Pete Wishart’s position is now essentially identical to the one Ash Regan took during the leadership election (which, with characteristic but truly comical delusions of grandeur, a certain Tory voter in Somerset is claiming as his own policy which Ms Regan merely “adopted”!). This is odd in a way, given how scathing Wishart was towards Regan during the campaign, but let’s not be churlish about it. You’d only need to wind the clock back around a year or so to find Wishart positioning himself as the most vehement opponent of plebiscite elections, and blasting those of us who believed in the idea as “absolute menaces”. We initially thought his screeching U-turn on the subject was nothing more than a sign of robotic loyalty to the SNP leadership, but it can no longer be dismissed in that way. By maintaining his belief in the Sturgeon plan after Yousaf has ditched it (and indeed by demanding that the SNP go even further than the Sturgeon plan), Wishart is actually rebelling against the SNP leadership, so his reversal of stance can now be regarded as authentic. That may not be a game-changer in itself, but it certainly has the potential to help shift the dial somewhat.
It may be that Nicola Sturgeon’s conversion to the idea of a plebiscite election caused Wishart to look at the proposal with a fresh eye, free from his prejudices against the people who had previously been putting it forward, and he suddenly recognised that it made perfect sense. I’ve said this many times, but even if you put the SNP’s self-interest ahead of independence, shying away from trying to deliver independence at elections is an illogical thing to do, because it demotivates your own support base, increases the abstention rate, and in Westminster elections may even lead to SNP voters drifting off to Labour. Suppose you’re a committed independence supporter in Glasgow, but you also loathe the Tories, as all right-thinking people in Glasgow do. In the 2024 general election, you’re faced with two competing pitches – Labour saying “vote Labour on Thursday, the Tory government will be gone by Friday”, and the SNP saying “vote SNP to send a message to Westminster”. Which of those two would you find most inspiring? Whereas if you replace the meaningless waffle of the SNP’s pitch with a concrete commitment to negotiate an independence settlement if pro-indy parties win more than 50% of the vote, and end London rule once and for all, it’s a totally different proposition. You need to give people something to vote for.
James Mitchell’s advice to the SNP for many years has been ‘don’t do anything that might look like you’re trying to deliver independence’. They’ve broadly followed that advice and this is the state it’s brought them to. He’s still not satisfied, though.https://t.co/kWGQkOJvSl
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) May 6, 2023
My anger about the above is totally genuine, because it literally is the case that listening to the “do nothing” advice from the likes of James Mitchell has got the SNP into the almighty mess they are currently in, with all the consequences for the independence cause. I vividly recall that, just after the exit poll was published on the night of the 2017 general election, I decided to take the SNP manifesto at its word, and point out in a tweet that the “triple lock mandate” for an independence referendum had been completed by the SNP winning a majority of Scottish seats at Westminster. It didn’t matter that 35 seats (or 34 as the exit poll initially projected) was a sharp reduction on before – it was still a very clear majority, and according to the terms of the manifesto, a referendum should thus swiftly follow. Professor Mitchell, who I don’t think I had ever previously interacted with, instantly jumped on my tweet with absolute fury. “This is insane!” he said. “There isn’t going to be an independence referendum!” By which he meant that he thought there shouldn’t be a referendum and he was determined to ensure that there wasn’t, and he was enraged by any narrative that might threaten his attempt to use the general election result to kill off the whole plan.
Well, he got his way, and the most important consequence of that was suddenly the SNP didn’t have a referendum to spend their ring-fenced fund on. Regardless of whether it turns out that there was anything wrong from a legal point of view with what they did with the money instead, the fact remains that this chain of events killed the Sturgeon leadership. The police investigation would never have happened if there’d been a referendum or de facto referendum to spend the money on, and without the police investigation Sturgeon would never have been forced out. The SNP would not have suffered a slump in support due to the installing of a much less popular leader and a string of dreadful headlines about alleged corruption and/or illegality.
You’d have thought Mitchell might be somewhat chastened by having demonstrably offered such dud advice, but instead he’s urging the SNP to double down on its idleness by not even using any opportunity thrown up by a hung parliament (and I agree with him that any such opportunity is improbable) to bring about independence. With the greatest of respect to the man, the idea that SNP voters (especially the rump that is left after the Humza slump) don’t want their party to seize opportunities to deliver independence when they’re there, and to just be cowed into pathetically going along with whatever Starmer wants, is pretty obviously bogus.
In any case, the choice between unconditional support for Labour in a hung parliament and “letting the Tories in” is a false choice. Much more probable is that the SNP would let Labour stagger on as a minority administration but use guerilla tactics in parliament to ensure Starmer would never be sure of whether he’d get his business through, leaving him “in office but not in power”, to use Norman Lamont’s famous phrase. The hope would be that this might drag Labour reluctantly to the negotiating table, with the prize for them being a stable spell in government.
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Labour people like Blair McDougall criticised the SNP for “joining with the Tories” in talking down Labour’s gains in the English local elections last Thursday. The reality is, though, that those gains were pretty easy to talk down, because Labour objectively underperformed. According to the BBC, Labour’s lead over the Tories on projected national vote share was nine points, and according to Sky it was only seven points. That’s hung parliament territory, not Labour majority territory. To put this in context, both Tony Blair and David Cameron enjoyed double-digit leads in local elections in the run-up to taking power. Putting on a Canadian accent, Thursday night was another trrrrrr-ible night for the Conservatives, but that trrrrrrr-ibleness was inflicted by several parties, not just by Labour, or even primarily by Labour.
The latest episode of the Scot Goes Popcast aims to win a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s shortest podcast as I give my succinct verdict on the local elections.
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