House of Commons/FlickrIndyRef2 doesn’t feel any closer today than it did what the Prime Minister said it was “off limits”. His language, at PMQs yesterday, whether deliberate or inadvertent, may have changed a bit but the reality has not.
Andy Burnham had initially seemed to take the same line as every Prime Minister since David Cameron, that he simply would not countenance another independence referendum. Yesterday, he seemed to soften a bit, suggesting that there could be another vote if public opinion showed demand for it. That is and has always been the reality.
In 2017 when prime minister Theresa May told first minister Nicola Sturgeon “now is not the time”, she was absolutely right. If people in Scotland had wanted another independence referendum, they would have said so by voting for an SNP majority in the 2016 Scottish Parliament election, just as they did in 2011. If they had vehemently disagreed with her, they would have overwhelmingly backed the SNP at the 2017 General Election. They didn’t.
Every SNP first minister’s request to every UK prime minister since (and there have been a few) has been much the same and got much the same response.
Yesterday the language did seem to shift ever so slightly. Andy Burnham linked the idea of another Scottish independence referendum to an Irish Border poll. He said the Good Friday Agreement made clear that a border poll would be “considered by the Northern Ireland secretary when there is a clear consensus in the country, when public opinion has changed to the point where the call has to be considered”. He went on, “I would say exactly the same situation in Scotland. I am not aware that there is a majority of public support for another referendum, and until that changes, there won’t be one”.
Today First Minister John Swinney has written to the Prime Minister asking for a meeting to discuss it. “Dear Andy,” he writes “your acceptance of the fact that majority support for independence in Scotland means a referendum should take place is welcome. I am encouraged you have reconsidered your previous comments…”
He wants the Prime Minister to agree a “legal mechanism, as exists in Northern Ireland”. The problem with that is that the legal mechanism agreed in the Good Friday Agreement is pretty vague, so vague that the Irish Prime Minister is today calling for greater clarity about what would lead to a border poll being called.
Andy Burnham’s off the cuff remarks at Prime Ministers Questions yesterday seem to have opened the floodgates on the constitution, or as Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay describes it “Andy Burnham has pulled the pin on the constitutional hand grenade”. But don’t panic! It seems unlikely to go off any time soon.
Most opinion polls have independence versus the union running fairly close – independence has been a bit ahead – 52-48 in a number of polls this year but that is far from clear enough to qualify under the vague directions of the Good Friday Agreement. John Swinney went in to the election in May asking voters for an SNP majority as a mandate to deliver another independence referendum. They didn’t give him one.
That is all why it doesn’t feel like IndyRef2 is any closer today that it did yesterday, but that is not to say nothing has changed. For the first time Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland all have nationalist First Ministers. And on Monday the SNP First Minister of Scotland, the Sinn Fein First Minister of Northern Ireland and the Plaid Cymru First Minister of Wales will all meet in Cardiff to sign a memorandum of understanding calling on the UK Government to prepare for and facilitate constitutional change. What Andy Burnham acknowledged yesterday, whether he meant to or not, was that the only demand for constitutional change a UK Prime Minister will accept will come from the people.
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