On Monday, SNP members narrowly voted to turn their party into a de facto devolutionist party. In many cases, probably most, they were blissfully unaware of what they were doing, but the salient point is that they did it. Events since then have confirmed that this was not a drill. As he indicated that he would, Yousaf has ditched Nicola Sturgeon’s de facto referendum and replaced it with…nothing. For the first time since at least 1942, the SNP are no longer a party actively trying to win independence. Yes, of course, we’ll constantly hear lots of happy-clappy messaging along the lines of “get out there and campaign some more and the barriers to independence will all melt away in some conveniently unspecified manner”, but that’s just the equivalent of TV evangelism or soap operas or pornography for the masses – it’s a way of keeping us distracted and occupied while the SNP leadership get on with the real meat of their careers.
John le Carré’s novel A Perfect Spy contains a segment – which apparently is a faithful replication of a real-life episode – in which the main character’s conman father somehow finds himself as the Liberal Party’s candidate in a 1950s parliamentary by-election in East Anglia. At a public meeting, he tries to explain the relevance of the Liberal Party as the “party of ideals” given that ideals don’t create jobs or put dinner on the table. “Ideals are like the stars,” he says to rapturous applause, “we cannot reach them, but oh HOW WE PROFIT FROM THEIR PRESENCE!”. That’s what independence now is under Humza rule – it’s not something that we actually try to bring about in real life, it’s just a lodestar that gently guides our political lives.
All of which creates a formidable barrier for those of us, whether inside or outside the SNP, who see independence as a concrete objective to be achieved in the here and now. However, barriers are there to be overcome, and we must at least endeavour to do so. I was initially quite encouraged to see Craig Murray tweeting yesterday about how we should all cheer up because we have a bedrock support for independence of at least 44%, which isn’t going to go away. However, he then ruined it somewhat with the last couple of sentences –
Any message of hope based on the premise that “all we have to do is destroy the SNP and then everything will be fine” is actually a counsel of despair, because clearly the SNP cannot be destroyed in anything like the foreseeable future, and even if it somehow could be, it’s likely that unionist parties (and particularly Labour) would fill the gap left behind. However, on the assumption that the first part of Craig’s tweet is correct, let me suggest a few more plausible ways in which it may be possible for us to get back on track within a maximum of three years.
1. The Alba route.
This is what I was suggesting in my post about Alba the other day. Although Alba cannot replace the SNP as the leading pro-independence party in the short or medium term, the Holyrood electoral system makes it possible for a small party to win a decent number of list seats with as little as 6% of the vote. Make no mistake, that is still a tall order – most serious commentators all the way up to John Curtice expect us never to win any Holyrood seats, because at best we’ve been flatlining on the 2% we won in the 2021 Holyrood election and the 2022 local elections. However, if we get out of our comfort zone of being an inward-looking sect, and make the changes necessary to become a mainstream party that appeals to both the wider independence movement and the general public, 6% is just about achievable, and it could produce a result in the 2026 election that is something like this –
SNP 51
Labour 34
Conservatives 19
Greens 9
Liberal Democrats 9
Alba 7
In that scenario there is a clear pro-independence majority (67 pro-indy seats compared to 62 for unionist parties), but the SNP cannot form a stable government on the basis of that majority without either direct or indirect participation from Alba. They would therefore have a choice of either cutting a deal with Alba or entering into a ‘grand coalition’ with Labour. Although they would probably be tempted to do the latter, it would be fraught with danger for them because their remaining supporters would suddenly see clearly that they have abandoned independence. So, on balance, I would expect them to go down the indy majority route, and we know that Alba would insist upon a credible strategy for independence as their price for supporting an SNP-led government. It would be a tricky balancing act, because the Greens would also be needed for the majority, and the Greens would refuse to be part of any formal arrangement with Alba, who they pretend to believe to be “far right bigots”. However, my impression is that the Greens are not actually opposed in principle to a radical independence strategy – they were on board, after all, for the de facto referendum until Yousaf ditched it. So there probably is a viable three-party arrangement there to be reached as long as it’s kept informal, arm’s length and above all else deniable.
2) The opinion poll route.
Yousaf’s wafer-thin victory was forged almost entirely on careerism – favours called in and promises made. But supposing it becomes painfully obvious from opinion poll evidence over the next few months that a large number of SNP MPs at Westminster are likely to lose their seats and thus their careers in a general election that is at most eighteen months away. Supposing also that his own personal approval ratings remain as poor as they currently are or get even worse. Could those MPs start joining the dots and realising that some of them are only about to lose their jobs because of Yousaf himself? Could they then start pondering the obvious but drastic remedy? There are plenty of precedents for parties changing leader pre-emptively to avert an impending defeat rather than waiting until after the defeat has occurred. A famous example is the Australian Labor Party hurriedly installing Bob Hawke as their leader just weeks before the 1983 general election, which transformed a likely defeat into a historic victory.
The odds are probably against it in this case, because on a day to day basis Yousaf is surrounded by MSPs rather than the MPs who are most immediately in the firing line. Nevertheless, it’s certainly not impossible, because even those MSPs are unlikely to be totally relaxed about throwing away Nicola Sturgeon’s hard-earned SNP majority at Westminster.
3) The life after defeat route.
In this scenario the SNP act like rabbits caught in the headlights – they see Westminster defeat coming but they take no action to avert it. But they then become angry about what they’ve so needlessly lost. If losing 21 seats in 2017 was enough of a shock for the SNP to put independence on the back-burner, it’s not too much of a stretch to think losing the majority outright would be enough of a shock to make them realise they need to rectify the mistake of installing Yousaf as leader. And because those who argued that “continuity won’t cut it” had been proved to be on the right side of history, it would be harder – by no means impossible, but harder – for another continuity candidate to secure the succession at that stage.
4) The Humza route.
I said on Monday that independence is impossible until Humza is no longer calling the shots, but could that be wrong? Suppose Humza himself panics because of dire opinion polls, and tries to shore up his leadership by demonstrating to the party and the country that he’s listened and learned. We could see Kate Forbes and Ash Regan (Forbes at the very least) being hurriedly drafted into the Cabinet in senior roles and with a promise of major input into policy. If real panic sets in, it might even occur to him that pretty much the only way of overcoming his own personal unpopularity is to bring back the de facto referendum from the dead – that’s the only means of guaranteeing that the Yes movement will be galvanised into supporting the SNP at an election.
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