You can get The National's Real Scottish Politics newsletter free and direct to your inbox every weekday.
THE Cardiff summit was a fascinating piece of political theatre. Nothing like this has ever been done before in Britain.
The leaders of three of the constituent parts of the United Kingdom, representing some 10.5 million people, told the world they wanted the right to quit the Union.
And yet one suspects they aren’t sweating about this too much in Westminster. A typically aloof response from Scottish Secretary Douglas Alexander dismissing the event as a “distraction”.
This is complicated by the fact that Andy Burnham, though he has since tried to muddy the waters, set out his position when he said that there should be a “clear consensus” for Scottish independence before another referendum.
It will be encouraging for supporters of Welsh and Scottish independence, and proponents of Irish reunification, to see their leaders taking a bold, cross-Border stance on the right to self-determination.
But Unionists will be comforted by the fact that, at least for now, the people are not banging down the door of No 10 Downing Street demanding constitutional change.
That is the offer and the challenge that Burnham made explicit in the Commons last week: While I can afford to ignore this, I will. The onus is on the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Sinn Fein to make their demands for constitutional change unignorable.
Whether today’s events will shift the dial for those still on the fence on the constitutional question remains to be seen.
When asked at a press conference on Monday, after the signing of agreements with the Plaid Cymru and Sinn Fein, what he was doing to boost support for independence to a level where it could not be ignored by Westminster, Swinney said that events like this were part of that work.
He added: “What the Prime Minister’s actually said is that there has to be demonstrable desire for a referendum on independence for Scotland and I think that evidence is with us just now and it’s evidenced by the fact that we have in the Scottish Parliament today the largest number of independence-supporting MSPs in the history of the Scottish Parliament.”
The First Minister also pointed out that “in most of the recent polls, independence is the preferred constitutional option across Scotland”. That is true, though it still falls short of what most people would class as a “clear consensus”, and Swinney’s critics will also point out that Westminster has confidently ignored pro-independence majorities for a decade now.
One of the chief concerns of the Scottish independence movement is that it is difficult to build the momentum the Yes cause did during the 2014 campaign without an event.
Set pieces like the coordinated display of strength in Cardiff today can provide a rallying point even if they are not a conclusive moment of reckoning like a referendum. Unlike going to the ballot box, however, they do not require anyone to make up their mind.
The Cardiff declaration puts the nationalist parties on the front foot. But there is no guarantee that this is a moment that sets the political weather for the coming years, let alone the coming days.
Support for Scottish independence sits, according to most of the recent polls, somewhere just below half of the population, though ahead of opposition more often than not.
Equivalent numbers are much lower in Wales and Northern Ireland, where between a quarter to a third of the population back independence or Irish reunification.
If Swinney, Rhun ap Iorwerth and Michelle O’Neill are serious about giving effect to the principles they have proclaimed, popular calls for self-determination must grow so loud that even our deaf leaders in Westminster can hear them.
This is harder than it seems. Even the calamity of Brexit, the growth of the far-right or the disastrous Boris Johnson and Liz Truss experiments have never taken support for independence into a sustained majority.
That strongly suggests that it is not enough for those who wish to end London rule to rely solely on the public’s disillusionment with Westminster.
Instead, Belfast, Cardiff and Edinburgh must show that the future lies with them. How they do that is up to them but it’s clear that unless they can create unstoppable momentum for self-determination, Westminster’s intransigence will endure.
