In my post the other day suggesting possible questions to ask the candidates at the SNP leadership hustings, there were a couple I wanted addressed to Kate Forbes on independence strategy, because I felt her position was somewhat ambiguous. In fairness, I would now accept that ambiguity is largely gone, albeit in a way that is maximally dismaying. She did an interview for the Sunday National not long afterwards in which she was asked similar questions, and the answers were pretty much the polar opposite of what I wanted to hear. No, the special conference (if it takes place) will no longer be making the final decision on strategy in the way Nicola Sturgeon promised. No, there is no Plan B of a de facto referendum if the SNP keep getting mandates for a referendum and the UK Government keep ignoring those mandates. All Forbes proposes to do is keep trying to build independence support higher and higher on the basis of the magical thinking that there is some ill-defined threshold of support beyond which the UK Government will crumple and achieving independence will become a piece of cake.
This fails to take account of two inconvenient and rather enormous problems. Firstly, if independence support goes higher, the UK Government actually have a stronger incentive to refuse an independence referendum, not a weaker one, because the referendum would look less winnable for the No side. And secondly, even if it turns out this ill-defined threshold of necessary support exists, it may not even be attainable for demographic reasons. For example, I’ve always argued that 60% support for independence on a sustained basis (which incredibly is sometimes punted as a perfectly reasonable target) is not attainable, because there are too many sections of the electorate that we know are very firmly wedded to the No side.
Forbes’ position on independence strategy is, at it turns out, near-enough identical to Yousaf’s. Total surrender to the anti-democratic Westminster narrative that 50% + 1 on the day of the decision is not enough, and that we instead need a supermajority on a sustained basis in opinion polls run largely in the south of England by people who often have unconscious unionist biases (leading to abominations such as the “Kellner Correction” in 2013-14 which allowed YouGov to justify to themselves significantly under-reporting the high level of Yes support they were picking up). A meek acceptance that Westminster have the right to define what the supermajority needs to look like and what “sustained” means, and that our London masters also have the right to keep shifting the goalposts on a whim, Ruth Davidson-style, to suit themselves. And no Plan B, ensuring that Westminster’s veto on Scotland’s exercise of its right to self-determination is absolute and total. It’s a heartbreaking reversal of the much more credible strategy that the SNP still, to this day, nominally hold under the leadership of Nicola Sturgeon.
So if both a Forbes win and a Yousaf win would represent exactly the same setback on independence strategy, does that mean it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other if it comes down, as it appears to be doing, to a straight choice between the two of them? No, it does not mean that. Forbes is still vastly preferable to Yousaf, and there are two main reasons for that.
Firstly, although Forbes is adopting a Yousaf-like independence non-strategy, the mood music she’s surrounding it with is a million times better than the equivalent offered by Yousaf. Now, I know some people will roll their eyes at that observation, but in politics and in government, optimism can often prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, particularly for a new leader enjoying a honeymoon period. An example of what I mean is Tony Blair achieving a seemingly-impossible agreement between the Northern Ireland parties within a year of taking office. If he’d been asked in 1997 exactly how he was going to broker such a deal, he wouldn’t have been able to explain, but he still managed it, and a big part of the explanation for that was sheer momentum and positivity. Forbes is offering something similar on independence by constantly stressing we can achieve our goal sooner than many people think, and certainly in time enough that her newborn daughter will “grow up” in an independent Scotland – not go to university in one or be an adult in one, but actually grow up in one. In contrast, Yousaf is forever sucking the life out of the Yes campaign by emphasising that independence is a very, very, very long way away – what’s the rush, guys, Rome wasn’t built in a day, if Nicola couldn’t find a way, how the hell do you expect me to do it, etc, etc, etc.
Furthermore, Forbes is putting the onus on herself to deliver the objective of independence within such a tight timescale, which means she can actually be held accountable if she fails to find a way of breaking the deadlock. Yousaf, on the other hand, would just shrug and say “don’t look at me, guys, you just haven’t been knocking on enough doors – there’s nothing I can do until you get support for independence a lot higher”. He’d also be able to quite reasonably point out that SNP members had elected him on a promise to do essentially nothing about independence, and that he’s just faithfully delivering the nothingness that members voted to get.
The second reason for favouring Forbes over Yousaf is more fundamental. If we are now doomed to an outcome where the new SNP leader imposes on us a totally needless supermajority requirement for Yes support, there is hard polling evidence to demonstrate that Yousaf will have no chance of achieving his self-imposed target, but that Kate Forbes might just be able to. In other words, Yousaf and Forbes both have the same strategy, but Forbes may have the capacity to actually make the strategy work in a way that Yousaf does not – and there can hardly be a more crucial distinction than that. An analogy would be that both candidates intend to set off on a foolhardy solo flight across the Atlantic, but that Forbes has just enough fuel in the tank to reach New York while Yousaf’s fuel will run out when he’s barely halfway over the ocean. So you already know before he even starts that Yousaf is going to fail, whereas with Forbes it remains to be seen.
The Ipsos poll commissioned by Channel 4 for last night’s debate showed that Kate Forbes was clearly the preferred choice of the general public, but that she was essentially tied with Yousaf among the subsample of people who voted SNP in 2021. It was astoundingly ironic that Yousaf, a candidate who claims that he is the guy to get independence support over the line (meaning his self-imposed supermajority line), was claiming that only the results among SNP voters mattered and that Forbes’ popularity with the wider public was irrelevant. In other circumstances, it might be just about defensible to say that the SNP had 47.7% of the vote in 2021, and that you don’t need any more than that, so if you’re semi-popular with SNP voters nothing else matters. But if you’re voluntarily chasing supermajorities, I’m afraid 47.7% just doesn’t cut it. Even to get to 55%, you’ll need to win substantial numbers of votes from unionist parties and those will mainly be people who have never previously voted for the SNP or for independence. The Ipsos poll clearly shows Kate Forbes has a fighting chance of reaching those voters, but with Yousaf it would be hopeless. Let’s crunch the numbers from the poll…
Net approval ratings among people who voted No in the 2014 independence referendum:
