Like Barcelona's famously unfinished Sagrada Familia, Scottish independence may take a long time

I spent a wonderful few weeks in Barcelona this summer, enjoying my distance from the Holyrood bullring and the never-ending news cycle. Even as I attempted to switch off, however, the SNP’s approaching conference – which kicked off today in Edinburgh – was never far from my thoughts.

This conference comes just weeks after a bruising election result in which over half a million voters deserted us from the previous general election. It was our most significant humbling since entering government 17 years ago. That is understandable, but only up to a point.

Our conference will be a time to debate and discuss what went wrong but, most importantly, to plot the path forward. After day one, the mood is a mixture of reflection about why we fell short and a real desire to get the party’s mojo back.

Awe-inspiring architecture

Walking around the Sagrada Familia, as I took in Barcelona’s sight with conference on my mind, I was awestruck by the building and amazed at the lives which had been entirely spent building it. The architect, Antoni Gaudi, even went as far as to design and build a nearby school to educate the children of the generations of workers who would devote their lives to constructing the cathedral.

In true Carrie Bradshaw style, as I gazed up at the ceiling of the cathedral, I couldn’t help but wonder if some in the SNP had been looking for inspiration in the wrong places in Catalonia. Gaudi was born in 1852 – just a few months before the newly built House of Commons Chamber was opened – and died in 1926, with less than one-quarter of the cathedral fully built.

Work on the Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona began in 1882 (Picture: Pau Barrena) | AFP via Getty Images

It is still under construction today. Generations have grown up in the shadow of that building’s scaffolding, living their lives to a very different rhythm than the one patiently beat out by the cathedral builders’ hammers.

I’ve written in these pages before about the need to step back from the transactional nature of how we have been doing public policy, and instead reassess the outcomes we want to achieve and how we shape the Scottish state – which hasn’t been significantly reformed in a quarter of a century of devolution – to achieve socially democratic outcomes. That means thinking bigger.

Planning for the future

Of course, the SNP – its members and elected politicians – must have answers to the material needs of citizens across the land, here and now. At the same time, we cannot lose sight of the country we are trying to build together. This means being realistic about the process and timescale that takes.

Like the cathedral builders in Barcelona, we need to think longer term. We need to get better at planning and strategising in terms of decades and stop dancing to the five-year beat of the electoral drum. However, this inability to think long term has, in some ways, been the SNP’s Achilles’ heel: why plan for a future within the British state when our goal is independence?

We need to put that school of thought to bed this weekend. We must be realistic about the fact that independence will not happen tomorrow, or indeed on any timescale that would compel us to think tactically about manoeuvring in the short term. We must shun deeply unserious proposals for de facto referendums or other not-so-clever wheezes such as unilateral declarations of independence. A referendum, agreed by both sides, is the proper way to ever test the independence proposition, and this is where we should take the initiative.

Constitutional quagmire

It is as much for the party’s own good as for the good of the country that we need to lead the way in this. We – everyone in Scottish political life – will benefit from agreeing on a codified mechanism that allows this voluntary union to be tested by the Scottish people. So long as the power rests solely at the whim of the sitting Prime Minister of the day, then our entire public discourse will continue to be bogged down in the constitutional question.

My party should take the initiative and lead this debate and seek to design a mechanism that could be introduced via an amendment to the Scotland Act, that would lay out in black and white the circumstances under which a lawful referendum can be held.

If we are to successfully go down this path, however, the party must first undergo a significant personality change. A lot of people will need to be brought back down to planet Earth and be forced to face the political reality of the space that the SNP now occupies in Scottish and British political life.

SNP’s north star

The alternative is to march down a road which will result in us becoming political strangers to the electorate – one where we choose the warmth of the comfort zone over being effective. We should embrace the type of opportunity for change that the most significant electoral humbling in a generation gives us.

If we are to remain a relevant force in Scottish politics, then we must reposition ourselves as the natural vehicle for people’s aspirations, built on a generous electoral coalition that is cross-country and genuinely speaks to all points of the political spectrum. While independence will always remain the SNP’s north star – the only way for Scotland to realise its democratic, economic and social potential – we also need to ground ourselves in the here and now and take pause to think strategically about the decades ahead.

By thinking long term, grounding ourselves in the political reality, and championing the aspirations of the Scottish people to live in a society that’s prosperous, resilient and fair, we can rebuild our electoral coalition and be agents of positive change again. The path ahead may be long but, like the builders of the Sagrada Familia, we must find within ourselves the vision and patience needed to create something truly remarkable for generations to come.

Stewart McDonald is former SNP MP for Glasgow South