Peter Jones: Referendum loss doesn't mean defeat

Published on Monday 6 September 2010 14:47

Defeat, at least when it is applied to himself or the SNP, is a word which simply does not exist in Alex Salmond's mind. Of all the politicians I have seen over the years, the SNP leader is by far the most adept at turning what looks to have been a humiliating electoral rejection into a great triumph.

So it will be with the admission that he is not going to bother trying to persuade the Scottish parliament to let him have a referendum on independence. Actually, he is right.

The opposition parties, of course, say it is a humiliation - from flagship policy to white flag, as Iain Gray, the Scottish Labour leader, put it. The more an opposition leader can persuade voters that a government has failed to deliver, the greater the chance that voters will turf out the government at the next election, now just a few months away.

The problem here, however, is that the charge that Mr Salmond has made a contemptible climbdown is not all that convincing. It looks rather more like a straightforward recognition of the fact that there is simply not a majority at Holyrood for independence, and there never has been. So where is Mr Salmond's victory?

Let's remember that the SNP was elected to minority, not majority, government on the back of getting about a third of the popular vote in 2007. That does not add up to a mandate to do anything, never mind holding an independence referendum.

Mr Salmond only had a mandate to get laws passed where he could gain support for them from one or more of the other political parties in the parliament.

On a big range of policies - from reform of the criminal justice system to reducing business rates bill - it was always possible to gain the necessary support. But it was never likely to be the case for an independence referendum, where all parties bar the Greens are as fundamentally opposed to independence as the SNP are in favour of it.

So why didn't he just admit that right at the start? Only when you ask the question, do you begin to realise just how much he has achieved.

Without the stated intention to hold a referendum, there could have been no National Conversation which gave SNP ministers free licence to roam the country preaching the virtues of independence as they see them.

There are grounds for thinking that the website debate, the principle forum for public discussion, was mainly populated by already-convinced independistas and was thus not much of a debate at all.But there will have been enough sceptical material posted there to enable the SNP to more finely tune its arguments and make them more convincing to the unconverted.

Activity by civil servants preparing, not just the necessary legislative framework for a referendum, but all the back-up arguments for independence that go with it, would also have been impossible. Much of those arguments we will still hear, but in the context of the next election. That, some might argue, is an outrage. Surely it is scandalous that civil servants, whose salaries are met from the hard-earned taxes that we all pay, should be engaged in such obviously one-sided propaganda?

Well, no, not really. All parties in power do that. When Labour won the 1997 general election, civil servants set about producing all the material needed by their political masters to win the 1997 devolution referendum, and then to get the necessary legislation through Westminster. What Mr Salmond was doing was no different.

Again, you might well contend that all this has now been proven to be a complete waste of time and money. That is true, but only in the very narrow literal sense that there ain't going to be no referendum.

From a longer term, and nationalist, perspective, a great deal has been achieved. For the best part of four years, independence has been moved from a fringe topic of interest only to the committed to a more central place.

Everyone has been forced to take it more seriously and to discuss it more earnestly. Scots have been forced to think about it much more deeply than they have done before. Along the way, the unionist parties have been compelled to come up with an alternative strategy to remodel the existing devolution settlement. It is true that the creation of the Calman Commission was pretty much all the doing of Wendy Alexander, briefly the Scottish Labour leader after Jack McConnell stood down. Ms Alexander has always been a proponent of enhancing the Scottish parliament's powers and so examining ways of doing that while strengthening the union between Scotland and England came naturally to her.

Equally the Liberal Democrats, within their core belief of a federal Britain, have also been backers of a more powerful parliament. The Conservatives, however, have not. And it seems pretty clear to me that without the advent of a Nationalist minority Scottish Government apparently determined to pursue independence, supporting the creation of the Calman Commission, never mind its recommendations, would have been last on the Tory agenda.

The evidence therefore supports the argument that Mr Salmond's insistence, until now, on keeping the referendum pot bubbling helped to put much more momentum behind the Calman Commission process than it would otherwise have had.Where there seems to have been a miscalculation, was in thinking that Calman was most unlikely to come up with anything that would do more than shift the constitutional centre of gravity by a tiny amount. In fact, it has come up with something much more substantial that will involve a Scottish finance minister in having to take some quite big decisions about taxation.

On the constitutional agenda therefore, there is a real debate and choice to be made between Calman and independence at next May's election. Thus while Mr Salmond cannot claim to have won the ultimate prize for his party, he can claim to have been victorious in bringing its central goal in from the political fringes to a more central place. He may not achieve independence, but he has brought it in from the cold.