No observer of Scottish politics could have failed to be impressed by the beauty parade [sic] of ministerial royalty that made their way to Oban last week for the Scottish Labour Party Conference. A remarkable caravan of exiled Caledonians made their way north; Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and John Reid merely the most pre-eminent of them. And, perhaps even more extraordinary, this bulging sack full of ferrets managed to pause from tearing strips of flesh from each other's flanks to train their attentions on the real enemy; Alex Salmond, leader of an SNP which, as this blog has recorded and discussed over the last few weeks, is either level-pegging with Labour or even surging ahead in the polls, depending on whom you believe.
Nor has the slow shift in the political landscape gone unnoticed by the English commentariat. Just yesterday, Simon Jenkins and Simon Heffer penned major pieces in the Guardian and the Telegraph respectively, both in essence arguing the same case (albeit from different standpoints); Go. Walk out the door. Just turn around now, 'cause you're not welcome anymore. Hell, added Heffer, we never really loved you, anyway. But don't think you're getting the house. That's ours.
Even Michael Fry, one of the grandes dames of the Scottish Tory establishment (if one can speak with a straight face of such a phenomenon) has recently declared that independence is now the only sensible solution to the nation's ills, and that he will be voting SNP at the Holyrood elections next May.
These straws in the wind suggest that journalists, politicians and chatterati alike are beginning to wake up to the very real possibility of an SNP-led administration after next year's elections and, more to the point, the prospect of Scotland going its own way, although whether with a tearful wave or a snarling V-sign remains to be seen.
Of course, for the SNP to win the largest number of seats come May, they have to negotiate an electoral map which sees vast swathes of the country trudge joylessly to the polls year after year, like an army of particularly mindless zombies, to return Labour representatives of sometimes quite startling mediocrity. Even were they to overcome this hurdle, that would not be the end of the story but merely the beginning; most observers agree that, even if they were able to form one, the exigencies of coalition government might prevent, or at least delay, the SNP's holding an independence referendum in the aftermath of victory. And then there would be the small matter of winning it; whatever polls may say, Scotland's appetite for separatism is, at best, lukewarm.
And yet, and yet. I wonder if we - and, by we, I mean the majority of Scots who have always resisted the idea of independence, whether in casual conversation in the pub or with our votes - if we are, really, thinking very long and hard about what divorce could mean? Beyond smirking suggestions that we might rent out rooms in British embassies worldwide or put passport inspectors on the train at Berwick, are we really taking the possibility of a change in our nationality seriously?
I think that, in as far as it is possible to generalise, we are not. Opinion polls purport to show that a majority of Scots back the prospect of an independent Scotland; but outside of committed SNP supporters, I know of no Scot who seriously believes that we will be 'free' in five years' time. Independence would mean not just a reshuffle of seats at the UN or an extra set of diplomats dipping their snouts in the Brussels trough; it would mean a cultural shift of potentially seismic proportions; a reassessment of our identity as Scots and as citizens; it could be the moment when we took our first steps on the path to prosperity and renewed self-confidence as a proud member of the concert of nations, or - who knows? - it could simply mean an acceleration in our long, vertiginous descent from the heights of David Hume and Adam Smith to the land of such intellectual pygmies as Henry McLeish and Rosie Kane. It might even - and not incidentally - presage a total realignment of the Scottish political map.
These are big issues about which there should be, must be, a debate - a major, grown-up, serious debate, because these are important and weighty matters. But that national conversation just isn't going on - not being helped, admittedly, by doltish, rabble-rousing garbage from the likes of John Reid; claiming that you're either with the Union or with the terrorists, as he did last week, was patronising to the point of insult. But where is the serious discussion? Who is standing up and asking the big questions? What will independence mean for us as Scots, what will it mean for the rest of the UK and, if we are really going to take this momentous step, where are we going and why?
Yes, of course, it's asking a lot to expect mature debate from the coterie of slack-jawed morons and clock-punching placeholders that make up the bulk of the Scottish political nation, most of whom - a few notable exceptions aside - would shrivel up in the face of real responsibility like a virgin being ordered to drop his Y-fronts by the prom queen. This is particularly true a few months out from a tight election. But how much more febrile would the atmosphere be in the runup to a putative independence referendum? In those circumstances, John Reid would probably be warning of the slaughter of the firstborn on D-Day plus one.
No, this debate has to be had now. But we're not having it. No-one's having it, really. The swinging dicks of Scottish Labour certainly don't want to have the argument; they just want to hang on to their seats, keep their hold on power at Holyrood (Why, incidentally? To what end? What are Scottish Labour actually for?); their strategy is to ramp up the rhetoric and close down the debate, not open it up. We can't rely on our politicians to have it, any more than we'd trust them to run with scissors or spell long words. We need to start talking about this ourselves. We need to look before we leap.
