Can John Swinney delivery indyref2?

It mattered little that Prime Minister Andy Burnham had walked back on his words – John Swinney was in Cardiff ready to end the Union.

The SNP leader lined up with counterparts from Plaid Cymru and Sinn Féin in front of the media as the UK constitution again came under the spotlight.

The four – Swinney, Plaid’s Rhun ap Iorwerth and Michelle O’Neill and Mary Lou McDonald of Sinn Féin – agreed a memorandum of understanding which urged Burnham’s government to prepare for and facilitate border polls, warning that “Westminster’s time is coming to an end”. 

“I think he will be the last prime minister of the United Kingdom”, Swinney said of Burnham.

The dramatic statements came days after the new PM was wrong-footed by the SNP’s Chris Law in the House of Commons with a question that was two weeks in the making and addressed a live issue in Scottish politics. 

While the country remains split on whether there should be a fresh independence referendum, there is interest on both sides of the constitutional divide on the criteria by which one could be called. 

A ‘hail Mary’ legal case brought by the last Sturgeon government confirmed that the Scottish Parliament cannot do so without Westminster consent, something successive prime ministers have refused to give. Meanwhile, though the SNP’s vote share has reduced, independence-supporting MSPs outnumber their pro-Union counterparts, and the UK Government has seemed either unable or unwilling to set out a test for when or how the constitutional question could be posed again. 

The subject became an issue in the Scottish Labour leadership election, with neither Joe Fagan nor Michael Marra able to provide clarity under repeated questioning. “I’m not going to sit here and set out a series of tests as to what that looks like,” Marra said of a trigger point, telling Bernard Ponsonby: “It’s not my test to set.” “See if the country wants another referendum,” Fagan proffered in the same Go Radio interview, “it’ll just be obvious.”

In the Commons, Law set out for answers. He asked Burnham about his prior comment that a Northern Ireland border poll is “off the table”, despite the provisions of the Good Friday Agreement. “Does the prime minister recognise that he has no mandate to defy the constitutional wishes of the people of Northern Ireland, the people of Scotland or the people of Wales, and that any written constitution or devolution agenda must include a pathway for each of those nations to choose their own future?”, Law said.

Unsatisfied with an answer that did not mention Scotland, the Dundee Central MP lucked out when he tried again the following week, having spent days rephrasing his effort. This time the response set political wheels in motion. An NI vote would be considered “when there is clear consensus in the country”, Burnham said, adding that the situation in Scotland is “exactly the same”. 

“I am not aware that there is majority public support for another referendum, and until that changes, there will not be one,” Burnham concluded – only to clarify his meaning in a letter the following day as Swinney called for a “clear, understandable mechanism” on triggering a second Scottish independence referendum.

There is “no consensus” for such a ballot, Burnham wrote, and as such “independence and a referendum are off limits”.

“It’s disingenuous,” Law says. “It makes the UK Government look rather weak around these issues.

“We have tried various different attempts with different prime ministers to get a question to land in a way that would get a more meaningful response,” he goes on. “I thought to myself, based on the nature of the Good Friday Agreement, which is based on international law and was delivered in part by a Labour government, either he stands by it or he doesn’t, and then what does that mean for the other nations?

“I asked it half in hope. The response was pretty clear.”

And then, two days after that Cardiff summit – at which the Welsh and Scottish governments also signed a collaboration agreement on areas like child poverty and sustainability – the Irish president, Catherine Connolly, walked into Bute House for the start of an official visit. 

If [indyref2] was called now, it would be a statistical toss of a coin. Neither side would be confident of winning

In Dublin, Taoiseach Michael Martin might have been critical of Sinn Féin’s cosy-up with the SNP and Plaid Cymru, saying they may have “set back unity” by having “embroiled Northern Ireland in British politics”, but Connolly’s visit – the first by an Irish president in 10 years – made for good optics for Swinney. The FM has sought both to deepen relations with EU-member Ireland, becoming the first overseas leader to meet Connolly in Dublin, and to increase Scotland’s visibility on the international stage. It is perhaps helpful, then, that their Edinburgh meeting came less than a week after Donald Trump told the Irish press that reunification would be “one of the naturals of all time”, adding that he would save his thoughts on the Scottish question “for another day”

Twelve years and three Holyrood election cycles on from indyref, the constitutional issue continues to divide. A raft of polls show Yes edging slightly ahead by around 52 per cent to 48 per cent, but the single digit difference is far from convincing enough to ensure a victory for Swinney even if he manages to deliver a referendum by 2031, as is his stated aim.

And while he and his party seek to build momentum, so unionists have mobilised around support for the status quo, with members of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party – O’Neill’s partners in government – joining the Orange Order in Edinburgh on the day after Connolly’s arrival. Chaired by businesswoman Marie Macklin, this too sought “greater cooperation” across the Irish Sea. 

And, responding to the Cardiff summit, Reform’s Scottish leader Malcolm Offord said the lack of an SNP majority means Swinney lacks a mandate for another referendum. “Westminster has served Scotland well for 320 years,” Offord said. “Reform rejects this latest stunt for what it is and will always be resolute in the belief that Scotland’s future lies safely within the family of nations.”

