Wings Over Scotland

As a lifelong political geek and former SNP and Alba Party member, I’ve spent years supporting Scotland’s independence movement. However, over the last few years, I’ve watched the campaign (as opposed to support for independence) wither away. Being a Scottish nationalist has become increasingly disheartening, like watching someone you love succumb to a slow, debilitating illness. In frustration, I switched off from my homeland and turned my focus to the drama of US politics.

Over the last three years I immersed myself in it, watching both left and right-wing outlets. I became so hooked and invested that I jumped on a plane to Washington DC for the 2024 election. I canvassed with DC Democrats in rural Pennsylvania (that’s me third from the left in the pic below), attended Kamala Harris’s concession rally, and went to Trump’s only watch party in DC.

My journey led me to believe that Scotland’s independence campaign could learn a great deal from Trump’s victory and the Democrats’ failure.

Many were surprised by Trump’s win, but I expected (and wanted) it. However even I was surprised he won the popular vote, the first time a Republican has done so in 20 years. The signs, however, of his huge and comprehensive triumph were there.

Trump’s victory was a masterclass in coalition-building, which should be a lesson for the Scottish independence movement. The GOP has now become the party of the working class across all racial lines, something Bernie Sanders would be envious of. Trump, however did something even more significant – he won over traditionally Dem-leaning groups, including 30 % of black men under 45 and 43% of the Latino vote.

(Largely by not antagonising it by calling it “Latinx”.)

Trump didn’t need to win the majority of the Black or Latino vote to win; he simply needed to eat into enough of the margins to weaken the Democrats’ base. His appeal wasn’t limited to just the working class but spanned education levels, age groups, and urban, suburban, and rural communities. This broad coalition of support is rare in modern politics but essential for any movement that needs to win not merely a plurality in a multi-party election, but an absolute majority of the electorate.

If Scotland’s independence movement is serious about independence, it needs to take this approach seriously. Real progress lies in reaching across demographic lines, building a broad-based coalition that can stand strong in the face of opposition and MSM attacks and being massively financially outspent, just like Trump’s did.

(Because the Yes vote will ALWAYS face those huge disadvantages.)

Polls consistently show that inflation and the cost of living were top concerns for voters. While canvassing in rural Pennsylvania, almost everyone I spoke to mentioned inflation, food prices, and illegal immigration. Working-class and middle-class voters overwhelmingly felt they were better off economically under Trump, while wealthier, college-educated voters stuck with the Democrats.

While the Dems talked about the stock market the reality is most Americans don’t have money in the stock market. They don’t care if Wall Street is thriving when they’re struggling to pay bills or buy a home. The average age of first-time homebuyers in the US is now at an all-time high of 38. Yet the Democrats focused on niche policies like student loan forgiveness, which mainly benefits wealthy college grads (ie the people that staffed the Harris campaign).

Given that over half of Americans never attend college, it’s no surprise the average voter didn’t feel those policies were for them.

Trump tapped into populism both economic and political, and this strategy should be the guiding light for Scotland’s independence campaign. If it’s ever to succeed, its message must centre on economic security for everyone. This means, for one thing, being pragmatic about oil – Scotland’s government should do everything it can to preserve the Grangemouth refinery.

(With Trump sitting in the White House, Scotland’s pitiful, voter-repelling but cripplingly expensive efforts at Net Zero become infinitely more futile than they already were. Any microscopic contribution we could make to reducing world CO2 would be dwarfed a thousand times over by the vast clouds of extra carbon belching out of his USA.)

But it’s more than oil. We need a balanced economy that fosters entrepreneurship, not just the public sector.

Populist policies which would appeal to all Scots which a smart Scottish Government could do to win back trust would be to eliminate free tuition for frivolous and pointless courses such as gender studies and sociology and instead use the money saved for business start-up grants to promote young entrepreneurship, axing air passenger duty which would lead to cheaper flights, more flight routes and economic growth (as well as putting some distance between them and the wildly unpopular Greens after the disaster of the Bute House Agreement).

