Caledonia Dreaming, Multi-Party Politics and the Rise of the Populist Right
Should progressive people inside and outwith Labour seek to move the party to a pro-independence position? David Purdy contributes to the ongoing debate.
In a recent post (Early Days, 29 July 2026), Doug Chalmers and Seb Fischer bemoaned the subservience of Scottish Labour to Westminster and expressed concern about the Burnham government's dealings with John Swinney and his colleagues. The early portents, they argued, did not bode well. Anas Sarwar's surprise resignation as party leader and his 'elevation' to the House of Lords to take up a ministerial post in the Business Department suggested that the Scottish party was still being treated as a branch office. And the decision to retain Douglas Alexander, a notorious scourge of the SNP, as Secretary of State for Scotland offered little hope for a less fractious, more constructive relationship between Westminster and Holyrood.
In sharp contrast, Doug and Seb invite us to imagine a world in which Scottish Labour leaves the mothership, backs the demand for indyref 2 and campaigns alongside the SNP and Scottish Greens for a Yes vote. The proposal that Scotland should leave the UK is then approved by a 65 percent majority, and after the terms of separation have been settled – a stage in the narrative that is curiously missing – Scottish Labour emerges as the largest party in an independent Scottish Parliament, having reconnected with its historical traditions and overtaken its rivals on the centre-left.
Doug and Seb acknowledge that the sequence of events they describe is a daydream and I have no problem with that, so long as we maintain a clear distinction between time-bound action in the real world and timeless speculation about another world. From the standpoint of human agents – whether individuals or collectives – at any given point in time the past is closed and cannot be altered, while the future lies open and contains a multitude of possibilities, few of which will ever be realised. When we use imagination to explore these possibilities, we step outside any definite timeframe. Attaching dates to the events recounted in a waking dream may lend it verisimilitude, but does not turn it into a prophecy or forecast. That said, dreams, visions and utopian thinking in general may offer hope, consolation and inspiration, especially in dark times. Indeed, dreams often inspire more devotion than any party manifesto or business prospectus.
A good example is John Steinbeck's novella Of Mice and Men, which tells the story of two migrant farmhands in California during the Great Depression. George Milton is small, quick-witted, but uneducated; his companion, Lennie Small, is a big man – physically strong, but with the mind of a child. What sustains both men and the bond between them is a dream: the great American frontier dream of settling down on their own smallholding. Here, George repeatedly reassures Lennie, they will keep rabbits and feed them on home-grown alfalfa. Yet the story ends in tragedy, reminding us that “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley / An' leave us nought but grief an' pain / For promised joy.”
Full disclosure: I remain to be convinced of the case for Scottish independence. I would prefer to see Ireland reunited and Britain transformed into a federal state, with the House of Commons reconfigured as the English parliament and the House of Lords replaced by an elected federal legislature, responsible for defence, foreign affairs and macro-economic management. But this elusive object of desire lies on the far horizon of political possibility – perhaps even beyond it. Either way, it is a more distant prospect than the break-up of Britain. So instead of focusing on the long run – in which, as Keynes famously remarked, we are all dead – let us consider the short- or short-to-medium run. For this is where the action is: where we live our lives, weigh up options, arrive at decisions and proceed to act on them, in full awareness that our projects are always going to be constrained: partly by the legacy of history, as embodied in established institutions and articulated by prevailing norms, which in turn have been shaped by vested interests, structural privilege and dominant ideologies; and partly by the exigences of political conflict.
Cleavages in Scottish politics: from block on progress to progressive bloc
Over the past thirty years, Britain's political landscape has been reshaped. In each of its three nations, five or six parties now compete for power; and on the major issues of the day – the future of the Union, UK-EU relations, the neo-liberal policy model, the climate crisis and the depletion of nature – there are overlapping cleavages, with differing party alignments on different issues. (Strictly speaking, these are all clusters of issues and the positions taken by parties or by tendencies within them are generally more nuanced than a broad-brush treatment can convey). Scottish Labour, for example, is strongly pro-Union and thus opposes the SNP and the Greens. But on the other issues, it stands on the same side, or at least might be open to the idea of agreeing on particular policies.
Similarly, the long-term goal of the Greens is to transform the metabolism between humankind and the natural world, an ambition that places them well to the left the other five parties represented in the Scottish Parliament. But on the more narrowly defined issue of global warming and the pursuit of net zero, they might be willing to join forces with the SNP, Labour and the Liberal Democrats in opposition to Reform UK and the Conservatives. And as a small, albeit growing party, they have a strong incentive to seek out alliances if they want to influence public policy.
