PK in The National: Scotland's 'independence cohort' have a lot of work to do
Is the case that demographics alone - Yessers getting older and staying indy-minded - will be enough to deliver a Scottish nation-state?
This is a fully-research-linked, mildly updated version of my weekly column in The National, published Saturday, April 26th 2025
A “COHORT” – if the term comes to your mind at all – sounds military. Indeed, it was the name for one-tenth of a Roman legion. But that itself came from the Latin “cohors”, meaning enclosure, farmyard or retinue.
Keep all that in mind, dear National reader, as you luxuriate in the notion reported this week by Edinburgh University’s Centre for Constitutional Change – that we have an “independence cohort”, inexorably moving towards an indy majority.
This is cohort as social scientists have recently defined it. These are people, born around the same time, who internalise shared formative experiences. This shapes stable attitudes and behaviours that persist throughout their lives.
A cohort defies what sociologists would call “lifecycle” factors. Which is that, as you grow older, bearing more responsibilities (career, home, family), you become ever more deeply invested in the status quo – and therefore much more conservative/less radical.
So you may be hot to trot for something as disruptive as indy in your teens to early 30s, but that will fade away with age.
However, the “lifecycle” doesn’t seem to be turning as it should. The “cohort” for indy is pushing through the age barriers. This generation are maintaining positivity towards the idea of a Scottish nation-state, no matter their life contingencies.
Academic Mark McGeoghegan has studied 23 years’ worth of data on constitutional opinions. He finds “strong support for a ‘cohort’ effect, but no evidence that younger voters become less pro-independence as they age”.
Indeed, “not a single cohort has become less likely to support independence as they have aged”.
The polite term for this is “actuarial”. Or: it’s comin’ yet for a’ that – as the miserable oldies die off.
But I’m more interested as to when the indy cohort first began to kick in.
Lindsay Paterson’s 2023 paper, Independence Is Not Going Away: The Importance Of Education And Birth Cohorts, hazarded an answer.
In Paterson’s analysis of the social attitude stats, the turning point was those people born since the 1970s, particularly from cohorts born 1977-1986. Independence support here averages 40-57% between 2014 and 2023.
Current youth cohorts (born 1999-2007) show support levels around 66%. The most recent poll found that a thumping 75% of 16-29-year-olds would vote Yes, compared to just 34% of those over 75.
But Paterson also notes that there are earlier signs of indy-mindedness. In cohorts born 1957-66 (that’s me!), indy support robustly increases – from 27% in their 30s (early 1990s) to 38% in their 50s (2014).
That earlier shift hints at Paterson’s explanation. For him, the key factor is the expansion of education. Graduates rose from 9% of the Scottish population in 1979 to more than 40% by 2014.
With higher education tends to come a commitment to liberal, civic and European values. Scottish nationalism has leant strongly in that direction (recent hiccups notwithstanding), thus becoming a vehicle whereby that cohort can explore its interests.
Before we break out the unicorn-printed bunting, let me take a pause here, and ask some obvious questions. If being liberal and well-educated constantly strengthens the indy cohort through the generations, and assuming aspirations to FHE are consistent … then is it a matter of waiting till we’re smart enough overall?
Cohort theory seems to explain why support for the SNP (as a party and government) spikes and troughs, according to its behaviours and prospectus – while support for independence slowly but steadily advances. It would be nice to think that “advance” was cognitive.
Hmm. Anyone active in 2012-2014 knew that Project Fear was aiming at the worried, panicky and anxious parts of our brains – aiming to deep-freeze our imaginative, projecting and future-oriented faculties.
Setting up a currency, establishing a tax base, transitioning pensions, removing nuclear missiles. According to the No campaigners, these weren’t challenges to be embraced, but framed as disasters waiting to happen.
So are our cognitive capacities burgeoning so much (according to the sociologists) that the next Project Fear will just bounce off us? Will Scottish citizens’ growing sanguinity and intellectual calm about establishing indy become an impervious shield?
I’m not entirely convinced.
There’s that recent high of 21% of Scots polling their support for Farage’s Reform – already outstretching the Scottish Greens, with not a representative yet in sight or place. That statistics is at least an indicator that new Project Fears are always possible.
Paterson’s liberal-left graduate cohort now faces a significant chunk of recalcitrant fellow Scots. They’re turning their face against an overly demanding future – on race and migration, on the urgencies of the climate crisis, on gender/sex culture wars.
John Swinney’s post-partisan summit this week – exploring ways to maintain social peace and plurality in Scottish life, as far-right populism rises – had Paterson’s “indy cohort” in its sights.
The Scottish General Election campaign wheels are already turning, and the threat of Faragist advance (itself another kind of Project Fear?) looks like it might benefit the SNP in terms of Holyrood seats.
Yet the cohort research – explaining the varying fortunes of indy parties, which is separate from the solid advance of indy preferences – also points us to more deeply embedded forces of change. Ones that lie beneath the Punch and Judy of electoral politics.
Does independence mean the same old types of political classes, technocrats and corporate interests? Who operate in unaccountable (or under-accountable) zones of policy and resource-spending, doing so on the people’s behalf?
If that’s how it looks, then who can expect even a second SNP-Green coalition to ride out the storms of popular scepticism and contempt?
But then, there are challenges to any nation-state these days. They seek consent from their electors to keep them secure – as wars rage, AI transforms, living costs rise, the world’s populations move. The demands are almost too mighty to be met.
An “indy cohort” can’t be expected to just focus on the macro-agenda – the next indyref, the next coalition party deal, the geopolitics of Europe.
What about the micro-level and the mesa-level - those local empowerments that can strengthen and make larger the lives of Scottish communities?
One of the things that makes the community energy movement in Scotland so interesting is that it implies, indeed requires, energetic communities. Ones that can find – either within themselves, or intelligently procured – the expertise (engineering, legal, commercial, deliberative) to pull together their bid.
And the outcomes are rich. They can be about hard cash. As Lesley Riddoch noted in these pages recently, potentially hundreds of millions can come directly to Scottish communities if they set up their own electricity-producing windfarms, solar arrays and hydro schemes (rather than leave it to corporates, who distribute pittances of compensation funding).
But these initiatives can also be civic outcomes - building capacity to solve other complex problems in your locality. This desire for competence can be extended beyond electricity generation – to local food production, or repair practices, or housing and transport provision.
Many leading environmental experts – like the Climate Majority’s Rupert Reed – urge that communities must try to prepare themselves in advance for ecological buckles and shocks to our global systems. Reed urges us to develop alternatives and supplements to the services and goods we currently rely on.
So there’s a Scottish sweet spot here, soft and wide, for whatever bright-eyed political player can touch it. It turns out that doing resilience and true local empowerment is also about learning the craft of nationhood – one turbine, one solar panel, one co-op meeting at a time.
Who can start to act on this, at the appropriate and effective level? We have precedents. The Scottish Government’s Community and Renewable Energy Scheme (or CARES) is a one-stop shop for ambitious localities that want to be capable of making their own electricity.
But can land law, and regulation, make it even more possible for such extensions of confidence and competence in Scottish life?
And what are those requests “for forgiveness, not permission” that need to come from below – self-determining instances so authentic they have the state scrabbling after them?
Can the “indy cohort”, in short, be comprised of more than merely occasional, super-informed voters?
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