NOT in tribute to Jeremy Corbyn, but because I’m prone to bad ideas, I tried to make jam the other week.
We’d been out looking for blackberries and my young children were keen on me doing something creative with the meagre finds.
I don’t know how long the Labour leader has been perfecting preserves, but jam-making is a lot harder than it sounds. I ended up with a brick of burnt-fruit toffee. The bin ate it.
At one point in our exertions, my six-year-old and I had to navigate a sodden bramble-covered slope without being scratched into confetti. I showed her how to crab-walk sideways down the hill to avoid a tumble. I’ve been reminded of that moment quite a few times recently as Nicola Sturgeon has edged away from a second referendum. First there was her speech on the 20th anniversary of the devolution referendum, in which division over independence seemed to have been downgraded to a bit of amicable banter between parties over the “final destination” of devolution.
Most of that speech was about trying to find consensus among Holyrood’s warring tribes.
On the surface it was about taking a stand against the Westminster legislation on Brexit. But it was also planning for a future in which an independence referendum has to be parked by a weakened First Minister as she refocuses her administration in light of June’s election losses.
With the trajectory of all decade-old governments trending earthwards, it also makes sense to feel out possible coalition partners in readiness for more reverses in the next Scottish elections.
Then there was Ms Sturgeon’s New Statesman interview. Although there was a dispute over what was printed, there is no dispute over what she said, because the SNP Government had its own verbatim transcript. In this, the First Minister said her approach to the referendum and its relationship to Brexit had changed since the election. “Is it different to what I said previously? Yes,” she said. Previously, she took the view that “we should decide now, at this point of time, give or take, depending on exactly when it became clear, we should do this”; meaning, when the terms of Brexit are clear, we hold a referendum, no messing.
But now her position is that “people are not ready to decide now that we will do that”. Instead, “we have to come back to that and decide, when things are clearer, whether we want to do it and what timescale we want to do it”; note that “whether”. It’s no longer a certainty. Having a second referendum may or may not take place before this Parliament ends in 2021, when her “cast-iron mandate” to hold one expires.
Ms Sturgeon’s language is subtly but inexorably changing to that of retreat. On Thursday, her official spokesman said she still wanted to hold a referendum once the “Brexit process” was completed but chose not to define what it included. “The end of the process is, frankly, very unclear at the moment,” he said. Asked if there would be a referendum by the 2021 election, he said: “The First Minister’s answer is ... as she said to the New Statesman, she honestly doesn’t know on timescale.”
He insisted the position was just the same as in June, when the First Minister told MSPs she’d update them on the timing of a referendum in late 2018. It doesn’t feel like it.
Back then, as Ms Sturgeon addressed parliament, her husband, the SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, launched a new party website to renew the movement for independence. Called mobilise.scot, it proclaimed: “A plan for the way forward.”
But the First Minister now “honestly doesn’t know” about timing, a pretty essential element of any plan. You can hardly mobilise a movement on “mibbes aye, mibbes naw”. Some might complain this is dancing on the head of a pin, obsessing about word games. But the message of the election was crystal clear for Ms Sturgeon: most voters don’t want a referendum. But a party leader can’t move away from its raison d’etre in one bound, especially ahead of conference. Traumatising the members is bad for business. So Ms Sturgeon is breaking it to them gently, almost subliminally, to keep the show on the road. It’s the difference between a puncture and blow-out. You can drive with one but not the other.
I suspect her bid for consensus could also prove handy. If she achieves her goal of working with others “in the national interest”, then she could, in a year or so, appeal to that same national interest to rule out a referendum in this parliament, perhaps to preserve a vital consensus on Brexit. She knows the referendum issue will become ever more problematic as the next election approaches, forcing other parties to distance themselves from the SNP.
So to get consensus at Holyrood, to get things done and look like a government with life left in it, she has to shelve another vote. But if she shelves it too suddenly, she risks consensus in her party. She has to move in increments, taking her party on a journey it really doesn’t want. It’s a thorny problem. As my six-year-old now knows: How do you cross a bramble patch? Slowly, of course.
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