A collision course everyone can see coming, between a Holyrood majority built from multiple parties and a Westminster government that has repeatedly ruled out exactly what that majority is asking for.
John Swinney has been explicit, both before and immediately after this year’s election, that he intends to treat the pro-independence bloc’s record parliamentary strength as a genuine mandate for pursuing a second independence referendum, explicitly modelling his approach on the precedent that produced the original 2014 vote. Keir Starmer, for his part, has been equally explicit, repeatedly and consistently, that he cannot foresee agreeing to a second referendum during his own time as prime minister. Both positions have now been restated clearly enough, often enough, that a genuine collision between them feels less like a hypothetical future possibility and more like an already-scheduled certainty. I want to spend this entry making the case that both sides are, in a genuine sense, bluffing considerably more than either currently wants to admit.
Start with Swinney’s position. The specific mandate he is claiming rests on the pro-independence bloc’s combined parliamentary strength, seats won by the SNP together with the Scottish Greens and other smaller nationalist parties, rather than on the SNP achieving the outright majority his own party had originally, explicitly campaigned toward as the actual trigger for pursuing this mandate. That is a meaningfully weaker constitutional claim than the one his own pre-election rhetoric had been building toward, and I think Westminster’s legal and political advisors are almost certainly aware of exactly that distinction, giving them a genuinely credible basis for rejecting Swinney’s claimed mandate as insufficiently clear-cut, considerably more credible than a flat, simple refusal to ever countenance a second vote under any circumstances whatsoever.
Now consider Starmer’s position. A flat, permanent refusal to ever again allow a second Scottish independence referendum is, I think, a considerably harder position to sustain indefinitely than it currently sounds in a single, forceful press conference soundbite, particularly if the pro-independence bloc continues posting genuinely strong results across successive Holyrood elections, and particularly given the specific generational polling trend I discussed in an earlier entry this week, a trend that, left to run its course over enough election cycles, could eventually produce a Scottish electorate whose pro-independence majority becomes considerably harder for any Westminster government of any party to credibly keep dismissing as insufficiently clear or insufficiently sustained.
I think both leaders currently benefit, in the genuinely near term, from maintaining maximalist public positions precisely because neither actually wants this specific confrontation to reach a genuine constitutional crisis point on their own watch. Swinney gets to keep his core nationalist base mobilised and energised around a clear, principled demand, without yet needing to actually test whether Westminster would hold firm against real, sustained pressure if the pro-independence bloc’s parliamentary position continues strengthening across future elections. Starmer gets to avoid the genuine political cost, among his own party’s English electoral base specifically, of being seen as the prime minister who agreed to a vote that could plausibly end the United Kingdom, without yet needing to actually explain what his government’s answer would be if Scottish voters kept delivering ever-larger pro-independence parliamentary majorities indefinitely into the future.
What actually breaks this current stalemate, I suspect, is not a single dramatic confrontation but a slower, more gradual accumulation of exactly the kind of electoral pressure this year’s result represents, a record pro-independence parliament that nonetheless still falls short of Swinney’s own original, clean SNP-majority threshold. If that specific pattern repeats or intensifies across the next several Holyrood elections, Westminster’s current position becomes considerably harder to sustain politically, regardless of its underlying legal merits. If, instead, this year’s result proves to be something closer to a high-water mark, perhaps softened by Reform’s unexpected new entry into the picture pulling votes away from both traditional blocs in ways nobody has fully modelled yet, Swinney’s current claimed mandate may simply fade quietly rather than ever actually forcing Westminster’s hand.
I do not think either outcome is currently more likely than the other, and I want to resist the temptation, which I see in a great deal of current commentary from both sides of this debate, to present total confidence about where this specific standoff eventually lands. What I am confident about is that both Swinney and Starmer’s current public positions are considerably less fixed and considerably more contingent on future electoral results than either man’s current rhetoric fully lets on, and I intend to keep watching this specific dynamic, election cycle by election cycle, rather than assuming today’s maximalist positioning from either side represents where either of them will actually still be standing several years from now.
There is also a genuinely important international dimension to this standoff that Scottish domestic coverage sometimes underweights, the question of how any eventual second referendum, if it ever actually happens, would need to be recognised and treated by the European Union and other international bodies, particularly given how thoroughly Brexit has already complicated the specific pathway an independent Scotland would need to navigate toward eventual EU membership. That is a considerably more complex, more slowly unfolding question than the immediate Swinney-versus-Starmer standoff, but I think it deserves real, sustained attention alongside the domestic political drama, since it will shape the actual practical stakes of independence considerably more than either side’s current rhetoric tends to acknowledge in the heat of an immediate post-election news cycle.
I will be returning to both threads, the domestic constitutional standoff and its considerably more complicated international dimension, as this parliamentary term develops, rather than treating either as a settled question this single election has already resolved one way or the other.
More from this author at Morag Sinclair, prat.uk.