Salmond: Scotland “in an irreversible process of independence”

“Were his aspirations to be met, it could lead to the intriguing possibility of a party committed to the break-up of the Union as we know it could hold the balance of power in who forms the very same United Kingdom government whose legitimacy to rule they question.”

Sadly we know whose side the SNP came down on in the past. In ’79 it was their critical votes that brought down the Callaghan govt and ushered in Margaret Thatcher.

As Callaghan said at the time: “What a massive display of unsullied principle! The minority parties have walked into a trap. If they win, there will be a general election. I am told that the current joke going around the House is that it is the first time in recorded history that turkeys have been known to vote for an early Christmas.”

I’ve no time for the nats myself …but Labour does need to change the record regarding the no confidence vote in 1979. I’ve NEVER heard the Liberals being accused of bringing down the Callaghan despite their havng 14 MPs (3 of them Scottish). It is in any event 30 years ago (and if the Thatcher legacy is still with us it is in part because new Labour bought into into many of it’s assumptions) Two years on from Labour losing its top slot North of the border for the first since the 1950′s I’ve yet to see any serious analysis of why they lost. Knee jerk nat baiting might keep the colleagues warm in Holyrood – but it aint going to change much in the wider world

The 1979 vote of confidence also just meant that the election was in held in May rather than 5 months later in October – and in retrospect even Callaghan didn’t believe that he’d have won it then either.

Of course like Brown his big mistake was not going earlier – just as if Brown had sought to strengthen his position in Autumn 2007 by holding a snap election we’d now be looking at another 2-3 years of Labour govt, so if Callaghan had gone to the country in Oct 1978 before the Social Contract collapsed the polls indicated we might have been spared the worst years of Thatcherism (and if she’d survived that defeat and won in 1982-3 her slash and burn policies would at least not have been implemented in the middle of a deep recession).

Scotland may well be closer than ever to independence, but given that it’s never really been that close to it in the past, that’s not necessarily saying very much. Talk of an “irreversible process” is just standard Nationalist bluster, and I strongly suspect Alex Salmond himself knows it.

Even if the SNP succeed in achieving a pivotal position in the House of Commons after the next election, it may not work out for them quite as they expect. In other countries such as Spain and Canada with devolved layers of government, the entangling of separatist parties in coalition politics at the national level has if anything strengthened state cohesion. The pattern seems to be a steady accretion of powers to the devolved bodies, which nonetheless always falls a good deal short of independence. Of course most of these countries have PR, so coalition politics is normal whereas in the UK it is exceptional.

Whatever the next election result, the fact remains that there is no precedent I can think of of a developed country breaking up without a major political crisis. The closest example is the break-up of Czechoslovakia, but given this occurred so soon after the fall of communism (a fairly dramatic event) I’m not sure it can really count.

Perhaps a Tory government, with minimal Scottish representation, pursuing a slash and burn approach to public finances could provide such a crisis, but I suspect even this would be insufficient. It seems far more likely to me that the coming years will see increased devolution rather than full independence.

[...] arrogant attitude. It will have been a particular blow for the nationalists following Salmond’s aim, set just a few weeks ago at his party conference, to get 20 SNP MPs elected at the general [...]