You'd think that this key lesson from history, ie. that a de facto referendum in 1918 succeeded where an agreed referendum failed in 2014, would at least lead to the idea of a de facto referendum being treated with proper respect throughout the independence movement, and that it certainly wouldn't be wrongly dismissed as "crazy" or "bonkers" - but nevertheless that's precisely the message we've been hearing over the last couple of weeks from the former SNP MPs Stewart McDonald and Tommy Sheppard. Mr McDonald has always been something of an outlier in the stridency of his opposition to those who seek to win an independence mandate by any non-London-approved route, but it's more concerning to hear the same sort of rhetoric from Mr Sheppard. It may be a symptom of a climate that the SNP leadership are trying to foster within the party - one in which the whole idea of using a scheduled election to win a mandate for independence is deligitimised and placed beyond the bounds of acceptable or reasonable debate.
Straw men, misdirection, and wildly inaccurate claims abound in Mr Sheppard's article. He tries to make out, for example, that a unilateral declaration of independence would inevitably have to follow any victory in a de facto referendum, and that this is partly what makes the whole plan "bonkers". Well, it's true that some - but not all - proponents of a de facto referendum would want UDI afterwards, but by the same token there are some opponents of a de facto referendum (most notably Craig Murray) who just want to go ahead and declare UDI without any sort of mandate at all. A de facto referendum and UDI are self-evidently two completely separate things, and conflating the two is nothing more than a misleading debating tactic. It's perfectly possible to have a de facto referendum on a consultative basis and to simply use any successful result as powerful leverage to bring the UK government to the negotiating table.
It's telling, incidentally, that Mr Murray himself uses a mirror image of Mr Sheppard's straw man argument. In a recent tweet, Mr Murray said: "The SNP have started stating, as a matter of principle, that Independence MUST only be achieved with the agreement of Westminster." If the SNP are stating that, they're just stating the obvious, and they're even stating something that logically Mr Murray must agree with, because why else would he be arguing for independence supporters to lay down their lives by standing unarmed in front of British tanks and waiting to be crushed? It must be because he thinks that Ghandian tactics will lead to London accepting Scottish independence - which means he tacitly agrees that London's acceptance will eventually be needed. So the problem is not that the SNP leadership are correctly saying that London's agreement will ultimately be needed for independence - it's that they're wrongly saying that London's agreement will be needed for us to seek or win a mandate for independence, which in reality is plainly something we can do entirely constitutionally and legally without London's consent.
Mr Sheppard and Mr Murray agree on pretty much nothing other than their opposition to a de facto referendum, so the fact that they're both trying to gloss over the absolutely fundamental distinction between unilaterally seeking an outright mandate for independence and unilaterally declaring independence ought to set some pretty massive alarm bells ringing.
The most jaw-dropping double-standard in all of this is the endlessly-repeated claim from the 'caution' faction that a de facto referendum strategy must by definition be a dud strategy unless its proponents can show how it would automatically lead to Scotland becoming an independent country. If that same logic were to be applied to the 'caution' faction's own strategy of seeking a mandate for a Section 30 order, that strategy would already have been proved beyond doubt to be a dud on a galactic scale, because by my count we have won no fewer than five clear-cut mandates for a Section 30 order since 2016, but a Section 30 order has never actually followed.
Oh, but wait: Mr Sheppard goes on to argue that we can still "force" London's hand by "driving public support for independence to much higher levels". In other words, a majority in favour of independence, which we already have in an average of all opinion polls, is woefully insufficient and we instead need some sort of eye-wateringly fantastical supermajority. Not only does that abandon the entire principle of democratic self-determination (by implicitly saying that Scotland should be forced to remain in the UK if only a 'narrow' majority of its people wish to become independent) but it's also magical thinking. The idea that London will refuse a referendum when defeat for the No side is merely likely, but will suddenly agree to a referendum when defeat for the No side becomes certain, is for the birds.
Mr Sheppard prays in aid the lower support for pro-independence parties than for independence itself as an additional reason for believing a de facto referendum would be unsuccessful. But that looks at the problem the wrong way round. The reason that independence support has become decoupled from SNP support is that some voters no longer believe that independence is on offer if they vote SNP. Change that perception, as you would do pretty much automatically by seeking an outright mandate for independence, and many of those voters would come flooding back.
Perhaps most dodgily of all, Mr Sheppard claims that the SNP conference has already roundly rejected the concept of a de facto referendum. Well, I was a delegate at the SNP conference last October, and I therefore know that we were invited to reject a de facto referendum specifically for this year's election on the basis that we could trust the leadership to win a single-party overall majority and then use it to force a Section 30 order out of the UK government. As that entire premise turned out to be bogus, it's plainly an open question whether conference would back a de facto referendum for future elections, if given a chance to do so.
The puzzling thing is this. The SNP leadership are not remotely squeamish about questioning the UK government's democratic legitimacy in ignoring repeated mandates for Scotland's right to choose. Well, success in a de facto referendum would strengthen our hand in questioning the UK government's democratic legitimacy, because by that point London would be ignoring a mandate for independence itself, not just a mandate for a referendum. Why suddenly become squeamish about that, when the principle is identical? As I said a few days ago, it's almost as if some people in the independence movement do not want to live in a world in which the No vote from 2014 has been clearly overturned, and would prefer to continue living in a world in which London still has the 2014 result to fall back on to provide some cover for its obstructionism. That's a psychological phenomenon which should perplex and trouble us all.
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