Scottish referendum still a sea-change in UK politics

More than a quarter of a century ago there was a famous incident involving an equally famous BBC weather forecaster. The meteorologist’s name was Michael Fish.

During a weather forecast in October 1987 he said: "Earlier on today a woman rang the BBC to say she'd heard there was a hurricane on the way," he began.

"Well, if you're watching, don't worry there isn't."

Within 24 hours the South East of Britain was battered by the worst storm encountered there for over 250 years.

Technically, it wasn’t a hurricane but the damage was still immense.

And the Scottish independence referendum was one in which just about the entirety of the political establishment was spectacularly blindsided in a very similar way.

Nobody saw it coming. It might not have been as devastating a hurricane as it might have been but despite a relatively facile win for the Yes side in the end, the damage has still the potential to be immense.

So how did it all happen? When you look back a decade or more, you will find that Scottish independence was only a preference of a smallish percentage of Scots people. What really accelerated change were changes introduced by one of the unionist parties, Labour, when it was in power. It offered a fair degree of devolution to Scotland, its own parliament in Holyrood and its own first minister, just as happened here in the North.

But Labour’s act of largesse was based a little on self-interest but also on a spectacular miscalculation. And it was this – it believed that the Scottish National Party would never be a dominant player in domestic politics.

As Fianna Fáil also discovered here in Ireland, staying in government for a third term is always perilous and often disastrous. For Labour in Scotland, it allowed the Scottish National Party and its astute and mercurial leader Alex Salmond wrest the prize from beneath its nose, governing first as a minority administration and then winning power in Holyrood in its own right.

And it was from that that the moves to hold a referendum came. With devolution came greatly increased support for more independence – ultimately it was still Westminster which held the purse strings and which made the major decisions on fiscal matters.

With a Tory government in power, the nationalists were able to capitalise on Scottish identity, a sense of dislocation and distance from the London seat of government, frustration that Scotland was unable to have autonomy and sovereignty over its own wealth, including its oil fields, and increasing public disenchantment with the health service (the funding of which was still controlled in London).

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.