Politics & Power Quote by Sean Connery

Connery isn’t doing constitutional theory here; he’s doing moral math in a voice people associate with authority, charm, and a certain granite certainty. The line lands because it frames a political mismatch as a violation of common sense. Seventeen years is long enough to feel like permanence, long enough to turn “election result” into “system feature.” By repeating the number, he makes the imbalance sound less like bad luck and more like rigging by design.

The specific intent is pressure: to make the UK’s democratic legitimacy feel conditional, especially from a Scottish vantage point. Connery isn’t arguing that Scotland is uniquely virtuous or that socialism is inherently correct. He’s arguing that a democracy should produce governments that reflect the repeated preferences of its parts, not just aggregate them into a permanent override. The subtext is the “democratic deficit” that fueled modern Scottish nationalism: Scotland can vote one way consistently and still be governed another way because Westminster majorities are built elsewhere. That “hardly” is doing heavy lifting - it’s the polite version of “this is a joke.”

Context matters: late-20th-century Britain, with Thatcher and then Major reshaping the state while Scotland largely rejected the Conservatives. Connery, a global celebrity, acts as a cultural emissary, translating a technical grievance (electoral geography, first-past-the-post, union centralization) into a gut-level story about fairness. The genius is that he never says “independence”; he makes the existing arrangement sound unreasonable enough that the listener supplies the next step themselves.