Yesterday’s poll results attracted quite a surprising amount of anger from people who apparently don’t consider it at all important to the cause of independence to find out what people intending to vote SNP at the next Holyrood election think.
They’re probably not going to like these ones much either.
A third of SNP voters are unconvinced by the First Minister’s constant assurances that a second indyref will be delivered in the next 18 months. But the related question posed by several readers yesterday was “If you don’t think the SNP has a coherent strategy for securing a new vote, what would YOU do, Mister Smartypants?”
Which is annoying, because it’s a question we’ve answered in various contexts half a dozen times in the past year and a bit. So we thought we’d see if voters had been paying any more attention.
This is a specific prospect raised on Wings way back in April, and again in July. And by a margin of exactly three to one, it’s a proposal that would be backed by SNP voters.
Politics is all about compromises, but the SNP have been terrified since 1979 of doing anything that looks remotely like collaborating with the Conservative Party. (Despite the fact that Labour have been playing the “Tartan Tories” card ever since then with spectacularly decreasing levels of success.)
The fact of the matter, however, is that the SNP’s 35 MPs currently have a degree of arithmetical leverage in the Commons that they’ve never had before and quite likely will never have again. On the numbers for the last time the Withdrawal Agreement went to the vote, the SNP hold the balance of power, but are shy of using it.
At the moment, PM Boris Johnson is pretty comprehensively boxed in. His only escape from breaking his promise not to request another Brexit extension is a general election the opposition won’t give him. But there’s no road from the current deadlock that leads to a satisfying outcome for anyone. The messy Remain alliance has the numbers to block Johnson but not to agree anything else, and no polls suggest any post-election scenario that gets the SNP anywhere.
So it’s at least possible that Johnson is so desperate that he’d be willing to risk cutting Scotland loose in order to get his Brexit. We know that it wouldn’t upset his own voters. We know that the Tories look set to lose most if not all of their Scottish MPs anyway. So it’s a fairly easy sell for him.
(He can also frame it to his hardcore Unionists as a chance to kill the Yes movement once and for all, since the polls are still neck and neck at best and most people agree that a second defeat would set independence back for decades.)
But what about the SNP’s perspective? People fearful of the ghost of ’79 say it would enrage voters if they did a deal with a Tory government, but are then unable to explain exactly WHICH voters it would risk.
This poll tells us that the party’s own voters are strongly in favour of the idea, so it’s not them. What, then, about those Unionist Remainers – mainly in Labour – who are currently edging towards independence as a result of Brexit? It seems absolutely ridiculous, by definition, to suggest that if those people were given a direct meaningful choice between independence and Brexit in a referendum they’d choose Brexit out of spite because they were annoyed at the SNP for offering them the decision.
(Some also say that the Tories couldn’t be trusted to honour such a deal, but that’s the case with ANY route to independence, or indeed any kind of deal anywhere in life. And if Brexit shows us anything it’s that Parliament won’t necessarily respect the result of any referendum, so it seems pointless to fret about them reneging on the chance to hold one. If we think that they’re going to cheat us whatever happens, why are we bothering at all?)
It’s not only a politically sound strategy, it’s morally the right one. Some quail at the idea of “abandoning” the rest of the UK to Brexit, but the rest of the UK voted for it and it’s not up to us to overrule them. We don’t like it when that happens to us, why would they be any different?
(Northern Ireland, we must note, also voted Remain, but Northern Ireland has its own solution open to it, and the Withdrawal Agreement effectively keeps NI in the EU indefinitely anyway. And the deal is a far kinder outcome for the rest of the UK than the alternative, which is almost certainly a catastrophic crash-out Brexit.)
We’ve made these arguments before. But now we know that the vast majority of SNP voters agree with us. If the party doesn’t have the courage to get its hands dirty and risk its cuddly media image by doing some actual politics, and if the best chance of independence we’ll ever get vanishes over the horizon, it may not be easily forgiven.
