Illusion and delusion

Should you brave the ‘Community’ (letters) page of The Sunday National today, you will find a couple of examples of the kind of fantasy politics that has rendered the independence movement increasingly ineffectual over the last decade. Dr Andrew Docherty bemoans the decision of the Scottish Parliament’s Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee to knock back a petition seeking incorporation into Scots law of the International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights (ICCPR). He further demands that the chair of that committee, a certain Angus Robertson MSP (Cabinet Secretary for the Constitution, External Affairs and Culture), provide a full accounting of the committee’s justification for rejecting the petition. Good luck with that, Doc!

Even with all this bemoaning and demanding, Dr Docherty still finds space to repeat the totally fallacious claim that incorporation of ICCPR would enable us to hold a new independence referendum.

Andy Anderson’s letter in last week’s Sunday National once more points out that enactment of these provisions for referenda of the people, to provide direct democratic agency when deciding important national issues, up to and including such matters as conscription and constitution, represent a very real “popular” option for springing from our constitutional entrapment.

This is just plain wrong. Were I inclined to be generous, I’d say it was misleading. Since I’m not, I’ll call it dishonest. I do this because it has been repeatedly made clear to those promoting this nonsense that the Scotland Act of 1998 would not be changed or its impact altered by the incorporation of ICCPR. The Union between Scotland and England is specifically reserved to Westminster, and would remain so even after incorporating ICCPR into Scots law. It would affect only devolved areas.

In another letter, Alexander Potts makes this very point. I have to advise him that he does so to no avail. No matter how often nor how comprehensively the ICCPR bunkum is debunked, I know from long experience that those promulgating it will persist. Nor does it matter how authoritative the person doing the debunking is. Aileen McHarg is Professor of Public Law and Human Rights at Durham Law School, but not even someone this illustrious can deter the direct democracy enthusiasts. I watched her try to do so at last year’s Independence Forum Scotland (IFS) Autumn Convention, with no success whatever. More on that later.

While pointing out Dr Docherty’s ‘error’, Alexander Potts provides further examples of fantasy politics. He presents us with the splitting-the-independence-vote fallacy along with the closely related single-party folly. The former being the idea that the pro-independence vote can be split. Which could only be true if there were more than one independence. That makes no sense. If a vote is for independence, then it is a vote for independence. What Alexander Potts is talking about being split is not the independence vote, but the party vote. If all the parties being voted for are pro-independence, then all votes for any of them must be a vote for independence.

The problem is not a splitting of the pro-independence vote but the fact that while Alexander Potts supposes only votes for one of these parties are votes for independence, in fact none of them are.

Mr Potts is a believer in the notion that only votes for the SNP will count as votes for independence. Meanwhile, supporters of other nominally pro-independence parties make similar claims. Each nominally pro-independence party maintains that voting for them is the most effective way of voting for independence. But not one of them offers a clear and credible proposal for restoring Scotland’s independence. That’s because restoring Scotland’s independence isn’t the priority for them; getting elected is.

The single-party fallacy is the deceptively plausible notion that concentrating votes in one party makes for a more powerful mandate. And there is no doubt that it would. But mandate for what? The SNP is not seeking a mandate to restore Scotland’s independence. John Swinney is asking only for a mandate to seek a Section 30 order that would temporarily and conditionally transfer to the Scottish Parliament competence to legislate for a referendum like the one in 2014. That is to say, a consultative and non-self-executing referendum having no legal or constitutional effect.

The fantasy element of all this is the widely held belief that progressing Scotland’s cause is entirely a matter of which party or parties we vote for. What matters, however, is not the name of the party but the nature of the commitment to restoring independence. If the commitment is inadequate, the name of the party is irrelevant. As things stand, no party has a commitment to independence that would make a vote for them a vote for independence. Whatever nominally pro-independence party you vote for in May, you are voting for a party that is pro-independence in name only.

I earlier referred to the (IFS) Autumn Convention and Professor Aileen McHarg’s puncturing of the ICCPR balloon. I did so because this perfectly illustrates the debilitating effect of fantasy politics and magical thinking on the independence movement. At that IFS event, we were supposed to be discussing the ‘how’ of restoring Scotland’s independence. The practicalities and the process. As it turned out, there was no discussion whatever of a clear and credible strategy for restoring independence. Instead, we had two of the great distractions that have prevented the development of a common strategy for restoring independence—fantasy politics/magical thinking and the vision thing, which focuses on the why rather than the how.

The ICCPR fallacy is illustrative of the former. But it is far from the only example of fantasy politics and/or magical thinking. Perhaps the biggest single fantasy is the one in which some ‘white knight’ party topples the SNP and becomes the new and genuine ‘party of independence’. As the polls indicate, the SNP is not for toppling. Not because it has a strategy for restoring independence, but due mainly to voter inertia and partisan tribalism.

What we see in blogs such as this and in social media is the hyperactive, fast-moving front of the independence movement. The mass of the electorate lags far behind and moves at a glacial pace. The kind of things that are discussed daily in articles such as this haven’t even begun to impinge on the consciousness of the general public. I would estimate that this latency is rarely less than two election cycles. Where the activist vanguard is in May 2026, the larger part of the electorate will begin to arrive between five and ten years hence.

A significant element of fantasy politics is failure to factor in this lag. It is not at all uncommon for pro-independence campaigners and commentators to discount this delay between cause and effect. All too many ‘cunning plans’ assume that awareness is uniform across the population. In fact, most voters are either ill-informed or misinformed or not informed at all. Most voters are not making rational choices based on factual information or rational arguments. People vote according to what they feel, not what they know. That is why the populism of Reform UK is so successful. Populism is an appeal to the real or perceived interests and prejudices of ordinary people, framed as a struggle against a privileged elite. It works by making people feel disregarded, ill-served, and victimised, and therefore indignant and angry.

The ‘max the Yes’ or ‘supermajority’ plans, for example, work very nicely when they are arithmetic on paper. They don’t work at all in practice because they require that pretty much the entire electorate be informed of and persuaded by the arithmetic. In the real world, only a relatively tiny number are.

Magical thinking is similar to fantasy politics and also rife in the independence movement. It is to be found in the conviction that a given cause will have a particular effect despite there being no necessary or sufficient connection between the two. Typically, it will take the form of an assertion of the form 'Do a and b will ensue’. This makes for great campaigning rhetoric. But such assertions tend not to survive even the lightest of scrutiny. In reality, a is either massively unlikely or effectively impossible, and/or b is totally or only tenuously or tangentially related to a.

If someone is talking about ‘people power’, they are almost certainly guilty of magical thinking. We are told that if the people unite, liberation will follow. It’s a great line! But uniting the people is not so easy. And liberation does not necessarily follow. The strength of the people in combination—supposing this can be achieved—must be applied to a tool, such as a political party, in order to have any effect at all. If that connection is not made, nothing changes.

The independence movement is all over the place. There is no focus, no direction, and no common purpose, and so no effective effort. All of this can be attributed to a failure of leadership. If all the effort and resources that have been expended on fantastical projects and magical ideas had instead been applied to a single, well-formed purpose, Scotland’s cause would be in a far better place.