IF Scottish independence is to mean more than constitutional change, the movement must show how it would extend democracy into the economy itself.
The result of last week’s Holyrood election has clarified the political landscape without resolving the central question inside it.
The SNP have secured a fifth consecutive victory, and the Scottish Parliament still contains a pro-independence majority. But if that result tells us independence remains politically alive, it also underlines a deeper problem: the movement still needs a clearer answer to what independence is actually for.
Independence, on its own, is not a political programme. It is a transfer of authority. Its meaning depends on what democratic power is used for, whose interests it serves, and whether it changes the conditions of everyday life. If the case for independence is to recover intellectual force, it has to be argued not only as a constitutional demand but as a democratic claim over the economy itself.
That means revisiting a tradition of social democracy more ambitious than the managerial politics that often passes for it today. In Olof Palme’s Sweden, the argument was not simply that inequality should be softened after the event. It was that democracy was incomplete if economic power remained concentrated in too few hands.
In the 1970s, Palme and the Swedish social democrats confronted a contradiction that now feels familiar. Political democracy had advanced, welfare states had expanded, and yet the decisive questions of ownership, investment, production and work remained insulated from democratic control. People could vote for governments, but too much of economic life was still organised beyond their reach.
Palme’s insight was that democracy could not stop at the ballot box or the doors of public institutions. If it stopped at what he and others described as the factory gate, then it remained partial and unfinished. A society might redistribute some of the proceeds of economic life, but if it left control over economic life itself largely untouched, then power would remain where it had always been.
That is why Palme still matters.
Modern politics often accepts a narrower ambition: governments are expected to correct market outcomes after the fact, but not to democratise the structures of ownership and decision-making that produce them. Inequality is treated as a distributive problem when it is also a problem of power.
Scotland’s constitutional debate should be understood in exactly those terms. The case for independence is strongest not when it is reduced to sentiment, symbolism or a change of flag, but when it is grounded in the democratic question Palme posed so sharply: who holds power over the economy, and who gets to decide how it is used?
Devolution has created serious democratic institutions and allowed distinct Scottish policy choices to emerge. Social security powers have been used to build a more dignified system of support. The Scottish National Investment Bank has brought patient, mission-led public investment into economic policy, while community wealth building has widened debate about procurement, ownership and how wealth is retained locally.
These are not trivial developments. They point towards a recognisably social democratic understanding of economic life, but they also reveal the limits of acting without full power.
They are important precisely because they show what Scotland is trying to do and what it cannot yet fully do.
The Scottish Parliament carries visible democratic responsibility without full economic authority. Key levers over employment law, industrial relations, most taxation, macroeconomic policy and much economic regulation remain reserved to Westminster. Scotland can innovate at the margins, but it cannot fully redesign the structures through which economic power is exercised.
That leaves Scotland in a condition of partial democracy in Palme’s sense: elected institutions exist, public expectations are real, but decisive economic power remains elsewhere. The gap is the distance between what people are told they can vote for and what their parliament can actually deliver.
Seen in that light, independence is not an abstract constitutional aspiration. It is the demand that democratic authority in Scotland should extend far enough to shape the economy that governs Scottish life. It is, at its best, an argument for bringing political responsibility and economic power into the same democratic frame.
But that argument only becomes persuasive if the movement is willing to say what such power would be for.
Too often, the independence movement has been more confident about acquiring state power than democratising economic power. It has been clearer on why Scotland should leave the Union than on how an independent Scotland would reorganise ownership, investment, work and accountability in ways people could actually feel. Constitutional change matters enormously, but it cannot be the whole argument.
A more serious engagement with economic democracy would start from the recognition that freedom is not only constitutional but material too. It concerns whether people have security at work, power over the conditions of labour, influence over investment, and some democratic claim on the wealth their society creates.
Of course, this cannot mean mechanically recreating the industrial politics of Palme’s era. Scotland’s economy is organised differently. Work is fragmented across services, care, technology and insecure labour.
Housing costs distort life chances, and ownership is often remote. For many younger voters, the constitutional question is filtered through a practical test: would independence make the economy feel more accountable than it does now?
That is why Palme’s question still bites. Who holds power over the conditions of everyday economic life, and through what democratic means can that power be challenged, directed or shared?
A serious Scottish answer would ask how public investment can set long-term priorities rather than merely repair market failures. It would ask how procurement can build domestic capacity, how ownership can be broadened, how wealth can be retained in communities, and how the energy transition can be governed in the public interest. In short, it would treat the economy as a field of democratic choice.
None of that dilutes the case for independence. It gives it substance.
The Holyrood election has renewed the constitutional argument for independence. The next task is to renew its economic meaning. Palme understood that democracy was diminished when it ended at the edge of the economy. The independence movement should rediscover that truth. Until it can say how independence would extend democracy into the structures of economic power, it will still be answering only half the question of what independence is for.
