Rally for what?

I sympathise with a sentiment expressed by Lesley Riddoch in her column in today’s National. She writes, “…when you’re fed up making a point repeatedly, others may only have just started to really listen“. I am certainly fed up making the point that it is not the UK government we need to send a message to but the Scottish Government. As I have stated countless times, Westminster has no role in the exercise of the right of self-determination by the people of Scotland. It is an internal matter for the people of Scotland alone.

Lesley urges us to rally outside the Scottish Parliament on Friday 8 May for the benefit of the British media, there to cover the election. She wants us to gather in numbers once the outcome of the election is known so that people in England can see us celebrating yet another nominally pro-independence parliamentary majority.

Just what this gathering is supposed to achieve, I’m not sure. I’m also fed up making the point that there is no possibility of a win for Scotland’s cause in this election. As a lifelong Scottish nationalist, I certainly won’t be rejoicing at the prospect of five more years being squandered by the SNP and the rest of the independence industry.

Whatever the intended purpose of this demonstration, we can be sure that John Swinney will claim it as a tribute to him and his woeful ‘strategy’ for securing a second independence referendum. He will insist that the UK government’s position is untenable, that it cannot continue to deny democracy, and that it must agree to his plea for a Section 30 order so that he can step out from the shadow cast by the towering figure of Alex Salmond.

In response to Swinney’s strongest push, the British government will not budge even a millimetre. The word ‘untenable’ means incapable of being defended. What Swinney has evidently failed to learn is that the Union means the British state has no need to offer up a defence of its actions relating to Scotland. It can pretty much do as it pleases. The British Prime Minister can tell John Swinney to fuck off, and there is not a damned thing Swinney can do about it. Not even if 100,000 people turn up to Lesley Riddoch’s rally at Holyrood.

John Swinney could achieve the ‘perfect storm’ of an outright SNP majority with more than 50% of the vote on both ballots and a huge nominally pro-independence majority in the Scottish Parliament, and the British Prime Minister could overrule all of that with a sneer and no explanation.

Why is the British Prime Minister able to do this? The obvious answer is that they can do it because the Union provides them that power. The less obvious but far more significant answer is that the British Prime Minister can say no because the First Minister of Scotland accepts their authority to say no. By requesting consent to a referendum, Swinney validates the veto over the will of Scotland’s people that the British state claims and will surely exercise. By first claiming a mandate from the people of Scotland and then going begging to the British Prime Minister, John Swinney is the one spitting on that mandate. It is he who is treating the people of Scotland with contempt by putting the British Prime Minister above them.

The greater the SNP’s success in this election, the greater will be the mandate, and the greater will be the insult when Swinney says the British Prime Minister can overrule it.

Lesley says,

All the media will be outside Holyrood at 6pm on Friday May 8.

Will they be standing outside an empty building or will Yessers be there celebrating a win for independence and demanding Scotland’s right to choose?

Perhaps she could explain, for the benefit of me and anyone else who has been paying attention, what a win for independence in this election might look like. For me, a win for independence would look like victory for a party or parties which had stood on a manifesto commitment to specified action on the constitutional issue within the term of the parliament. Since no such party even exists, it’s hard to see how there can be a win for independence.

Presumably, Lesley Riddoch is one of those people who still associate a win for the SNP with a win for independence. But Swinney is committed only to begging for permission to hold a referendum, which is a glorified opinion poll with no legal weight and no constitutional effect.

Lesley suggests this rally might be seen as people “demanding Scotland’s right to choose“. First of all, we already have that right. It’s called the right of self-determination, and it is already ours. Nobody is denying our right of self-determination. It is our access to that right that is being denied. It is the means and opportunity to exercise our right of self-determination that is being denied to us not by Westminster—remember, Westminster has no legitimate role in this—but by our own Scottish Government.

OK! That might be regarded as a bit pedantic. But only because it is accurate. It is surely better to have an accurate account of the way things are. and it is not accurate to say or imply that we are being denied our right of self-determination by the British state. In fact, the British state has gone to great pains to avoid denying our right of self-determination. Hence the phrase, “Now is not the time!”, and not an outright refusal. This is an important point, which I’ll come back to. First, I’d like to deal with something else Lesley Riddoch writes in her column:

Many people have got completely fed up asking Westminster for a referendum they will never grant. And some hope legal process at the UN will unlock powers for the Scottish Government, without needing permission at all.

Evidently, John Swinney is not one of the people who are fed up asking Westminster for a referendum. It’s the only idea in his head. And nobody with any sense is expecting the Liberation Scotland/Salvo UN initiative to “unlock powers for the Scottish Government“. That’s not how these things work. The UN cannot bestow powers on the Scottish Government. All the UN can be expected to do is acknowledge Scotland’s status as annexed territory. This action will have no direct or immediate effect at all. It would require that there be a Scottish Government in place with a plan that could exploit this redefinition of Scotland’s status. That most emphatically is not the government we’ll get as a result of this election.

Let’s go back to that point about the British state not explicitly denying our right of self-determination. They don’t do so because they are aware that this would put them on the wrong side of international law. It is important for them that they maintain the pretence of a voluntary political union. If the UN looks like adding Scotland to the list of non-self-governing territories, the UK government will want to be able to plead that there is no need for such action, as Scotland already has a democratic means of ending the Union.

Now, normally if the British state pointed to the Section 30 process and claimed this offered a valid democratic way for us to exercise our right of self-determination, the UN would just laugh at them. But what if the First Minister of Scotland had validated the Section 30 process? The UN would then have an excuse to do nothing. Which tends to be their preference when doing something could get messy.

This is why Swinney’s ‘strategy’ has to be condemned. Partly because it is a betrayal of the principle that the people of Scotland are sovereign, partly because it accedes to the alien doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, and also because it denies us the ability to claim that there is no provision within the UK for us to fully and freely exercise our right of self-determination, and therefore we must resort to #ScottishUDI.

If, as Lesley Riddoch suggests, the rally at Holyrood on 8 May will be people “demanding Scotland’s right to choose“, those people are going to look a bit silly when they are also celebrating the election of a government which maintains that Scotland’s choices are conditional on the approval of the British state.