As world leaders, negotiators and activists converged on Glasgow for the start of the Cop climate summit, curious delegates who picked up a Scottish newspaper may have seen a small advert from the Scottish National party. Its main image was of Skye’s famous crags bathed by sunshine, with a soft-focus portrait of the first minister, and it read: “A nation in waiting welcomes the nations of the world.” Despite the simplicity of that proposition, public enthusiasm for independence has fallen since it reached a record high of 59% at the peak of the pandemic in October last year. Most opinion polls over the past six months have shown the yes vote trailing no by between four and eight points.
Was that message misplaced? Her pro-UK opponents have accused Sturgeon of pursuing a “divisive obsession” as the rest of the world focused on a collective effort to combat a global crisis – a charge she denies. Hardliners inside the independence movement fear Sturgeon has lost her spark, fatigued by the long hours she invested managing the Covid crisis, the impacts of Brexit and the Alex Salmond crisis, and running her government. Last week she broached the issue of life after politics, disclosing to Vogue magazine she may foster children in the future. Some internal critics, bolstered by their allies in Salmond’s small breakaway party Alba, are openly challenging Sturgeon on the timing of a referendum, and question her appetite for staging one. Angus MacNeil, a dissident SNP MP who chairs the Commons trade committee, implied in a newspaper column last week that Sturgeon knew Boris Johnson would never agree to a referendum and that the supreme court would block any attempt by her to stage one without his approval. She had to find another route to secure independence, he argued. Yet there are few concrete signs Sturgeon is as ambivalent as her critics allege. When she set out her programme for government in September, she said civil servants had been told to start drafting a new case for independence. Conscious, too, of the public mood, Sturgeon insists that combating Covid takes immediate precedence over pushing for a fresh independence vote. And her strategists have their eyes on other factors, the Cop climate talks among them. What Cop may do is nudge cautious Scottish voters into taking a more green- and climate-minded worldview. If so, that could work to Sturgeon’s long-term advantage and that of the wider independence movement. Her SNP government is sharing power for the first time in 14 years with the pro-independence Scottish Greens. For the first time since devolution in 1999, there are Green ministers at Holyrood and their agreement includes staging an independence vote before the next Scottish election.
Glasgow’s designation as host city – perhaps chosen by Conservative ministers in London to show the UK embracing Scotland – directly influenced Sturgeon’s decision to sign the deal with the Greens. It was a political decision, and not based on numerical advantage at Holyrood: she has aligned the SNP with a more leftwing party to amplify her government’s pro-climate claims, at a time when green politics, thanks to Cop, is ascendant. While Sturgeon does not have a seat at the negotiating table – no devolved administrations do at Cop – she is enjoying a significant profile at the conference locally, welcoming Greta Thunberg and the Minga Indígena collective, and campaigning for the voices of women and girls to be advanced in the talks. She is sufficiently distant from any policy failures at Cop not to be tainted by them, while able to point to the differences she says independence would bring. That strategy is likely to emerge clearly later in November, when the SNP is to hold a short party conference at which Sturgeon is expected to prioritise the drive for a second independence vote. Any policy failures at Cop and her government’s heavier emphasis on the climate and environment will feature heavily. If Cop helps shift the Scottish electorate’s mood, and finally makes voters amenable to the tougher changes to their energy use, and driving, shopping and holiday habits that cutting CO2 emissions involves, Sturgeon has gambled that the SNP and the case for independence will gain.