Indyref 2020

The 700th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Arbroath will occur on April 6th, 2020.

This document contains many stirring passages. The most important, however, is not necessarily the most famous.

Every school child in Scotland should be able to recite that "it is not for honour nor glory nor riches that we fight, but for freedom, and that alone, which no honest person gives up but with their life". Every child should know that it is possible to resist oppression "so long as but one hundred of us remain alive". However, the earlier passage regarding the kingship of Robert I offers key words of contemporary relevance: "if he should give up what he has begun [...] we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy [...] and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King".

Something important happened during the Wars of Independence. The cause of the king and the cause of the country were decoupled. One was pursued only in service of the other. I have spoken previously about what motivated a small nation to resist the cupidity of one of Europe's foremost military powers of the day. It certainly wasn't feudal obligation. They didn't fight for the king's sake. And it wasn't because they felt like it. The threat that was resisted touched every hearth and home then as it does now.

One thing that this decoupling between the leadership of a movement and its objectives achieves is resilience to attempts to suppress the movement by decapitation. The imperialist play-book includes a few standard easily recognisable moves we have seen employed by oppressors throughout the ages - divide and rule, sectarianism, encouragement of competing classes within the oppressed community so that at least some of the oppressed can be distracted into complicity in their own oppression, and so on - and perhaps one of the most familiar is decapitation, the removal of strong, able leadership, the elimination of the ring-leaders.

But when a movement consists of well-motivated, well-informed followers with clear objectives, no leader is irreplaceable. The hand upon the shaft may change but the standard around which we rally and unite stays the same. And that standard is the sovereignty of the people.

The sovereignty of the people is a key principle of Scottish politics today as much as in 1320, when any king could only ever hope to be primus inter pares, the first among equals. Sovereignty resides among and is exercised only on behalf of the people and only with their explicit consent. This was asserted in the Claim of Right in 1989, it was codified by George Buchanan in De Jure Regni apud Scotos in 1579, manifested in the practice of tanistry before it was replaced by primogeniture in the 11th century BCE and was traced back to a mythical Fergussian consitution in the 4th century BCE in order to support the legitimacy of its later practice in the deposition of monarchs.

But myths are not my concern here. The reality is that this concept has de facto, if not de jure, prevalence in Scottish constitutional thought. This is how Scots think of themselves, whether or not it is reflected in the deliberations of a remote parliament at Westminster that has ideas above its station. Once the people assert their sovereignty it cannot be denied. No de jure objection raised by a government can prevail against the de facto will of the people, and any constitution that pretends otherwise is a con trick. The will of the people is the only form of sovereignty that is self-ratifying.  

The revolutionary aspect of the Yes Movement has been precisely this assertion of popular sovereignty motivated by utter abhorrence at the actions taken by Westminster in our name, and Scotland has been fortunate in having the cause of self-determination to allow this to be expressed productively in the form of a progressive agenda. We still require unity to complete the unfinished business of Independence, and this is why I advocate voting SNP on both ballots in the forthcoming Holyrood election. Indeed, the situation has only deteriorated with respect to the original complaints that the possibility of self-determination was raised to address, and Independence only becomes more urgent with the passage of time. The obscenities of poverty, prejudice and war are more acute now than they were in 2014.

This need for unity does not prevent every voice being heard in the Yes Movement, and the SNP are not above criticism. At the same time, it is not the SNP's responsibility to formulate Labour party policy for them, and if the Labour party cannot attract more support amongst the electorate that is entirely their own fault. The fundamental problem Labour has is that they have been utterly found out, and they still seem incapable of grasping the magnitude of the transformation required for them to regain any semblance of trust. The only future Labour have in Scotland is as a potential government in an Independent Scotland, not as managers of industrial decline and guarantors of our subordination.

One of the great achievements of the Yes Movement has been to decouple the parliamentary fortunes of the SNP from Independence. We do not seek Independence for the SNP's sake, our support is not unconditional, we only invest our hope in the SNP while it offers a route to the honest, competent government of an Independent Scotland. The Yes Movement can still be the political laboratory in which we test many possible futures against the litmus of informed argument.

Before the Yes Movement, the opponents of Scottish Independence would undermine the case for Independence by criticising the SNP policy platform as though one depended on the other, and indeed this approach gained traction before the SNP's first administration demonstrated their competence, while they were still arguing for the very feasibility of Independence. Gibes and slanders such as "Tartan Tory" which now seem juvenile and ridiculous were taken seriously and had influence with voters generationally inclined towards Labour. This was all an exercise in decapitation, an attempt to discredit the ring-leaders.

But as a result of the Yes Movement, the credibility of Independence no longer relies on the competence of a particular party. The case is not fatally undermined on the basis of party policy, just as no-one would contest the sovereignty of any country that is currently independent on the basis of the policies of the governing party. Scottish political debate is no longer a feasibility study. It is a crucible in which a sovereign people are finding their way towards self-awareness and self-expression.

There is now a generation that is well-informed, engaged and motivated, for whom Scottish Independence is axiomatic. This is what determines the trajectory towards 2020.

Because "so long as but one hundred of us remain alive, we will not submit".