The US election proved that economic populism, not technocratic solutions, gains traction. The SNP has missed this point by focusing for far too many years on narrow and toxic social policies. It needs to concentrate on the bread-and-butter issues that could win over undecided Scots across demographics.

What of another hot-button topic? When Biden took office, he swiftly reversed most of Trump’s executive orders on immigration, leading to at least 21 million undocumented immigrants entering the U.S. The Democrats downplayed the scale of the border crisis for 3 years, only proposing a weak border bill earlier this year when polls showed it had become a major issue.

Trump’s appeal on immigration was clear. Not only were border states struggling, frustrations and pressures were felt in northern Democrat sanctuary cities. The left’s response was to dismiss these concerns or label them as racist, which alienated large swathes of voters.

This out-of-touch attitude was exemplified by ABC News anchor Martha Raddatz, who downplayed the issue of Venezuelan gangs taking over areas of Colorado by saying that “only a handful of apartment complexes” were overtaken. Raddatz, like many in the media, lives in an affluent neighbourhood detached from the realities faced by working-class Americans.

The same mistakes should not be repeated in Scotland. The general political party consensus is that Scotland wants mass immigration, illegal or otherwise. But the reality is Scotland receives a disproportionately small fraction of the immigration of the UK.

If we had the same level as down south and the accompanying economic and social pressures, the liberal virtue-signalling would quickly evaporate. It’s naive to assume that Scots are somehow magically immune to the kind of backlash the US and UK have seen. Reform are already starting to make serious inroads.

That’s not to say Scotland doesn’t need immigration – and particularly skilled workers – but the real question is, why are skilled immigrants not not flocking to progressive Scotland, instead choosing to stay in the supposedly far-right and bigoted England?

“Progressive” brings us neatly to another major factor. Core issues like immigration, the economy and crime were pivotal in Trump’s win, but trans issues also played a crucial role in alienating voters from the Dems, and in particular the swing voters who decide every US election, and who said Harris’ stance on gender ideology was THE most important factor that persuaded them to vote for Trump.

Most people support equal rights for trans people, but the extreme push on issues like gender self-ID and biological men in women’s sports has gone too far for the large majority of the general public, culminating in a Democrats policy that sounds like it was invented as a joke by (right-wing US satire site) The Babylon Bee – taxpayer-funded sex-change surgery for transgender illegal-immigrant prison inmates.

For many voters, such policies drove them to demand a return to “common sense” by voting for Trump, and he wasn’t slow to focus on it, devoting a huge proportion of his campaign spending to what he correctly identified as Harris’ Achilles heel.

To understand what a significant difference a 2.7-point shift is, it’s only necessary to note that Trump eventually won the popular vote by just 1.4 points.

The centrepiece of Trump’s final campaign ad was male Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, an almost pantomimic villain who perfectly encapsulated in two seconds the revulsion most voters felt about his gold medal in the women’s Olympic boxing.

(The true genius of this strategy, incidentally – a point spectacularly missed by left-wing US commentators like Jon Stewart and John Oliver – is that Harris couldn’t rebut the attacks, because talking about the policies in any way would only have drawn even more attention to how poisonously unpopular they were with voters.)

The lesson for Scotland here is that the independence campaign should avoid divisive “woke” policies—whether it’s gender, climate alarmism, radical feminism or foreign wars, all of which played terribly for Harris. Most people don’t care about these issues, and certainly don’t want them to take centre stage in a future independence movement or government agenda.

Independence should be about getting Scotland out from under Westminster’s thumb, not pushing side issues that fracture support. Politics is simple maths: it’s addition, not subtraction. Every vote lost needlessly over a fringe issue is twice as hard to win back.

Trump built a broad coalition right across racial and socioeconomic lines by addressing voters’ concerns, not by telling them they were extremist bigots. The Democrats lost because they stopped listening and hectored and lectured instead. If the SNP keeps pushing “woke” agendas that ignore the concerns of 99% of Scots, they’ll lose too.