There are lots of things you can do. You can scheme your schemes and dream your dreams of personal political advancement. You can resort to sophistry about how the Holyrood voting system works. You can be as abusive as you like on social media and pass it all off as salt-of-the-earth working class honesty. You can spend your days obsessing about an issue that is not a priority for the vast majority of the population. You can sue Labour politicians to your heart’s content (and you might even have a point about that). But if you’re remotely serious about helping to bring about independence, there are two things you never, ever do –
1) You don’t try to sabotage a successful SNP election campaign by idiotically calling upon the charismatic party leader to resign just two or three weeks before polling day.
2) You don’t try to undermine a thumping, newly-won SNP mandate with absurd unionist-style propaganda about the result being a “failure” and “nothing to do with independence”.
I actually doubt if Mr Campbell’s extraordinary behaviour during the campaign had too much of a direct effect on the SNP vote. Wings readers were unlikely to think to themselves “Stuart is putting the boot in, so I’d better vote Labour”. At worst it might have led to some unnecessary abstentions among independence supporters. But there’s no way we can rule out the possibility that it had a detrimental indirect effect by sapping the morale of people who would otherwise have been pounding the streets for the SNP.
As for the SNP landslide having nothing to do with independence, he knows that’s rubbish. He’ll have seen the same TV debates that the rest of us did, and will know that Nicola Sturgeon didn’t shy away from making the case for independence, or from insisting that a second independence referendum must take place next year. He’ll have seen how central independence was in the SNP’s manifesto. He’ll have heard reports of doorstep campaigners up and down the country emphasising to voters that independence was one of the three major SNP priorities in this election. And yet he pretends to believe that all of the above is somehow negated by a single campaign video made by a single SNP candidate in a difficult-to-win Tory-held seat. Why?
These are not the actions of a genuine independence supporter. They can’t be, because he’s intelligent enough to realise that if anyone actually bothers to pay any heed to what he’s been doing, the cause of independence can only be harmed. Somebody who wants to bring the date of independence forward as much as possible would in fact have done the complete opposite. They’d have been willing Nicola Sturgeon on throughout the campaign, and would have eagerly emphasised that the SNP’s massive victory further strengthens the existing mandate for an indyref.
It no longer makes any sense to refer to Mr Campbell as a pro-independence blogger. He’s an anti-SNP activist whose first love is the trans issue. If you forced him to choose between independence and the overthrow of the “woke” SNP leadership, he would undoubtedly pick the latter. How it came to this I have no idea, because his passion for independence seemed genuine five years ago. But something has clearly changed inside his head.
Luckily the Yes movement seems to have recognised that he’s opted out, and is moving on from him. The SNP are doing just fine – a hell of a lot more than fine, actually – without his support. It would be great to have him back on board at some point, but in the meantime we’ve got our country’s freedom to win.
