On the previous thread there was a little exchange which once again crystallised for me the “scunnered middle” problem faced by the independence movement. In a nutshell, the issue is this. If you back the SNP leadership, to the hilt and without reservation, what you are doing is legitimising the following narrative –
“Everything must be absolutely perfect before we seek an independence mandate. All the stars must be in ideal alignment, because we only get one more shot at this. If we run away ten, twenty or a hundred times from actually trying to make independence happen, no matter how many decades may pass with Scotland still trapped in the United Kingdom, we are acting in the interests of the independence cause, because we are preventing a defeat that would kill it forever. We must keep the flame alive at all costs.”
The snag is, of course, that this supposed vital need to wait for perfection – something which is unattainable in this world and thus translates to indefinite passivity and inaction – just happens to coincide with the self-interest of parliamentarians who might be privately happy enough if independence doesn’t become a real-world prospect until their own careers at Westminster come to a natural end and they’ve had a chance to reap the full salary benefits. Even worse, there’s an inter-related narrative that states that only the SNP leadership themselves have any role in adjudicating when this perfect moment has or has not arrived…
“Many things are known to the Leader that are not known to us. We must trust in the Leader who is in a better place to judge than we are. It is wise that The Plan is but known to a select few, because if The Plan is concealed from us it is also concealed from our enemies, who will fall victim to our advantage of surprise and will have no opportunity to find a strategy for counteracting The Plan. There is no doubt that The Plan has been in place for many years and any apparent U-turns are premeditated tactical steps to hide the existence of The Plan.”
This begs a couple of obvious questions. If The Plan has been so cunningly hidden, why would it be obvious to us that it’s there when it isn’t obvious to unionists? Logically, the non-existence of any plan is an equally compelling explanation for the events of the last few years. And if there is indeed a revolutionary vanguard at the core of the SNP who are following some brilliant long-term strategy that has to be kept from us for our own good, why does Alex Salmond – who was leader of the SNP less than eight years ago – believe that there is no such vanguard and no such strategy? What it boils down to is a type of circular quasi-religious faith – the vanguard and The Plan exist and therefore you must believe in them without evidence, because if you demand evidence you are helping our enemies. Belief is everything.
And again, isn’t this just remarkably convenient? The cause and the Leader are one, and if you attack the Leader you attack the cause. If the Leader does nothing to bring independence about, it’s because she can see that perfection has not yet been attained. Only she can make that judgement. It is sufficient for the rest of us to simply Trust In Nicola.
(People may complain that I’m exaggerating to make SNP leadership groupies sound like a Dear Leader-style cult, but much of what I’ve written above is a very close paraphrase of tweets from loyalists such as “Scone of Destiny”, or whatever he calls himself these days.)
So the conclusion is obvious. There has to be some qualification for any support we give to the SNP leadership, because signing them a blank cheque leads to nothing – or just to an endless kicking of the can down the road and promises of jam tomorrow.
But if you try a more effective strategy to apply pressure on the SNP leadership and thus keep them honest, you quickly run into a different sort of narrative, which goes something like this…
“Now that you’ve realised that SNP MPs have got their snouts in the trough and that the leadership are betraying us, you know that we must destroy them completely. What good are all these pro-independence MPs to us anyway? We had an independence referendum when there were six SNP MPs. We didn’t have one when there were fifty-six. Therefore, we’re better off getting rid of them all and only having six pro-indy seats again. Stands to reason, dunnit?”
Well, no, actually, it doesn’t stand to reason, it’s absolute bloody lunacy. Being reduced from 56 to 35 MPs in 2017 was a horrendous setback for the independence movement. Being reduced to six might finish us off for a generation. The reality is of course that no-one honestly believes that only having six MPs would somehow help us win independence – the agenda for people who say these things is not actually independence at all, it’s instead to destroy the SNP in an act of revenge. In some cases that impulse is understandable – several people have been treated horrendously by the Sturgeon leadership and were subjected to spurious disciplinary proceedings while they were in the SNP. But those of us who prioritise independence can’t afford to go down the road of destruction for its own sake.
What is needed is a more nuanced approach. Neither ‘trust in Nicola’ nor ‘destroy the SNP’. We need to find the sweet spot where we’re applying effective pressure on the SNP leadership but stopping ourselves well before we reach the point where we’re handing seats and power back to the unionists. Without that sweet spot, either the SNP will take our votes and do nothing, or we’ll blow up our own cause while unwittingly mocking ourselves with a celebratory cackle. Neither of those outcomes strike me as great.
But I’m becoming increasingly despondent about there being enough people out there who have the remotest interest in threading the needle in the delicate and precise manner required. Maybe it’s something to do with basic human nature – people just want to pick sides. They’re determined to believe that Nicola Sturgeon is either some sort of infallible God or the enemy of independence. Truth be told, she’s neither.
So what do those of us in the middle actually do when we feel increasingly squeezed by the extremes? I know some would say “just opt out of the problem altogether and do your own thing campaigning for independence”. But if you think about it, that actually takes some of the necessary pressure off the SNP leadership, who for years have been telling us: “Just campaign for independence and don’t worry your pretty little heads about process, that’s a matter for your betters.”
I suppose what I’m really saying is that I haven’t found a satisfactory answer yet and I’m open to suggestions.
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Two very large donations (well, one very large, one absolutely enormous) came through to the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser on Friday. You both know who you are, so huge thanks to you both – I was absolutely blown away when I saw the jump in the running total. And also a million thanks to everyone else who has donated recently – it really is making a difference.
