Back to the Future

Back to the Future

Within five years, the people of Scotland will be asked to decide if they want to remain part of the union or create an independent state.

This is due to a remarkable win for the nationalists in elections to Scotland's devolved parliament which sits in Edinburgh.

The Scottish National Party [SNP] had governed as a minority administration but this time around it has taken 69 of the 129 seats up for grabs.

When the parliament was established in 1999 a complex electoral system was drawn up – a mixture of first-past-the-post and proportional representation – to ensure no party, particularly the nationalists, would ever win an overall majority.

But the founding fathers failed to see a complete collapse of the left of the centre Labour Party in its traditional industrial heartlands around Glasgow and Fife, the loss of every single Labour seat in the north east around Aberdeen and the huge collapse of the Liberal Democratic Party.

The SNP was told it would suffer because as the party in government in Scotland it approved the controversial release of the convicted Lockerbie Bomber, Abdel Basset Al Megrahi.  It didn't. It simply wasn't an election issue. 

Labour claimed the Liberal Democrat vote collapsed because of their links with the Conservatives in the UK government and disaffected voters went straight to the SNP. There might be some truth in that, but it does not detract from this astonishing result.

The leader of the nationalists, Alex Salmond, is by common consent the only 'big beast' in Scottish politics, by far and away the most impressive, informed, in touch politician.

He has in the past put forth the idea of Scotland having a parliament, everyone rejected this but they were wrong. That the SNP would never run Scotland, but they did with a minority administration in the last parliament. And that his party could never secure a majority.  And it has.

Now he says those who predict Scotland will never be independent must be worried.

The problem he has is convincing the people of Scotland. The last opinion poll puts support for a breakaway at just one-in-three.

Any referendum will come towards the end of the parliament’s five year term (it’s been extended for a year to avoid a clash with possible UK-wide votes).

One date being suggested is 2014.

That would be the 700th anniversary of the country’s most famous victory over English forces at Bannockburn during the first war of independence.

And so on a date so infused with historical significance, so resonant of the past, the Scots may get the chance to decide their future.