NEXT year, 2024, will see the tenth anniversary of the referendum on independence for Scotland. Since that year, the SNP has consolidated its position as the dominant party in Scottish politics, but very much as a centrist party of neoliberalism. 

And if, as Nicola Sturgeon claims, the Tories believe that creating a constitutional crisis on the back of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA), will undermine support for the SNP and independence, they are going to be disappointed. 

Without for a moment reducing the importance of the GRA both for its supporters or its critics, it is not a burning issue either in the lives of most Scots or in shaping their political allegiances.

The reasons for this are obvious: we are living through a period where the cost of food, energy and housing are soaring.  Many working-class people have therefore decided to fight for higher wages through taking industrial action. 

Many of those involved in this action are workers in key services like health and education and transport. Meanwhile, these very services themselves are in crisis, barely able, sometimes unable, to operate at a minimum level, a level, which, with no sense of irony at all, Tories plan to insist on as part of their anti-strike legislation for service workers.

Despite claims to a more “progressive” politics this crisis is every bit as deep and destructive in Scotland as it is elsewhere in Britain. Furthermore, the Scots are well aware of the role of the SNP in failing to address it, but the tectonic plates of Scottish politics have moved not a centimetre. 

Here is Dr Emily Gray of Ipsos Mori Scotland: “Why aren’t we seeing a slump in voters’ support for the SNP since public trust in the party’s competence has declined? 

“The key factor shoring up SNP support appears to be the constitutional question.…Half of those who would vote in a Scottish Parliament election say they would cast their constituency vote for the SNP, if anything slightly above the 47.7 per cent who actually used their constituency vote for the party at the May 2021 Holyrood elections.”

That was late December. Changes, such as they are, have been at the periphery of Scottish politics. In 2014 James Foley and Pete Ramand could write in  Yes: The Radical Case for Scottish Independence: “A progressive case for Scottish independence would aim to mirror the best approaches to national citizenship under today’s capitalism, creating a ‘Nordic utopia’. To an extent Salmond’s SNP already adopt this approach.” 

Supporters of radical independence today have become much more critical of the SNP. They share a concern with the wider left  both about  the economic strategy that the SNP want to pursue post-independence and the SNP’s timidity and conservatism in failing  to use the powers the Scottish Parlaiment already has to support working people in the cost-of-living crisis. 

The SNP produced a document on their post-independence economic strategy called Building a New Scotland: A Stronger Economy with Independence. The paper makes it clear that Scotland would continue to use Sterling as its currency post-independence until the transition to a Scottish Pound, necessary for membership of the EU. 

This would leave the key levers of economic control in the hands of the Bank of England, making progressive advance nearly impossible.

There is also growing frustration on the part of the left about the passivity of the SNP government faced with collapsing services, poverty and economic blight. The SNP Trade Union Group put forward a motion to the October 2022 SNP conference where they proposed “creative and bold use” of the “wide range of tax powers” available to the Scottish government to tackle the cost-of-living crisis. It was excluded from the draft agenda.

If you think this situation is screaming out for a united left response, you would be right, and on the streets constitutional preferences have played no part in the emerging movements around the cost-of-living crisis, like Glasgow’s Power to the People, despite having well known advocates of both Yes and No in its ranks. But in terms of building a political movement aimed at fundamental political change, as opposed to an activist alliance, there is still some way to go. 

However, there are, as always, reasons to be hopeful. Last month the STUC published Scotland Demands Better: Fairer taxes for a Fairer Future. The position they advocate is based on what the Scottish government could do now as opposed to in an independent Scotland, which is how the SNP prefer to cast their politics. The STUC report argues for higher and more redistributive taxes and for a shift in both tax rates and the tax base in order to support those services I earlier described as “in crisis”.

This should surely provide a concrete set of proposals that the left can unite around and fight for. However, it still does not address the constitutional distance between those committed to independence and those who believe that the levers of economic power remain lodged at the level of the British state and would remain so even after independence and who are, therefore, committed to a progressive federal solution.

Even here there may be the possibility of progress. One of the major impediments to progress has been UK Labour and Scottish Labour’s intransigence to any fundamental re-framing of the Union. Gordon Brown’s recent report “A New Britain: Renewing our Democracy and Rebuilding our Economy” had some welcome commitments in it, but as far as Scotland is concerned it failed to offer significant additional powers, especially powers over the economy, where we really need them.

Once again perhaps the STUC can have a leading role. Glasgow Kelvin Labour constituency is sending a motion to next month’s conference of the Scottish Labour Party. It concludes: “This conference believes that proposals to strengthen the Scottish Parliament’s powers should be formulated in a national conversation through a Scottish Constitutional Convention involving the STUC, trade unions, civic society and willing political parties and asks the Scottish executive of Labour Party to enter into discussions, initially with the STUC, with a view to setting up such a convention by the end of 2023.”

Should it pass, alongside a campaign for the STUC’s programme, perhaps the 10th anniversary of the independence referendum will be marked by the emergence of a vibrant movement for a radical parliament able and willing to challenge the depredations of capitalism.