Twelve years ago, I co-wrote The Strange Death of Labour Scotland – a historical account of how Labour’s dominance of Scotland ended. At the first public event held to discuss the book, the land reform campaigner Andy Wightman commented rather prophetically that “in a decade you will be writing the follow-up – The Strange Death of Nationalist Scotland”. And so, it has come to pass. In the 2024 election, Labour swept back from near-extinction in 2015 to take 37 seats, reducing the SNP to just nine.
This ended the SNP’s unchallenged dominance of Scottish politics, which began when the party first came to office at Holyrood in 2007. The SNP’s most successful years electorally, following the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, were a product of their melding centrist social democracy with a Scottish nationalism imbued with progressive credentials. This synthesis has come under deserved scrutiny of late.
But the SNP and its attendant nationalist ideology has arguably defined the intellectual direction of Scottish politics for much longer – from Winnie Ewing’s sensational victory in the 1967 Hamilton by-election onwards. And a more fundamental ideological crisis has occurred within Scottish nationalism to help shatter the SNP’s hegemony – a crisis which all forms of nationalism have historically been susceptible to.
Scottish nationalism was fortunate in having a very far-sighted and iconoclastic theorist and champion in the late Tom Nairn, whose work proved extremely useful in defining it and giving it intellectual weight. And in a 1995 London Review of Books essay he made an important distinction between upper-case and lower-case nationalism. Upper-case Nationalism was, in Nairn’s words, based on Scots’ yearning “to abandon their silent way and recover voice and presence within the arena of nation-states”. Lower-case nationalism, in comparison, informed the home-rule tradition in the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties, and the cultural nationalism which has contributed to Scotland’s arts, culture and ideas.
Nairn’s nationalism was of a positive stripe, whereas as a global force down the ages it has attracted as many detractors and victims as it has adherents. As the academic David McCrone wrote in Bella Caledonia, there has always been an “Ernest Gellner… Dark Gods theory of nationalism” which has led people to stress “that it needed to be kept locked up, in Pandora’s box, lest the virus escape and infect the body politic”. It is a perspective with particular salience at present, given the recent rise of virulent populist-nationalist forces. And with this in mind, Scottish nationalism has always emphasised its civic, benign, progressive credentials – labels it broadly deserves. The reality is that the most dangerous nationalism of these isles – the form that engaged most thoroughly in racism, xenophobia and imperial conquest – was the officialised nationalism of the British state.
But even the most benign form nationalism can congeal over time. In 2014, Fintan O’Toole published a powerful polemic, written from a perspective sympathetic to Scottish independence, in which he said: “Patriotism is a rocket fuel that can get you out of the orbit of an old order,” but once achieved, “it burns quickly and leaves you dependent on more complex and subtler systems of guidance to get you through the lonely expanses of historic space”. O’Toole was telling supporters of Scottish independence that this was the story of nationalism in Ireland and globally, and that Scotland was no exception. Ten years on, with the fuel of nationalism apparently exhausted, these comments seem particularly prescient.
Scottish Nationalism with an upper-case has fallen foul of multiple structural and rhetorical limitations, beginning with its simplistic insistence that Scotland should be independent because it is a nation (the “Scotland Why Not?” argument). But this ignores the fact that many nations across the world are not independent. And it develops into an assumption that Scotland would become a better place solely by achieving political autonomy. This fails to understand the nation in ways that most voters do, who are concerned with real-life issues such as the cost of living, jobs, the NHS and other public services.
But with that axiom in place, for its adherents Scottish nationalism comes to subsume all other political issues into the all-conquering “National Question”. You can hear this thinking in the old rhetorical phrase “Scotland: Free or a Desert” which was still popular among nationalists until about 20 years ago. Such a Manichean worldview is not the reality for most Scots, but even in small doses it relegates all other debates and perspectives – left, right, centre, green – beneath the larger issue. As one SNP member joked to me last week: “I might like to be a Tory the other side of independence.”
This way of thinking also ensures that the wounds of Scotland’s past continue to cast an oversize shadow on its present. This is not just a question of bemoaning the inequities of the McCrone report, GERS finances, or the fact that Scotland’s maritime border with England was moved in 1999. Frequently, it morphs into a wider victimology that blames Scotland’s failures throughout history on the British state and union. This historical distortion elides Scotland’s role in Empire, even insisting that Scotland qualifies as a colony (a view that is unlikely to win over wavering voters). If independence is a state of mind, then as Fintan O’Toole says it must represent “the art of growing up” and of taking collective responsibility. For too many on the independence side it is still too easy to just blame the union.
This victim complex breeds a vicious political factionalism in turn. For all the vaunted civic nature of Scottish nationalism, its adherents think and argue in the terms of “us and them”. They caricature those who disagree with them as unionists, when they could be (as many were in 2014) merely unpersuaded by the contents of the independence offer, and who was making it. But Scottish nationalism is a political tribe, community and imagined territory – and so it has exclusionary boundaries. Centred on the virtues of independence and Yes supporters, it unsurprisingly has little to say to those against or sceptical of independence, apart from the rhetorical jibe: “Are you Yes yet?” In the aftermath of the 2014 referendum both Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon spoke, with no real insights as to their bias, purely to those who voted Yes, offering nothing to those who supported No. Sturgeon maintained this stance throughout her eight years as First Minister.
This moral self-confidence that nationalism represents something inherently enlightened and progressive has ossified into self-congratulation. Scottish nationalists see themselves as the custodians of Scotland’s progressive tradition. And this is where the SNP’s marriage of social democracy and nationalism is flaunted most proudly. But it glosses over uncomfortable truths about their actual record in government: scandalous drug deaths, health inequalities and child poverty levels unchanged in 17 years of SNP rule. These are forgotten beneath the idea of a virtuous Scotland held back by a rotten, othered Britain, a bowdlerised vision of the state dissected so acutely by Nairn. The realities of UK politics, of Labour and Tory Governments and their differences, do not figure in this conception. They are all cast in the same damning light.
These are the intellectual flaws that have weakened the nationalist movement. None of it means that the SNP is finished or that the prospect of independence is doomed. But it means that the current credo of the SNP – and that of much of the independence movement – in articulating the official story of Scotland through the prism of Scottish nationalism is inadequate and will not shape or remake the country’s future. Instead, Scotland needs a new set of stories, perspectives and ideas about where it wants to go, what it wants to be, and what its collective future might involve. That is true for the SNP and for independence, but it is also true of all Scotland’s other political traditions and parties.
Supporters of Scottish self-government have so far been able to choose between upper-case and lower-case nationalism. The former is essentialist, self-referential and silent on the big questions nations and societies face in the 21st century; the latter so widespread and persuasive in Scotland that its appeal includes Scottish patriotic unionists, reducing its political traction. But maybe the time has come, 25 years after devolution, to peer beyond such categories and to dare to ask what a post-social democratic, post-nationalist Scotland could look like.
The outlines are already clear and there to be delineated: addressing the new economy; wealth; innovation and the eco-crisis. All within the context of a set of political structures based on dispersing power within Scotland while being comfortable with sharing and pooling it across the UK, Europe and internationally. Such a stance draws less from 19th-century social democracy and nationalism, and more from 21st-century ideas of collaboration and decentralised power.
If the SNP could recognise that this moment of change and crisis is also an opportunity to shed the old stories, they might still, sooner rather than later, reach their ultimate goal – independence. But without a change of priorities, Scottish independence will continue in its current impasse: enjoying the support of a sizeable part of Scottish opinion while remaining unable to understand the other Scotland it needs to speak to if is ever to change the country and decisively shape its future.
[See also: In search of a homeland]
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