How John Swinney's thoughtful words about 21st-century independence were twisted almost immediately

The SNP’s continuing electoral success – despite its referendum defeat – has forced unionist parties into an ever more negative and reactionary style of campaigning, in which every failure of Scottish Government is grotesquely magnified, while positive achievements are never acknowledged, to the point where even the parties that largely shaped the devolution settlement – Labour and the Liberal Democrats – now often seem hostile to it.

On the pro-independence side, meanwhile, political debate has stagnated to a point that would barely have seemed possible 12 years ago. Faced with the difficult task of governing in a time of severe financial stringency, SNP politicians seem to have become increasingly obsessed with day-to-day decision-making and fire-fighting, while their vision of independence seems reduced to a few platitudes about “taking control of our own future”, without any strategic sense of how the people of Scotland might actually do so, in an age of huge corporate and oligarchic power.

READ MORE: John Swinney: I want to collaborate with Sinn Féin and Plaid Cymru to break up UK

As for the quality of the public debate, on both sides it has deteriorated from poor to abysmal, particularly when influenced by social media, reduced to screeching anti-SNP hysterics on one side, and wild conspiracy theories about the British ‘deep state’ on the other, with multiple strands of rabid gender politics completing an unlovely picture now often mirrored, sadly, in political debates across the English-speaking world, and beyond.

So it came as something of a relief, this week, when the First Minister turned his eyes towards a future that may now be within reach, and said that if the forthcoming elections lead to the predicted positive results for the SNP in Scotland and Plaid Cymru in Wales, he would look forward to working with the Welsh government, and the Sinn-Fein-led government of Northern Ireland, to “change the dynamics of the United Kingdom”, which he said would be “irreversibly” altered by such an outcome.

His speech, of course, immediately entered the political blast-furnace of the current campaign, and re-emerged as a headline declaring “Swinney will work ‘in cahoots’ with Sinn Fein and Plaid to break up the UK”; the phrase “in cahoots”, it should be said, came not from John Swinney, but from Scottish Tory Rachael Hamilton.

What was really interesting about the speech, though, is that, in this context, John Swinney did not talk about ‘breaking up the UK’, but about changing its dynamics. It was almost as if, for a brief moment, he was trying to introduce into Scotland’s long-moribund constitutional debate some serious discussion of what greater ‘independence’ might mean for Scotland under 21st-century conditions, and what might actually happen, if Scotland ever began to negotiate with the other governments of these islands on that basis.

READ MORE: SNP suffering 'bleeding of support' as poll finds John Swinney to fall short of Holyrood majority

For the truth is that the idea of a complete ‘Scottish breakaway’, long cherished by some sections of the independence movement, is no more than a fantasy under 21st-century conditions. Even if the SNP were somehow to win a new independence referendum tomorrow, that would mark not an immediate split, but the beginning of a decade-long negotiation, of a complexity that would dwarf the UK’s four-year Brexit process; a negotiation that would involve not only the bilateral relationship between Holyrood and Westminster, but also relations with Belfast and Cardiff, as they navigate their own very different journeys towards greater autonomy.

What seems clear to me, though, is that whether the UK’s unionist establishment likes it or not, a process of change is under way; and trying to simply shut it down, with the combination of unthinking arrogance and notable ignorance that now so often characterises the comments of Westminster ministers on the devolved nations, will over time only prove counter-productive, confirming the growing sense, in those nations, that Westminster is no longer interested in them, except as a resource to be exploited.

So what John Swinney was briefly conjuring up, in Wednesday’s speech, was a new phase of that process, in which Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast may find themselves well placed to work together in beginning to challenge a system in which, when the chips are down, sovereign Westminster decides, and Scotland and Wales, in particular, simply have to suck it up – unlike Northern Ireland, where provision for border referendums under certain conditions is enshrined in law.

READ MORE: Readers' Letters: Just imagine Scotland under Independence

And if the three ‘Celtic nations’ begin to work together, on the shared understanding that those old power relations in the UK are no longer acceptable, then it is possible to begin to imagine, somewhere beyond the horizon of our current stalemate, a new configuration in which the nations of these islands begin to co-operate on a basis not of dominance, but of mutual respect, and where ‘independence’ is framed not as separation or break-up, but as evolution towards a more equal and civilised relationship.

It’s surely in working out the details of this journey towards a new settlement that Scotland’s political impasse might finally begin to ease, and we might find a compromise that respects and continues to value most of the ties that bind us to the UK, while also asserting our basic sovereignty, and refounding that relationship on a basis acceptable to a clear majority of the people of Scotland today.

Just for a moment, on Wednesday, John Swinney paused to conjure up an idea of how that process might start, if the electoral dice fall as predicted, and offered a brief, bright glimpse of how a more positive and consensual future for these islands might one day begin to emerge. And for me, that moment was worth noting, before the clamour of dim-witted polarisation once again swallowed up his words, and spat them out again, bereft of all nuance, all vision, and all hope.