The Glasgow SNP councillor Mhairi Hunter posted this truly jaw-dropping tweet the other day –
“You are comparing apples & pears. To win independence we need considerably more than 50 per cent of people to vote for it. That’s not the same thing as trying to win elections, where you don’t need to do that. Policy is probably actually less important than tone right now.”
I’m not sure if anyone can make sense of this, but I certainly can’t. There is, in fairness, a distinction between the winning posts in referendums and elections, but it’s categorically not the one that Councillor Hunter identifies. In a referendum, you need a simple majority of 50% plus one vote, whereas it’s possible to win an election on a minority of the vote. But you don’t need to secure “considerably” more than 50% to win a referendum, unless of course you’ve artificially added a needless and anti-democratic supermajority rule, of the type that has only ever been used once in the UK – to notoriously rig the 1979 devolution referendum. Is that what the SNP are proposing? If so, it contradicts decades of party policy – they were quite rightly opposed to the 40% rule in 1979, which it’s sometimes said permitted the dead to be counted as No voters (a bit of an over-simplification but there’s a grain of truth in that). They were also quite rightly adamant that the 2014 independence referendum had to be decided by a simple majority.
There’s a very good reason for opposing what George Robertson called “a fancy franchise”, and to understand why, you only need to think through the ramifications of more people voting Yes than No in any indyref, and then the returning officer declaring that Scotland has voted against independence. That’s not exactly a recipe for stability or for ‘losers’ consent’, and nor should it be, given the obvious demonstration that some votes are more equal than others.
Councillor Hunter’s hints about rigging the franchise (and doing so, eccentrically, in a way that would make it much harder for what is supposed to be her own side to win) need to be seen in the context of another recent tweet in which she adopted strikingly unionist rhetoric in saying that the public didn’t want an indyref in the near future, and that the onus was on anyone who wanted one to change people’s minds. Er, isn’t it supposed to be the SNP themselves who want independence, and a referendum to bring independence about? If there are any minds needing to be changed (there aren’t, incidentally, because the mandate has already been won), isn’t it the SNP’s job to change them? And if they show no interest in meeting that challenge, and if they seem almost more comfortable when they can claim that the challenge is going unmet, doesn’t that begin to call into question whether their support for independence and an indyref is anything more than nominal?
It’s difficult to know what to make of this, because Councillor Hunter is known to be close to the SNP leadership, but that doesn’t exclude the possibility that these are just personal views. But if by any chance she’s vocalising the views of the leadership, it’s deeply, deeply concerning. It would suggest to me they’re looking for evergreen excuses to say “now is not the time for a referendum” no matter how much time elapses. 48% Yes in the polls? “It’s not a majority.” 51% Yes in the polls? “It’s not a significant majority.” 55% Yes in the polls? “We need 60%.” 60% Yes in the polls? “We need a two-thirds majority. We only get one shot at this.”
And on and on it goes into infinity.
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