scottish people still have the “sovereign right” pledged to us all those years ago? Or is the United Kingdom a compulsory arrangement?
And this isn’t just a question for Scottish politicians. If Boris Johnson chooses to block an independence referendum, he will be leading a direct confrontation with democracy. Keir Starmer and Ed Davey will have to pick a side for Labour and the Lib Dems respectively, and their choices could well define their political careers.
Political reality
Walk out of the Church of Scotland Assembly Hall and you’re perched on the Mound – in Edinburgh’s medieval Old Town, looking north over the Georgian New Town, across the Firth of Forth and to the hills of Fife beyond.
The sweeping streets below were built with the plunder of empire and slavery that the union between Scotland and England gave access to, and are named to commemorate it: Thistle Street and Rose Street after the respective national flowers, Princes Street, Queen Street and George Street after the then Royal family, St Andrew Square to the East and, originally, St George Square to the West, after the patron saints – though the latter was soon renamed as Charlotte Square to avoid confusion with another George Square.
It was in Bute House on Charlotte Square that, in 2012, permission for the 2014 independence referendum was given in the Edinburgh Agreement, signed by David Cameron and Alex Salmond, who would both go on to disgrace themselves. At the time, this was essentially a matter for UK domestic politics. Support for Scottish independence trailed at around a third. Few people believed it would happen. For Cameron, this was a piece of political management, a concession to a quirky fringe interest while he got on with the real business of slashing public services.
