After what should have been its most calamitous year, the SNP enters 2025 in fine fettle, as does the Yes movement. Crucially, independence support has never been stronger.
There was a flurry of polling over the holidays which many may have missed. Unionists in particular should pay attention.
Professor Sir John Curtice – who’s rapidly assuming the mantle of Scotland’s Delphic Oracle – projects the SNP taking 54 Holyrood seats at the next election, with the Greens on 15 and Alba three. That’s 72 pro-indy MSPs, a Yes majority of 15. Labour would return just 19 MSPs, dropping three.
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At Westminster, the SNP leads Labour by 14 points. At the General Election, Labour took 37 seats on 35% of the vote. The SNP returned nine MPs on a 30% share. If the election were re-run today, the SNP would win 34% of the vote, and Labour would fall to just 20%.
One astonishing poll just before Christmas put independence support on 54%, rising to 59% if voting Yes was tied to removing the monarchy.
Another poll after Christmas had Yes on 49.5% and No on 45.2%. However, when people were asked how they’d vote if Nigel Farage were Prime Minster, Yes support jumped to 55.3%, while No sank to 36.8%.
Now, Farage may just have been roundly humiliated by his tech daddy Elon Musk, so perhaps his star burns somewhat less bright today, but he remains a powerful force in UK politics – and a key engine driving independence support. Scottish unionists should pray Reform dwindles. Its rise simply pumps blood into the Yes movement.
However, unionists seem incapable of understanding – or accepting – the forces controlling Scottish politics. It’s the oldest failing in the book: “I don’t like X, so X cannot be happening”. Well, X is happening, and X, in this case, is independence gaining the upper hand, and receiving most support from Scottish voters.
Demography doesn’t fully explain what’s happening, despite 10 years passing since 2014. The passage of those years saw the older voter cohort which backed No shrink, whilst the younger mostly pro-Yes cohort grew.
What matters more than demography, though, is the behaviour of the incumbent London government. Keir Starmer was a Hail Mary for many centre-left floating voters in Scotland. A forlorn hope.
Sickened by Conservatives, and turned off by SNP failure, they voted Labour, not because of Starmer’s charisma or radicalism, but because he came with promises of amorphous change.
That change hasn’t materialised. Indeed, Starmer now repels many voters as much as the Tories. With the Tories you knew you’d get stabbed in the front; with Starmer, coming from a tradition of social democracy, it feels like he’s stabbing the country in the back.
Many of those Scottish floating voters, who were crucial to electing Starmer, voted Yes in 2014, or are what you might call Yes Curious, not because of flags or patriotism, but because they’re fed up to the back teeth with Westminster trashing the country.
Independence offers a rather undefined way out for them, an alternative to Westminster that has appeal precisely because it lacks clear delineation. When something lacks detail – like Brexit – voters can project almost anything on to it.
To many, that nebulous “anything” is preferable to Westminster right now, and so independence gains. The same holds true for Reform in England. Farage offers to those on the right an alternative to what’s gone before.
Starmer was a last roll of the dice for many voters. That matters. It has significance. Once Starmer was deemed to fail – and fail so quickly – hope left the room.
Unionists often accuse the Yes movement of cult-like thinking. There’s some truth in that. The undefined nature of independence, it’s lack of clear vision, means those who cleave to it simply on the basis that “it’s right” smack of the cultist.
Keir Starmer now repels many voters as much as the Tories (Image: PA)
Yet unionists share the cultishness. For some, the UK is “always right”. It’s the Union or nothing. That cultishness blinds them to what’s happening.
There’s now no route to fixing Westminster. A Tory-LibDem coalition failed, the Tories on their own failed horribly, and now Labour is failing. The prospect of Reform either in power or holding the balance of power grows daily.
After all, what do many English voters have left as an option but Farage? If all else has proved useless, Farage, like Starmer, will likely find a route to power through voter apathy.
Independence is no longer tied to the SNP, but to Labour’s failure. However, it’s the SNP which picks up the spoils as it champions independence.
For the Yes movement, these moments are crucial. Over the next year, the Yes movement needs to get its act together. It has to establish how to get another referendum, and it has to properly define what independence means.
The smart move would be to set the bar high. Yes parties taking 55% of Holyrood seats should be seen as the gold standard. If that bar is reached, then Starmer would be deemed entirely anti-democratic should he refuse a vote.
As to the vision for independence: embrace the pain; be honest. Voters no longer believe platitudes. They want plain-speaking and emotion. Admit that independence will not be easy, but could it really ever be worse than what’s being done to the country by London? That’s the only authentic message.
Most of all: be radical. Independence will only succeed if it offers real social change. That isn’t the independence of Salmond, Sturgeon or Swinney.
So the Yes movement faces a dilemma. Right now, independence support has never been stronger. Simultaneously, independence has become unmoored from the SNP. Yet the SNP isn’t radical enough to get independence over the line, indeed its caution could now be seen as the greatest threat to independence.
If that’s true, then who should lead the Yes movement at the very moment independence has its greatest chance of success?
Neil Mackay is the Herald’s Writer at Large. He’s a multi-award-winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics