{"id":15910,"date":"2024-02-06T10:07:46","date_gmt":"2024-02-06T10:07:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/?p=15910"},"modified":"2024-03-25T10:00:21","modified_gmt":"2024-03-25T10:00:21","slug":"bias-politics-and-the-need-for-serious-debate-on-independence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/2024\/02\/bias-politics-and-the-need-for-serious-debate-on-independence\/","title":{"rendered":"Bias, politics and the need for serious debate on independence"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Things are looking up for independence when the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, says: \u2018The government will always give full and equal respect to constitutional nationalism and the desire for an independent Scotland, pursued through peaceful and democratic means.\u2019 Except, of course, he didn\u2019t \u2013 he was talking<\/a> about a united Ireland.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in Scotland, we learn, apparently just like their London counterparts on Brexit, that the Scottish civil service is\u00a0biased<\/a>\u00a0towards independence. This claim was based on an email about Covid travel exemptions from Scott Wightman, Director of External Affairs, to Scottish government ministers and officials, in mid-2020, suggesting that Spain would block Scottish independence if they were not given exemptions (given, he adds, Spain\u2019s relatively low levels of Covid prevalence at the time). He writes: \u201cThe Spanish Government will conclude it is entirely political; they won’t forget; there is a real possibility they will never approve EU membership for an independent Scotland as a result.”<\/p>\n

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Cue Labour and Tory quotes that this demonstrates a wholesale capture of Scottish officials on one side of the constitutional divide. This is, of course, very silly. The Scottish government has a strategic aim of independence in the EU. The civil service has produced several papers on this goal, including one on re-joining the EU as an independent state.<\/p>\n

And advising government ministers on how their decisions may impact internationally would seem to be part of the external affairs job description. I don\u2019t agree with Scott Wightman\u2019s particular view that this would have been taken so badly by Spain as to block EU membership for ever. But that\u2019s beside the point. A career diplomat, whose previous postings include being High Commissioner to Singapore, will know full well how to divide personal political views (whatever they are) from official advice.<\/p>\n

Paradiplomacy neuralgia<\/h2>\n

This non-story is partly just a demonstration of the very low level of Scottish political debate. But it also reflects wider unionist concerns that periodically bubble up. I was talking to a former UK official last year about the paradiplomacy row<\/a> over Cabinet secretary Angus Robertson attending meetings without UK officials present. This former official was particularly fed up that UK embassies were having to organise meetings for Scottish ministers where they knew the ministers would not put the UK position on topics such as Brexit (that\u2019s awful isn\u2019t it?). What had clearly never occurred to them was that Scotland taking a pro-European position on the EU, against Brexit, is widely and warmly received in the EU and tends to demonstrate that there are some sane parts of the UK still. In other words, it\u2019s potentially a plus for UK-EU diplomacy.<\/p>\n

This same former official went on to suggest it wasn\u2019t possible to know if UK officials could trust Scottish civil servants \u2013 they might, after all, support independence. This too, like the Wightman story, is all very silly. But it\u2019s also highly indicative of the mindset of some diplomats and officials at UK level.<\/p>\n

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Now, most foreign office officials (and officials in other departments) do not take kindly to Tory suggestions they\u2019re not doing their jobs properly or professionally because they\u2019re all part of the anti-Brexit mob. Faced with the fact of Brexit, they had to try to make it work however they\u2019d voted. Yet it\u2019s ironic to find amongst some UK officials that same fear that politics may trump professionalism \u2013 not for them, obviously \u2013 but for Scottish officials.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Politics, Covid and independence<\/h2>\n

Nicola Sturgeon\u2019s evidence at the Covid inquiry last week ended up focused especially on the question of WhatsApp deletions and lack of minutes of the central coordinating \u2018gold\u2019 group of ministers. These are serious questions \u2013 though not the only ones. Scotland, like the rest of the UK, locked down late \u2013 something Nicola Sturgeon says she now regrets. \u00a0On the specific email about Spain, Sturgeon said<\/a> she took decisions on travel exemptions based on scientific and economic grounds. More broadly, she said<\/a> that \u201c None of those [Covid] decisions were influenced by political decisions or trying to gain an advantage for independence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Certainly, the series of policy papers around independence that the then First Minister had announced in January 2020 were paused over the next two years as the pandemic took priority. Does that mean no Scottish government minister ever thought or talked about independence in that time \u2013 obviously not. Not least as support for independence in the second half of 2020 was at its highest and most sustained \u2013 related, in part, to how competent Sturgeon\u2019s daily briefings were compared to Boris Johnson\u2019s shockingly chaotic briefings in London.<\/p>\n

In fact, as the current Scottish government has, in recent months, pushed out a number of policy papers on a range of themes, with little follow up or sustained communication strategy, hindsight might suggest that pausing all the papers and analysis back then was not the best decision in terms of capitalising on that swing in the polls to independence. But the media outcry there would have been if independence papers had come out in 2020 and 2021 can indeed be imagined.<\/p>\n

Where now for debate on independence?<\/h2>\n

Overall, it is clear that hostility to Scottish independence from UK media, and from Labour and Tory politicians will remain \u2013 and will take a neuralgic form quite different to how the constitutional choice around a united Ireland is commented on. Certainly, Keir Starmer and Labour have not been held back from joining in the chorus by the fact that, as shown in the latest Survation <\/a>poll, over two-thirds of those under 45 years old support independence.<\/p>\n

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Yet, ironically, what might change that neuralgic, hostile and dismissive tone to some extent would be if support for independence went up to a sustained and clear majority. It\u2019s easier to dismiss independence when support is hovering around 48 per cent than when it\u2019s on 58 per cent. But the current doldrums of the independence debate and widespread air of pessimism do not suggest that sort of movement is on the cards any time soon.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Some are doing their best to create dynamism in the debate. The Scottish Government\u2019s recent paper<\/a> on EU accession curiously avoided discussing the specific and vital role an Association\/Trade Agreement with the EU would play in the transition period prior to joining the EU. But the activist group Yes4EU<\/a> recently ran a whole day event on this key question \u2013 serious, sustained discussion of an Association Agreement as part of an EU accession process.<\/p>\n

We know the constitutional debate in Scotland is not going away, whatever the respective fortunes of the SNP and Labour in this crucial general election year. The more serious that constitutional debate can be, on all sides, the better the quality of politics we will have.<\/p>\n

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First published on the author\u2019s Europe & Scotland Newsletter<\/a> on Substack<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“As Rishi Sunak says he respects constitutional nationalism in Northern Ireland, the same, of course, is not true for Scotland where the debate has sunk to silly levels in recent days. Are Scottish government officials biased towards independence? Did Nicola Sturgeon ever think about independence during the Covid pandemic? Our politics will be better, the more serious our level of debate is.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":15913,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[421],"tags":[30,708,36],"class_list":["post-15910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international","tag-europe","tag-indyref-2","tag-scottish-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15910\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}