Since Humza Yousaf’s narrow and controversial win in the SNP leadership election, opinion polls have shown the SNP’s lead over Labour in Westminster voting intentions hovering between a fragile five and nine percentage points. In many ways that’s the nightmare zone for all of us who care about independence. If the lead was much more commanding, we could relax a bit because there would be a genuine reason for thinking the SNP might get away with having installed a very unpopular leader. Or if Labour had taken an outright lead, something constructive would come out of it because the careerists in the SNP would go into panic mode and at least start to think about contingency planning for a change of leader. As it is, the danger is maximised that the SNP will sleepwalk into a crushing defeat without even attempting to address the Humza problem. The careerists (especially those who endorsed Humza and don’t want to admit to themselves that they were wrong) will cling to the polls as they are right now as a very thin comfort blanket, whereas in fact a narrow SNP lead at this stage points to the likelihood of defeat.
People always underestimate the effect of the official campaign period, ie. the last few weeks before polling day when the media are giving blanket coverage to the campaign. Long-term readers know that I despair at the “demographic drift” school of thought about patiently waiting twenty years for births and deaths to push support for independence into a sustained majority, because a glacial increase in Yes support over decades, even if it happened, could easily be dwarfed by a massive swing of opinion in the last two weeks of a referendum campaign, leaving us scratching our heads about why we’d bothered waiting so long. The SNP are particularly vulnerable to late swings in Westminster election campaigns, because those campaigns are ‘away fixtures’ for the party. The London media will portray next year’s election as Sunak v Starmer, with the SNP (and the Lib Dems for that matter) as little more than irritating complications. That’s what will be beamed into Scottish homes, and to imagine it won’t have an effect on Scottish voting patterns is naive. The obvious way in which the SNP could have counteracted the problem would have been to effectively put independence on the ballot paper, but Humza has ditched all plans to win independence for an indefinite period. So they’ll be left trying to win votes with an unpopular leader and a bland pitch of “send a message to Westminster”, which will impress and inspire absolutely no-one.
The classic example of the wheels coming off for the SNP during the official campaign period is the 2017 general election, and it’s worth reminding ourselves of the speed and scale at which that happened. Here is what a Survation poll showed around six weeks before the 2017 election –
Survation poll, 18th-21st April 2017:
SNP 43%
Conservatives 28%
Labour 18%
Liberal Democrats 9%
Nothing much there to cause any alarm. It was obvious the SNP were going to lose a few seats to the Tories, so the right-wing press were talking up the significance of that for all it was worth, but Labour’s vote was way down on the previous election and it seemed a racing certainty that the SNP would remain totally dominant across the central belt in Labour’s former heartlands. However, look at the difference a few weeks of intensive campaigning had made by the eve of the election…
Survation poll, 7th June 2017:
SNP 39% (-4)
Labour 29% (+11)
Conservatives 27% (-1)
Liberal Democrats 6% (-3)
Suddenly, out of nowhere, the SNP were facing a pincer movement from both of the largest two unionist parties. The Labour vote was no longer down from the previous election, it was up, and more importantly the SNP lead over Labour since the previous election had more than halved, putting a huge number of constituencies back into play. That happened because the TV coverage ensured voters were exposed to Jeremy Corbyn much more than they were to the SNP, and some of them became excited about the possibility of a “real Labour government” for the first time in decades. (I can recall overhearing conversations to that effect on the streets of Glasgow.)
In retrospect it’s a minor miracle that Labour only took seven Scottish seats in 2017, even though we had initially been confident they would take only one. For example, Labour gained just one seat in Glasgow, but from memory there were around another three or four seats in the city that were a virtual coin toss but all came down in the SNP’s favour. That pattern was replicated in some other parts of the central belt. If the campaign had been just a couple of days longer, there could have been absolute carnage for the SNP.
A short sharp swing to Labour on a similar scale now would transform an SNP lead of around 7 points into a Labour lead of around 8 points. First-past-the-post would magnify the effect of that lead, returning the SNP to fringe minority status at Westminster. If that’s what the SNP are happy to face, by all means they should retain Humza as leader and keep doing what they’re doing.
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As you might remember, I had intended to launch the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2023 as soon as the SNP leadership election was safely out of the way. But the sub-optimal outcome of that election, and the even more sub-optimal sequence of events in the weeks since, means that it’s just about the least promising moment ever to go all guns blazing with a fundraiser launch, especially as I’m sending SNP members a message on a near-daily basis that many of them don’t want to hear about the radical reversal of course that will be necessary if independence is going to be won in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, if anyone feels able and willing to help keep Scot Goes Pop going, donations are very much welcome. There are three options:
Direct payments can be made via Paypal. Those usually come through instantly and cut out the middle man. My Paypal email address is: jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk
Last year’s fundraiser page is still open for donations and can be found
HERE. There’s a small processing fee with this option.
If you prefer a bank transfer, please email me for details. My contact email address is different from my Paypal address and can be found in the sidebar (desktop version of the site only) or on my Twitter profile.
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