Analysis: SNP forced to play long game

Monday, 30 November 2009 12:00 AM

The SNP is losing the independence bill battle. It might be losing the independence war, too.

By Alex Stevenson

Today is St Andrew's Day, a fortuitous moment for the Scottish National party (SNP) to launch its first serious bid for a referendum.

As the party's leaders have watched it approach, however, the prospects for the success of its independence bill have slowly faded away.

Things were looking up for first minister Alex Salmond in mid-October, when he addressed an audience of mainly foreign journalists in central London.

He had built up a "very substantial and promising position" for his party and its two-year-old minority government. The Holyrood parliament had "substantial domestic competence". And the SNP were doing well in the polls, especially in voting intentions for Westminster.

Despite these pluses, serious question-marks hung over the Scottish government's ability to push the independence bill through parliament.

Salmond was optimistic. "Although there is stated opposition, there is no doubt there is a possibility that situation may change," he said.

This positive outlook was doomed to be thwarted. The first minister publicly acknowledged much rested on the Liberal Democrats, without whose support a referendum seemed unlikely. After some internal debate they backed the opinion of their leader, Tavish Scott, that they should reject the SNP's advances.

Instead Scotland's unionist parties - Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems - managed to agree to back the Calman Commisssion, a body they established to examine the first ten years of devolution earlier this year.

It identified a fundamental gap in accountability between the Scottish government's power to make spending decisions and its inability to decide on overall levels of taxation. Last week the Labour government in London backed the report's findings and recommended major reform.

"It is democratic and proper that if there is to be a substantive constitutional change... it seems inevitable there will have to be a referendum," Salmond protested before the report had even been published. His wishes look like being frustrated here, too.

If the independence bill being published today looks doomed to fail when confronted with a united opposition in Holyrood, therefore, the SNP will be forced to retreat to a more traditional battleground.

Some in Westminster have even suggested if the nationalists perform strongly in the 2010 general election, gaining up to around 20 seats, they could end up holding the balance of power.

There is a sense Salmond realises that all is not lost if his independence bill stutters and fails. He clearly has a longer-term view even than 2010.

"It will become perhaps a dominating issue in the next Scottish parliamentary elections in 2011," he suggested.

If that's the case the chances of him achieving his vision of destroying the union of 1707 will not be diminished by his failure to bring a referendum to the Scottish people now.

But the economy, a key area which Salmond has frequently used to cite frustration with Westminster, demonstrates just why this assumption is misplaced.

"The Scottish government is of the opinion that because the potential recovery is fragile, it is vital there is further capital spending next year, as there was this year," he said last month.

Investment in a new Forth crossing, which would cost £2 billion, is viewed as a key opportunity to "buttress" the recovery.

Yet the powerful argument he made is already in the process of being blunted.

At present the SNP government doesn't have the power to make these sorts of decisions. Once the Calman commission's findings are implemented it will, transforming the landscape of Scottish politics.

The independence bill is likely to fail. Looking several moves ahead, it's not clear how effective the SNP will be in a post-Calman Scotland.

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