Not Exactly Once in a Generation: Scottish Sepratists to Re-Run Independence Referendum After Just Nine Years

The head of the devolved government in north Britain, the First Minister of Scotland, has unilaterally declared a fresh independence referendum after her party lost the last ‘once in a generation’ vote less than eight years ago.

Europhile Scottish nationalists are taking a key lesson from the Brussels playbook on winning referendums: keep asking until you get the right answer. It was a tactic Brexiteers feared after Britain voted against the European Union’s wishes in 2016 given the tactic was seen at the time of the Maastricht Treaty but is now making a sorry appearance in the north of Britain.

Despite the Scottish National Party — left-wing nationalists who want to split the north of Britain off from the United Kingdom and become a small member state of the European Union — having agreed to a once-in-a-generation vote back in 2014 and the British government now not agreeing to another referendum so soon, their leader unilaterally announced a fresh vote on Tuesday.

Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said today there would be a “consultative” vote on Scottish independence next year, naming an October 19 date, The Times reports. Should it take place, that vote would be only a little over nine years after the last one on the subject, a far cry from the once-in-a-generation vote it was promised to be at the time.

Given the Scottish government, to whom power is ‘devolved’ from London, does not have the power to call such a referendum unilaterally, Sturgeon has asked the Scottish legal office to go to the UK supreme court to get a ruling on the legality of a vote.

Whether Sturgeon’s legal bid to ignore the UK government blocking another referendum comes so soon or not, she wins either way. Achieving a referendum would fulfil a promise to her left-nationalist supporters, and having it turned down by London could be easily spun into electoral dynamite to the Scotsnats who portray national rule by the south as autocratic and incompatible with Scottish pride.

That she intends to use such an outcome as a platform for campaigning for the next set of elections, Sturgeon is perfectly frank. She said Tuesday: “Scotland will have its say on independence… if the law says that is not possible, the general election will be a de-facto referendum. Either way, the people of Scotland will have their say.”

Despite the 2014 referendum being such recent history, if Scotland isn’t permitted to vote again now it would show, Sturgeon claimed, that the United Kingdom was not a “voluntary union of nations”.

United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson spoke out on the Scottish demand, The Guardian reports and said the country had other priorities than constantly re-running the Scottish Independence question. He said: “We think the number one priority for the country is the economic pressures, the spikes in the cost of energy, our plan for a stronger economy certainly means that we think that we’re stronger working together, but we have good relations with the Scottish government and we’ll see what she has to say.”

The Scottish Conservatives, the main opposition party in the Scottish Parliament, said the devolved government was achieving nothing because it was focussing all its energy on breaking up the United Kingdom.