An observer may well ask how we have moved from a “loveless” Scottish election in which turnout plunged to a renewed independence push within just four months. Pollster Mark Diffley says that is a “good question”. “I think we can all agree it was a slip-up,” he says of Burnham’s PMQs comment. 

The Cardiff summit was both a chance to “re-energise” the bases of each participating party and to apply collective pressure on the UK Government. “In that regard it was quite powerful,” he says, despite differences in circumstance across the devolved regions, and brings the issue “back into sharp focus, at least for the short-term”. But “there still isn’t a huge appetite for another referendum”.

“I know things can change but this five-year timeline the first minister set out, the latest polling would suggest that’s the minority position. A lot of people would rather wait longer than five years.”

Results from Ipsos support that timeline. Its research found that while 55 per cent of Britons think the UK will still exist in its current form by 2031, only 35 per cent say the same about the outlook for 2036. Over a 20-year horizon the figure drops to 24 per cent. 

Independence is going nowhere; the dial hasn’t shifted since 2014

For now, support for a breakaway Scotland is nowhere near the “mythical 60 per cent” needed to suggest a “comfortable” win. But with figures hovering around the halfway mark, the same is true of support for the status quo. “If it was called now,” Diffley says of indyref2, “it would be a statistical toss of a coin. Neither side would be confident of winning.”

Strathclyde University’s Dr Neil McGarvey, who has written extensively about Scotland’s place in the union, is doubtful that the Cardiff summit will achieve much. “It’s a bit of a given,” he says of the terms of the memorandum of understanding – which include progress on social justice and EU cooperation as well as to sovereignty aims. “It’s the SNP trying to show some degree of movement on independence,” he says of Swinney’s involvement, “but the UK Government isn’t going to feel much pressure from that.”

Former first minister Henry McLeish agrees, saying the tripartite talks “meant absolutely nothing” to any audience other than Welsh, Scottish and Irish nationalists. “I understand John Swinney’s desperation to keep the independence machine ticking over but the sad fact for him [is that] independence is going nowhere; the dial hasn’t shifted since 2014, and of the huge number of polls that have been taken since then, very few have shown more support for independence.

“Scotland is divided. It was divided in 2014, it’s divided now, and I don’t see anything coming out of this.”

There have been murmurs of unhappiness at Burnham’s handling of the subject within Labour ranks, however, with the sense that this devolutionist PM is not up to speed on the Scottish context. One unnamed Labour MP told The Times the PM had “got himself tied up in knots” and must now “do some work to reassure people”.

Law says he’s had conversations with Labour MPs that go further. “The official response is that ‘we stand resolutely in favour of the Union, and this question was asked a generation ago’, but there are individuals who I can’t name who are looking for a conversation around this,” he says. 

He says that doesn’t include Alloa and Grangemouth MP Brian Leishman, who has said that his party will “never win power if we refuse to offer a democratic route to holding another referendum”. “Good on him,” says Law, “but there are others and they are minority voices, but I think important voices.”

Still, Scottish Secretary Douglas Alexander has called the subject “a distraction” to the UK Government’s “vital work of growing the economy and helping to give families breathing space with the cost of living”.

When [Andy Burnham] said independence was off the table in Northern Ireland he inadvertently trampled all over the Good Friday Agreement

For the Conservatives, Russell Findlay said many Scots would “recoil at the sight of John Swinney joining forces with Sinn Féin in their shared desire to destroy the United Kingdom” and be “appalled by the SNP’s continued disrespect towards the majority of Scots who reject separation and want the devolved government in Edinburgh to get on with its job”. For the Lib Dems, David Green MSP said the FM should have been using Cardiff talks “to find common purpose in pushing power out to communities”.

That’s what Burnham’s devolution agenda is all about. The former mayor of Greater Manchester wants more mayors for England holding greater local powers, and he has expressed interest in exploring a “local model of devolution” for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. 

Alex Kerr MSP, the SNP’s national secretary, believes that shift in focus changes the playing field, but argues the PM has failed to appreciate differences between devolution in England and the rest of the UK, not least what he calls Scotland’s “constitutional logjam”. “You can see that he’s not across the detail on a whole host of things,” Kerr says. “When he said independence was off the table in Northern Ireland he inadvertently trampled all over the Good Friday Agreement, where the issue is very clearly codified. There were US senators commenting on that.”

The symbolism of the Cardiff summit was “huge”, he says. “It has helped bring that question of what is a democratic right to choose to a Westminster level for everyone to see.” 

It also came weeks before the SNP’s autumn conference in Aberdeen, the agenda for which is still to be finalised but will surely include debate on strategy.

And it took place the week before former SNP leader and first minister Nicola Sturgeon was due on our screens in The Wargame, in which she will play deputy UK prime minister to Michael Gove’s PM, with ex-Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy as foreign secretary. The programme will see the trio attempt to defend the UK against a fictional Russian attack and Sturgeon has suggested that Putin could be amongst its viewers.

Swinney will be hoping his real-life political drama will command more attention and achieve greater impact.