By Mark E. Saunders of “The Scottish Minuteman” https://www.facebook.com/profile.php/?id=61575625542197

While the band strikes up Hail to the Chief in Makerfield and the Prime Minister spends a nervous weekend contemplating his future at Chequers, sections of the Scottish press are once again falling over themselves to predict the death of the Scottish independence movement.

The instrument of execution this time? Andy Burnham.

According to Herald columnist and occasional prophet Neil Mackay, Burnham represents the SNP’s nightmare: a popular Labour leader who restores faith in Westminster and pulls the political rug from beneath the feet of the Scottish National Party and its supporters.

It is an interesting theory. But it is predicated on either a misunderstanding, or a misrepresentation, of why the SNP exists.

Mackay’s argument — one that will no doubt be repeated ad infinitum — assumes that support for Scottish independence is primarily a reaction to the perpetual dysfunction of Westminster.

If only London could produce a competent government, so the thinking goes, Scotland would settle down and independence would simply fade away. The phrase often used is that Scotland would be put “back in its box”.

But history, that troublesome book of facts, suggests otherwise.

If the fortunes of the SNP and the wider independence movement depended solely on bad governments or feel-good governments at Westminster, the party would have withered during the early, supposedly popular Blair years. Instead, support for Scottish self-government continued to grow and the search for an answer to the constitutional question became ever stronger.

So, if I may, I would like to offer a modest counterpoint to the Gospel of Mackay and his disciples.

SNP voters and other supporters of Scottish independence are not patiently waiting for a more likeable Labour leader — that ship sailed under the flag of ‘Better Together’. Neither do they support independence because Westminster is chaotic. They support it because they believe decisions about Scotland should be made in Scotland.

Not made in London, for London.

Andy Burnham may well be more popular than Keir Starmer. He may even prove to be an effective politician. He could revive Labour’s fortunes across large parts of England.

But none of that answers the central question of Scottish politics: who should govern Scotland?

That question existed long before Blair, before Cameron, before Johnson and before Starmer. It will exist long after Burnham too.

A freshly styled Labour government might reduce doorstep grievances for a time. It will not resolve sovereignty. It will not alter the constitutional relationship between Scotland and Westminster. It cannot make the national question disappear.

And that is why Burnham is not the existential threat some, like Neil Mackay, imagine and quietly hope for.

The real challenge facing the SNP over the next few years is not Andy Burnham. It is how it plans to rekindle the energy, confidence and sense of mission that inspired so many people to join its cause.

And that cause survives regardless of who happens to be sitting in Downing Street or Chequers for that matter.