Claustrophobic conversation

“Scottish independence is in a deadlock. Is this the plan to break it?“ asks Abbi Garton-Crosbie in The Sunday National. The short answer is, no. I’m seriously tempted to leave it at that because I’m just so weary of explaining why the answer is , no. But that wouldn’t make for much of an article, so I probably should expand on that reply.

What The Sunday National’s Multimedia Political Reporter is referring to is a ‘plan’ put forward by former SNP policy officer Toni Giugliano. The first thing to say about it is that it is not a plan to break the “deadlock” on the constitutional issue. We know it isn’t a plan to break the “deadlock” on the constitutional issue because (a) the cause of that deadlock is not correctly identified, and (b) it doesn’t qualify as a plan because it doesn’t identify a series of operations or actions which connect our present situation to a situation in which independence is restored.

In truth, Toni Giugliano wasn’t looking for a plan to break the deadlock on the constitutional issue. His purpose was to get his name in the paper and in front of SNP members. Toni is positioning himself to be the first vulture at the feast when John Swinney falls out of favour, as he surely must when even the diehard party loyalists can no longer deny or disregard the abject and entirely predictable failure of his “strategy for the SNP securing a second independence referendum”. A strategy which failed both to secure that referendum and to boost the SNP vote in this year’s Holyrood election, which was the strategy’s true purpose.

Abbi Garton-Crosbie explains Toni Giugliano’s plan thus:

Giugliano’s plan is threefold; establish a constitutional convention to agree within two years the mechanism for a referendum, to prepare to fight the 2029 General Election as a “constitutional election”, and to use part of SNP membership fees to fund a Yes campaign outside of political boundaries.

So, not so much a plan to break the deadlock as a plan to convene a talking shop which might devise such a plan. That is the first of the threefold plan. The second part is to make the 2029 UK general election a “constitutional election“, to use Toni Giugliano’s terminology. He’s a bit vague on exactly what this plebiscite’s precise purpose would be. Reading between the lines, however, it is clear that it is just another exercise conducted in the hope of persuading the British state to grant a Section 30 order. Here is the clue:

A mechanism developed and endorsed by civic Scotland would carry a legitimacy that no UK Government could easily dismiss.

This is naive nonsense. There is no such thing as a “democratic legitimacy that Westminster cannot ignore”. If your plan for breaking the constitutional deadlock relies on the British state cooperating with a process that would end the Union, then you don’t have a plan at all.

Toni Giugliano is making the same error as John Swinney and the rest of the independence industry in that he puts Westminster at the centre of the constitutional issue. Scotland’s cause will not be progressed by anyone who does that. That cause will only be progressed by someone who puts the people of Scotland at the centre of the constitutional issue.

The third prong of the Giugliano scheme involves recreating the Yes movement. Again, like John Swinney, he is harking back to the past while taking no lessons from it. The independence movement has changed dramatically since 2014. As has pretty much everything else. Giugliano makes another common mistake in that he imagines the independence movement as something that can be switched on and off as is expedient for his party. For the last 10–12 years, the SNP has treated the independence movement as an electioneering resource and ‘independence’ as an electioneering device. In between elections, the movement goes back in the freezer.

Toni Giugliano gets one thing right. He appears to recognise the importance of an intense focus on the constitutional issue.

It must be a single-issue constitutional election, uniting the Yes movement behind one ticket.

He is tantalisingly close to the idea of unity of purpose but still not quite getting it. Mainly because for all his talk of engaging with the wider independence movement, he continues to relate everything to the SNP. The reconstituted ‘Yes’ movement he envisages is not the original but the one that Nicola Sturgeon took ownership of in the name of the SNP.

Let’s reduce Toni Giugliano’s plan to a bullet list.

• Establish a constitutional convention

• Make the 2029 UK general election a plebiscite on a Section 30 request

• Restore the Yes movement to its former unity

The first thing you might notice is that there is nothing new here. The SNP has been promising to set up a constitutional convention for what seems like a very long time, and other nominally pro-independence parties have also talked about it. The idea of a plebiscite election has similarly been kicked around for quite a while, always seeming to end up in the long grass. The whole ‘unity’ thing has been done to death as well.

These are all old ideas. Toni Giugliano is not offering anything new with his plan. These ideas have been kicking around for a long time. And they have actually achieved precisely nothing. There is no reason to suppose this rehashing of old ideas will be any more effective now than it has been up to now.

The idea of a constitutional convention has great appeal to people who are understandably disenchanted with political parties. They imagine it doing what the parties should be doing but aren’t. Namely, exploring the constitutional issue in a rational, methodical, and dispassionate manner. They entertain an ideal of a body that takes on board every perspective there is and produces a synthesis that makes everybody happy. If only!

A constitutional convention may not be a bad idea, but it isn’t a solution. It may be helpful in a variety of ways, but ultimately everything comes back to the Scottish Parliament as the only body which can take Scotland’s cause forward because it is the legislature.

A plebiscite election can never be conclusive enough to decide the constitutional question. If all it does is mandate the Scottish Government to seek transferred powers which might be used to restore independence, then all it does is take us down a dead-end road. Westminster cannot transfer powers which supersede its own.

The independence movement cannot be what it was before because the entire context is no longer what it was before. Nothing is as it was.

Toni Giugliano is speaking to us in the outmoded language of the independence industry. He is untouched by the new thinking on the constitutional issue. He hasn’t moved on from a perspective that ceased to be appropriate or relevant even before the vote in 2014. He isn’t thinking outside the orthodoxy of the Sturgeon doctrine.

How do we change the discourse around the constitutional issue? Toni Giugliano is trying to engage me in a conversation I know to be pointless. It’s a conversation I was done with several years ago. I’m struggling to explain how I feel about this. It is something like claustrophobia. I read articles like the one under discussion here and I feel hemmed in. It’s as if the discourse is confined to a suffocatingly small space. The conversation is stunted and stagnated. It can’t grow. It can’t escape. It can’t explore. It can’t develop. It is going nowhere.