What would it take for the four centre-left parties to set aside the issues that divide them and form a progressive bloc around the issues on which their positions are – or could be – aligned? Clearly, the main obstacle is the question of independence. For the SNP, this is existential: as Alex Salmond said on stepping down as party leader in 2014: “The dream shall never die.” (Note the use of the auxiliary verb “shall”: defiant in defeat, he was expressing emphatic intention, not making a prediction.) Yet the SNP has shown flexibility on the timing of a second referendum and might be prepared to consider alternatives to the format adopted used last time, when voters faced a binary Yes/No choice with a simple majority deciding the result. This procedure is easy to understand, but as we discovered after the UK-wide Brexit referendum in 2016, it is also fraught with danger. When the stakes are high, opinion is polarised and the result close, it can seriously damage social cohesion and political stability. For in a referendum, as distinct from an election to choose a government, voters on the losing side cannot look forward to reversing the decision next time. A year or so before the Supreme Court ruled that a referendum held without the authorisation of the UK government would have no legal standing, Nicola Sturgeon appeared to accept this point. In a speech to the SNP conference, she told delegates that her model for indyref2 was not the Brexit vote, but the devolution referendum of 1997, which was won by 74-26, a decisive majority that could plausibly be described as representing the “settled will” of the Scottish people.
Unfortunately, Scottish Labour has shown no interest in approaching SNP to explore the scope for changing the rules of the game. Instead, it has lined up with the other pro-Union parties to insist that now is not the time for a rematch, citing the successive shocks that have plunged the whole world into permacrisis: Covid 19, the Russo-Ukrainian war, the resurgence of ethno-religious conflict in the Middle East, and the geo-economic and geo-political consequences of Donald Trump – all played out against the backdrop of great power rivalry between the US and China, while the UN and the rest of the world look on. This remains a compelling argument. All the same, the question of independence is not going away and sooner or later, one way or another, will have to be resolved.
In the meantime, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Sinn Fein have agreed to exert concerted pressure on Westminster aimed at advancing their respective goals. It remains to be seen what comes of this initiative. But one thing is clear: an alliance of nationalist parties seeking the break-up of Britain is a very different proposition from a progressive bloc of centre-left parties with common objectives focused not just on London, but also on Edinburgh and Cardiff. The latter project would, of course, be more difficult to set up and sustain. But by the same token, the scale of its ambition is greater, as befits an age of domestic and global permacrisis.
Saving liberal democracy
In common with other liberal democracies, the UK faces formidable economic challenges. The world has never really recovered from the financial crash of 2007-8 and the ensuing deep recession. According to Mervyn King, then governor of the Bank of England, the previous fifteen years were the NICE age (the acronym stands for “non-inflationary, constant expansion”). But the two decades since the crash have been marked by anaemic economic growth, persistent budget deficits, mounting public debt, deteriorating public services and widening inequalities of income, wealth and place as the supply of good, well-paid jobs dwindled and real wages barely grew at all, while property prices and asset values soared. Any government, whatever its complexion, would struggle to deal with such an inheritance. Pressure for higher public spending – on defence, policing, courts, prisons, housing, transport, schools, health, social care, social security, environmental services and public infrastructure – is intense. How can it be accommodated while simultaneously containing inflation, retaining the confidence of businesses and financial investors, and acknowledging the limits of taxpayer tolerance?
To be sure, “confidence” and “tolerance” are elastic concepts and in the course of time, prevailing ideas about issues such as the moral limits of markets, the proper role of government, social (in)justice, and the obligations we owe to future generations can be challenged and changed. But progress on this front tends to be slow, even when proponents of plans for a better world treat their opponents with respect and refrain from sermonising, virtue-signalling and invective. Meanwhile, in the short run, people's moral values and beliefs about society are largely given and the government's room for manoeuvre on the policy front is correspondingly tight.
What makes the management of the UK economy more than normally problematic and consequential at the present time is the fragmentation of party politics and the rise of the populist right. Under the first-past-the-post voting system still used in Westminster elections, Reform UK could win the next election with just over a third of the votes. Translated into parliamentary seats, this would probably not produce a landslide total such as Labour amassed in 2024 on a similar vote share, but it might be enough for the party to form a government, either alone or with Conservative support. Since Reform's success in last May's elections, its polling numbers have slipped as both the party and its leader became mired in scandals over their respective sources of finance. So for now, the spectre of Weimar has retreated. (In any case, history never repeats itself, though sometimes it rhymes). Even so, the populist right, including its neo-fascist fringe, is on the march across the world, and as the defeat of Victor Orban in Hungary shows, the only force that can stop it is some form of united front. As long as the parties of the centre-left put partisan interest ahead of the values and causes on which they broadly agree, liberal democracy is in danger.
Such a convergence might take various forms, ranging from tactical voting and cross-party talks to common programmes and electoral pacts. In each case, a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for success is the cultivation of what Ben Pimlott in his book Labour and the Left in the 1930s (Cambridge University Press, 1977) called a “popular front of the mind.” In that “low, dishonest decade”, under the shadow of fascism, united fronts – and later, popular fronts – were formed in several democratic states, with varying degrees of success. In a future post, I plan to examine these episodes. Here, I simply repeat what I said earlier: the formation of a progressive bloc across mainland Britain will not be easy, but all things considered, it offers a better way forward than either Labour's stubborn insistence on going it alone or a strategy aimed at the break-up of Britain. As the historian A.J.P. Taylor once wrote: “Without democracy socialism would be worth nothing. But democracy is worth a great deal, even when it is not socialist.”
Published 22 September 2026.
Illustration: a detail of ‘Engineers’ by Sandy Moffat, a mural commissioned by the Amalgamated Engineering Union for its Edinburgh offices in 1972.
