The victory by the SNP in the recent Scottish Parliament elections is interesting less for what it says about Scottish independence, and more about what it says about what sort of political parties are in demand by the electorate. The SNP, unusually for contemporary nationalist parties, is a centre-left social democratic party. One way of interpreting the vote (to confirm this, of course, would need more careful research) is to suggest that the SNP is the only mainstream straightforward centre-left party remaining in the UK, and that the victory represents a latent demand for such a political position that both Labour and the LibDems have moved away from.

So, perhaps the victory isn’t about Scottish independence after all, but about the SNP filling a much-needed role in the political landscape. Would this position, therefore, be tenable across the UK? Or is it just in Scotland where this demand exists to any great extent?

Having said that the vote was not about Scottish independence per se, perhaps it gives support for it in a different way. Traditionally, appeals for the independence of a nation have been based largely on history and sentimentality—the desire of a specific group to identify as “a people”. Perhaps the current situation in Scotland reflects a situation in which a new kind of rationalist argument for independence can be made—essentially, that the political landscape in Scotland has sufficiently moved away from the rest of the UK that representation by the Westminster parliament is no longer sensible, and that a rational basis for the creation of political units is the existence of a coherent political landscape.

Of course, under such a scheme Brighton should probably also be an independent country.