Colin Fox argues independence has been merely deferred and delayed but cannot be evaded

Scotland is a country like no other today and has been for months. The level of political engagement in the independence referendum has been absolutely extraordinary and with 50,000 people applying to join the three independence parties in its immediate aftermath that engagement looks like continuing for some time to come.

One measure of how close the independence campaign came to winning on 18 September can be gleaned from the fact no one arriving at the Royal Highland Showground in Edinburgh for the count quite knew what the result was going to be. The outcome was just ‘too close to call’ agreed the pollsters and analysts alike.

For those of us expected to give media interviews and provide immediate reaction to the results, it meant having two sets of remarks stuffed into our inside pockets. The official ‘Yes Scotland’ line I received from CEO Blair Jenkins at 10pm was that ‘things had gone very well for us and the high turnout, expected to be in excess of 80%, favoured ‘Yes’ as it signified unprecedented participation by those who did not normally vote and we fully expect to win’.

There were no exit polls produced by the TV stations but on entering the count we learned YouGov had forecast a ‘54:46 victory for ‘No’. This news put an early damper on the mood of Yes activists gathered to oversee the count. Our mood darkened further watching substantial numbers of ‘No’ votes pour out of ballot boxes from across the capital. And SNP insiders, in touch with ‘number crunchers’ around the country, alerted us to similar reports from elsewhere.

And yet the massive sigh of relief exhaled by the British ruling classes on Friday morning reflected just how close Scotland had come to independence. They feared a ‘Yes’ vote and threw everything at us in the last ten days of the campaign. They realised they were going to lose in Glasgow, Dundee, North Lanarkshire and West Dumbartonshire (as they did). They also knew the votes in Inverclyde and in North Ayrshire were on a knife-edge.

The Queen is said to have ‘purred’ with relief when she heard the result – even though she is supposed to stay out of partisan political debates. Charged with responsibility for saving her United Kingdom, the Scottish Labour Party declared it ‘the most successful political union in history.’ Their victory was hailed as their ‘greatest achievement’. In private they admitted their campaign was a shambles.

So why did ‘No’ win? In part, it was because the Better Together campaign managed to cobble together a last minute deal to sway voters whose preference was for ‘Devo Max’ rather than independence, promising unspecified extra powers for Holyrood over tax raising and welfare. They focused, after both a YouGov poll and internal polling suggested ‘Yes’ was in the lead, on persuading an elderly, conservative and timid majority that Scotland is subsidised by the rest of the UK and that their pensions were at risk, not from George Osborne’s ‘triple whammy’ – of work longer, pay in more and expect less back – but because Scotland was apparently too poor to guarantee such payments under Independence. They also insisted Scotland’s oil was worth little and was about to run out. They argued we would not be able to use the pound and that our economy would be vulnerable to international speculators in the financial markets. They insisted we were safer as part of a warmongering UK machine and promised the NHS in Scotland was safe from privatisation. And, they suggested we would be kicked out of the EU if we became independent and depicted Alex Salmond –the elected First Minister – as some kind of a tyrant!

These were the ‘No’ side’s most common arguments.

The pollsters also found Scotland’s prosperous middle class at the epicentre of the ‘No’ vote. Among them Edinburgh’s conservative financial sector, Scotland’s defence contractors and the wealthy professional classes, all of whom also turned out in unprecedented numbers and voted by a 3:1 margin to ‘save the Union’. The contentment and complacency of ‘No’ voters was, however, in stark contrast to the impatience and vulnerability of the working class and the young who bravely faced down the relentless scare stories and the outrageous BBC bias. Rejecting Westminster’s austerity, its corruption, its neo-liberal economics and its warmongering, xenophobic politics,’ Yes’ voters represented all that is progressive in modern Scottish politics.

And, there is remarkably little sign of despair or resignation on the ‘Yes’ side despite the defeat. Rather, there is a widespread optimism that it is only a matter of time before self-determination prevails. The predominant mood is that independence has simply been deferred not defeated. And to illustrate that optimism and determination more than 50,000 people applied to join the three ‘Yes’ parties in the 5 days after the vote. The SNP recruited the bulk of them. The Greens have also grown substantially. And the Scottish Socialist Party not to be outdone received some 2,500 applications reflecting an unprecedented level of interest, greater than any ever recorded before by a socialist party in these isles. Those applications have come from former Labour voters angry at the role that party played in the referendum campaign and from Yes activists who, as one woman, a new recruit to the SSP in Dunfermline put it to me this week, ‘refuses to go back in the box after this’. Makes you wonder what would have happened if there had been a Yes vote!

So where does the independence movement and the left go from here? History will surely record that Yes Scotland’s greatest success was not the winning of 45% of the vote (10% higher than independence has ever secured before) on 18 September but rather in building such an enormous grassroots movement. This was the biggest movement of this kind Scotland has ever seen and sustained. By contrast, Better Together was simply not at the races. When it came to the numbers of activists, and their energy, enthusiasm and organisation on the ground, the Yes side won by a mile.

So what tactics does the movement now employ in pursuit of independence? First it is right we accept the result as the democratic will of the people and rule out another referendum in the foreseeable future. However, that is not to suggest independence cannot be raised again in other ways. Jim Sillars, the former SNP deputy leader and a leading voice in the campaign these past two years, argues for example that we should make the 2016 Holyrood contest the ‘independence elections’ and insist that if the SNP, the SSP and the Greens win an overall majority that be considered a mandate for Independence.

Second, next year’s Westminster general election offers the independence movement the chance to take the fight to Labour. The referendum results in their so-called ‘heartlands’ show how vulnerable many of its MPs might be to a single independence candidate. Talks are now under way between the three Independence parties about establishing an ‘Independence Alliance’ to stand candidates in every seat and confront the inevitable Labour claim that only they ‘can defeat the Tories and form a government at Westminster’.

And the 2016 Holyrood elections will in all likelihood see three new features of this debate; the absence of the extra powers promised for Holyrood, the probability of another Tory government at Westminster [despite being rejected again in Scotland] and that government embarking on an ‘In/Out’ referendum on Europe. Such a set of circumstances would ignite the independence debate once more. There are, therefore, several reasons to conclude that Scotland’s move toward self-determination is not defeated but merely delayed.

Colin Fox, SSP leader and ‘Yes Scotland’ Advisory Board member was described by Alex Salmond as one of the ‘stars’ of the independence campaign, ‘earn[ing] the right to be included in ‘Team Scotland’ (Sunday Herald 7 September 2014).