Of all the political parties in the United Kingdom, the Scottish National Party is the most consistently strategic. That it lost a referendum on Scottish independence in 2014 and barely three years later is in a position to call another one is testament to its strategic acumen. It turns heated internal arguments into clear external purpose, executed with discipline. Yesterday, the Prime Minister accused it of treating politics as a game. She could hardly have chosen a less appropriate attack.
Calling a second referendum is high risk. If it is lost, as Quebecois nationalists know, the chances of striking it lucky third time are remote. The economic arguments against independence remain formidable, and would be further complicated, not resolved, by a parting of the ways between Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom over membership of the European Union.
Two factors explain Nicola Sturgeon’s decision: the intransigence of Conservative-Unionism and the weakness of the Labour Party. Intransigence is in part an artifact of the Prime Minister’s governing style, which combines “personal animus and political diligence”, as David Runciman has written. She sticks to a position doggedly and keeps things close to her in No10. She is capable of ruthless revenge, to the point of petulance, as Michael Heseltine recently discovered. It is a statecraft that has served her well until now. It is not one that is suited to sharing power in a process of negotiation and compromise across a fractured union.
Her choice of the hard route to Brexit has also narrowed her scope for flexibility. Taking Britain out of the EU single market and customs union is the proximate cause of Scotland’s discontent. It is also the source of mounting opposition to Brexit in Northern Ireland. There would be no possibility of a hard border in Ireland if the government had not chosen a Hard Brexit. And it is primarily because the government wants to negotiate a comprehensive free trade agreement with the EU, and to strike its own trade deals with the rest of the world, that is resisting the devolution to Scotland of the powers over agriculture and fisheries that will be repatriated from Brussels. (What’s more, if Britain leaves the EU without a deal, and unilaterally removes all tariffs in order to smooth its path to the WTO, the impact would be disproportionately felt by Scotland’s manufacturers, farmers, and distilleries). The logic of Hard Brexit is Conservative-Unionist, when to meet the aspirations of its constituent nations, and to hold itself together, Britain needs a flexible, federalist approach.
History is in danger of repeating itself. The last time the United Kingdom was challenged by the aspirations for greater self-determination of a significant proportion of one its nations was during the long struggle for Irish Home Rule. Conservative-Unionists met that challenge by suppression, not accommodation. It didn’t end well.
The second factor is the decline of the Labour Party. It has been widely remarked that the SNP will use Labour’s electoral weaknesses to present the referendum as a choice between independence and indefinite Conservative government at Westminster. But a near-term calculation is at work here too: Labour’s decline means that the referendum campaign itself will be fought between the SNP and the Conservatives. Labour will not carry the banner of unionism – the very term is now toxic for the party in Scotland – and while its UK leader cannot even stick to an agreed script, it will be incapable of marshalling anti-nationalist forces, as it once did. The referendum will become the straight fight with the Conservatives that the SNP has always wanted.
Labour’s vacillation on Europe means that it is currently largely voiceless in the national debate on Brexit. It is shedding votes to the Liberal Democrats as a consequence. It fears a further loss of support to UKIP and the Conservatives if it backs membership of the single market and customs union in the Brexit negotiations. But the prospect of the breakup of the UK, the unstitching of the Northern Irish settlement, and economic decline in its heartlands should give it cause to consider the national interest, not just the party interest. Labour could make itself politically relevant to the future of the UK, and to the Brexit negotiations, if it changed tack and support continued membership of the EU single market, as well as a new (quasi) federal constitutional settlement for the UK (perhaps even creating an English Labour Party in the process). Perhaps this is unthinkable, even for a desperate party. But without such a change, there is no prospect of a parliamentary bloc that unites pro-European Conservatives with Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the SNP and other parties in meaningful opposition to the government. And without that, there is every prospect of a Hard Brexit and the breakup of the United Kingdom.
The Quebecois comparison is misleading and is at odds with your discussion of a potential way out being a "federal constitutional settlement". People make frequent reference to Quebec as if the situation there is comparable to Scotland but Canada already had a strong federal system before the Quebec referendums. After the referendums the provinces obtained even more power from the central government. If anything, Canada is in the opposite situation of the UK in that it has a relatively weak central government. The UK's problem is that it has a very strong central government that is frequently at odds with Scotland, Northern Ireland and other parts. And as you note, the Westminster government tends to respond to political dissent in the provinces with suppression rather than accommodation, an approach that exacerbates the political problems of the union.
If a second Indyref is lost and Scotland stays in the union all the very significant political problems that lead to two independence referendum will remain. The unionist parties have shown very little appetite for any sort of coherent political reform that would address the political issues that afflict the union. Until they do, or Scotland votes to leave, the union will be an increasingly divided and bitter one. Thinking, as May has done that you can just ignore the interests of Scotland (or for that matter Northern Ireland, Gibraltar, ...) and just dictate to them is a recipe for disaster. That we are where we are is because the governing British political classes are guilty of massive failure of imagination and will.
I have to agree, with a sense of dismay and resignation, with Alan's comments on how if there is another 'No' at a second referendum all the problems within the UK will remain. And I agree that the the Unionist parties have shown very little appetite for any sort of coherent political reform. In respect of the latter, I would argue that this is but one reflection of the inept, dissolute, self-serving entity that the entire Westminster political class has decayed into. I was by turns angered and bemused at the realities exposed in the current BBC 2 television documentary on the House of Lords. It is literally incredible that a modern, post-industrial society is attempting governance in such a near farcical Gilbert & Sullivan operatic way. I cannot see what drivers or imperatives for deep and systemic reform there are within the Westminster regime. Perhaps it's the old conundrum of the organisations that most need the most fundamental change, are the ones most incapable of perceiving the need or delivering (even allowing?) the change. The clumsy way in which the UK has stumbled into Brexit and perhaps out of Europe is not only symptomatic of the malaise - it will IMO make matters worse when the full socio-economic impacts of the Brexit disaster hit the UK.