No country in the western world can avoid repercussions from Russia’s war on Ukraine. That includes Scotland and its governing party, the SNP. A historic change is now required in Scottish nationalist thinking. To be equal to this moment, the SNP must drop its threat to kick Nato’s nuclear deterrent out of an independent Scotland.
Impossible, say my fellow political commentators. Unthinkable, say SNP stalwarts, whose commitment to expelling Trident from the Clyde is at the core of their identity as independence supporters. Yet the impossible and the unthinkable are happening all around us as European nations recalibrate their world view in the light of Russian revanchism.
Look at Germany, where reticence about militarism needs no explanation to any student of history. Olaf Scholz, the chancellor, has spoken of the invasion as an “epochal change” that requires a dramatic increase in military spending.
Look at Finland, a nation once invaded by the Soviet Union and which in modern times has trod a delicate diplomatic line between neutrality and military readiness. Just a few months ago only one in four Finns were in favour of joining Nato. Now its membership is likely to be confirmed before the summer.
Look at Sweden, where neutrality during the Cold War was almost an expression of national character. Now the prime minister, Magdalena Andersson, says the country’s outlook has “changed fundamentally”. Sweden, too, is set for swift entry into Nato.
These shifts are serious and substantial. They show a willingness to reconsider the most basic national assumptions. They recognise that protecting political shibboleths would be foolish in the face of a serious challenge to global security.
Yet it seems we cannot expect the same resolve and willingness to adapt from the putative leaders of an independent Scottish state.
Last week in an essay for the Reform Scotland think tank, Stewart McDonald, the SNP defence spokesman, acknowledged the seismic change in attitudes across Europe. He placed particular significance on Sweden and Finland, countries fetishised by the SNP as exemplars of what Scotland could become. “Many in Scotland have long admired much of Nordic social policy,” he wrote, “but we have often neglected the reality that a sound defence posture is what ultimately underpins a nation’s ability to have a robust social contract with its people.”
In a recognition of the need for an SNP response, he added: “We in the SNP must show that we are adapting too. The world we want Scotland to enter as a member state has changed, and we must change with it.”
And yet the SNP is intent on the destabilisation of Nato, insisting that when Scotland gains independence the UK nuclear deterrent must be removed from the Clyde. Trident nuclear submarines must leave their base at Faslane and the UK’s stockpile of nuclear warheads must be removed from their subterranean storage facility at Coulport.
Andrew Marr, writing in the New Statesman last month, said the lack of a credible alternative to the Clyde means that “a Scottish independence vote next year would therefore also be a vote immediately to strip the UK of its nuclear deterrent”.
Whether or not this is an accurate assessment, the opportunities provided to President Putin by the eviction of Trident are clear. Division. Distrust. Distraction. All would be welcomed in Moscow.
To be fair to McDonald, he proposes a Scottish military closely co-operating with what remains of the UK, to an extent that has not been articulated before by an SNP frontbencher. There may be more shifts to come. But not on Trident. Senior SNP sources tell me there is no plan to change tack on this totemic policy. Party opposition to the UK’s nuclear deterrent is, they say, too deeply ingrained. Really? More deeply ingrained than German antimilitarism? More deeply ingrained than Swedish antipathy to armed conflict? More deeply ingrained than Finnish neutrality?
The SNP’s reluctance to grasp this thistle sits uncomfortably alongside those occasions where Scottish nationalism was genuinely bold: embracing Europe in the 1980s; embracing devolution in the 1990s; ending hostility to Nato in 2012.
These were big decisions that rejected SNP orthodoxy. They faced intense opposition from the party’s grassroots. And yet ultimately they were the right thing to do.
For all the SNP bluster about rejoining the international community, what I detect is a ludicrous belief that Scotland can carry on in its own wee bubble. War in Ukraine might mean a tweak to defence policy, sure, but nothing that would actually upset anybody.
The SNP either has this fight with its members or with the voters. Public opinion has not yet been fully tested on Ukraine but my instinct is that the electorate will look unkindly upon any political party whose platform is seen as in any way inimical to the interests of Nato.
Tactically there is a political case for an SNP shift on Trident. But the challenge represented by Putin demands more than political calculation. It requires a long view of history. It requires a clear-eyed understanding of a changing Europe, and Scotland’s place within it. Most of all it requires something the SNP at this moment seems to lack: guts.
