ABSTRACT
This afterword analyses how the SNP’s post-Brexit consolidation of power for the thesis developed in previous chapters. It notes a departure in dominant discourses of Scottish nationalism: having previously been cast as an irrational, populist breach with economic common sense, it gained a new reputation for competency. This was a product of the SNP’s opposition to Brexit and its stylistic shift towards projecting technocratic, managerial efficiency. Moreover, the chapter observes that the SNP has successfully adapted to the challenge of reimagining “Third Way”, centre-left politics in an era of capitalist economic weakness and crisis: whereas earlier models promised delivery, the SNP case epitomises a new centre-left that cannot deliver rising living standards, and therefore focuses on ethics and a pretension to good intentions. Nonetheless, the objective barriers to Scottish independence as a project may have increased in post-Brexit circumstances. The chapter argues that the stylistic focus on competency has not been matched by efforts to meet the post-crisis, post-Brexit intellectual challenges of imagining an independent Scottish political economy. Conversely, though, the chapter guards against a return to imagining pro-independence voters as gullible or irrational. Instead, Scotland’s case epitomises the difficulties of achieving meaningful political-economic agency in recurrent and interlocking crises.
