Another Scottish independence referendum could be risky for the regional government in Edinburgh, an academic and analyst has said.
Embattled British Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote to Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and first minister in the devolved administration, on Wednesday evening to deny her latest demand for a re-run of the 2014 plebiscite.
"As our country faces unprecedented challenges at home and abroad, I cannot agree that now is the time to return to a question, which was clearly answered by the people of Scotland in 2014," Johnson wrote.
Sturgeon announced in June that Scotland's Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain — whose cabinet post combines the powers of the Westminster government's attorney general and the director of public prosecutions — would ask the Supreme Court to rule on the legality of holding another vote without necessary approval from the Westminster Parliament.
The nationalist leader claimed Scots would vote to separate from England — where many of them work — out of a desire to reverse Brexit and opposition to 12 years of government by the Conservative Party, which holds few Parliamentary seats in Scotland.
Dr Roslyn Fuller, director of the non-profit think tank Solonian Democracy Institute and the author of the book Beasts and Gods: How Democracy Changed Its Meaning and Lost Its Purpose told Sputnik that while pushing for a repeat referendum was central to the SNP's identity, it was also a dangerous gamble.
She said SNP's planned vote next year would only be "advisory" and "non-binding", but that it also took the party back to its basic reason for being.
"I think the SNP has the same challenges that many other independence parties like Sinn Fein or the Bloc Quebecois have — they succeed in attaining power in their own region which forces them to go from a single-issue party (independence) to develop a multitude of other policies that voters then judge them on," the academic said.
"They end up working within the system they intended to break away from and this can dilute their message," Fuller added. "Sturgeon and the SNP generally need to be seen to be continuing to pursue independence to satisfy a certain portion of their voters, and this is a way to achieve that".
Running the plebiscite — with legal sanction — and winning would give the SNP a boost going in to the next general election, due by the end of January 2025 but potentially much sooner, the analyst believes.
Even if the vote was blocked, Sturgeon has already stated that she would consider the next general election a de-facto referendum on independence, she points out. "So again, it would serve to drive out the vote for the SNP and try to focus attention on this one issue (independence) that differentiates them from the other major parties."
"The only really risky situation for her would be if the Court did greenlight such an advisory referendum and it failed at the polls," Fuller stressed.
The 'Yes' campaign was leading in the polls in the run-up to the 2014 referendum, but ultimately the 10 per cent of voters declaring themselves undecided went overwhelmingly to the 'No' camp. Scotland voted by 55 per cent to 45 to remain part of the UK.
The key unknown factor, according to Fuller, is who succeeds Johnson as next Tory leader an PM.
"My personal feeling is that we'll be seeing a turn of the Tories back to more establishment politics with likely quite different policies," she says. "I think they ran Johnson as a counter to Corbyn, but that job is done now that the Labour party has turned back to its own centre."
Fuller argues that such a major change of political direction would be significant enough that a snap general election should be called to seek a new mandate to govern. She says the SNP's performance at the polls would be crucial to their referendum bid.
Legal Avenues
The think-tank director believes Sturgeon's appeal to the Supreme Court shows the SNP is anxious keep its latest bid for a referendum on firm legal ground, since its declared pretext for the vote is so Scotland can re-apply for membership of the European Union (EU). But she cautioned that would open "a whole can of worms."
"Firstly, it clouds the entire idea of independence. It Scotland were to re-join the EU, which is heading towards getting rid of unanimity voting, the average Scot would have significantly less power than they do if they remain in the UK," she says.
"It is not 'independence' in any actual meaning of the word," Fuller stressed. "How do you run an 'independence' referendum on the understanding that if you win, you are going to join a larger, even less democratic, entity?"
But more importantly, an unsanctioned 'indyref' would put the SNP in the same bracket as the coalition of Catalan nationalist parties who held an unofficial plebiscite in 2017, in which only supporters of independence bothered to vote. The political organisers found themselves arrested and charged or, in the case of then-regional president Carles Puigdemont, fleeing abroad as a fugitive.
"There are countries in the EU, like Spain, that are very much against separatist referendums, so getting some kind of legal blessing for this is probably necessary to retain their support," Fuller says.