As regular readers will recall, I was in absolute despair when Humza Yousaf was narrowly elected SNP leader in controversial circumstances three months ago, largely because it brought to an end the SNP’s eight-decade-long history as a party seeking to win independence. Yousaf’s announcement about independence strategy at the weekend does to some extent reverse that process, and there’s not much doubt that it’s a genuine U-turn. The briefings to the press suggest that the parliamentarians who backed Humza for leader precisely to get rid of Nicola Sturgeon’s de facto referendum plan, because they believed independence to be a drag on SNP support, have rapidly changed their minds because the polls in recent weeks have made them realise the complete reverse is true.
So the underlying reasoning is more cynical than we’d like, and it appears that the SNP leadership seem relaxed in the belief that they won’t have to negotiate independence irrespective of the general election outcome. Does that bother me? Not as much as you might think, because I’ve always made the point that the value of a plebiscite election, or anything equivalent to one, does not hinge on whether it will automatically result in independence. People who ask the supposedly ‘killer’ question “and what do you do when Westminster ignores the result?” are only demonstrating that they are missing the whole point. No matter what strategy we adopt, we have no control whatever over how Westminster react to it. Our job is to get on with what is actually within our province. An outright mandate for independence is an absolute prerequisite if independence is ever going to happen. It is wholly within our power to bring such a mandate about, because it can be done via scheduled elections, but we have conspicuously failed to do so thus far. Putting that right has to be the priority, and if we manage it, the independence movement will progress into an entirely new sphere. For the first time in our lives, the Scottish people will have decided to become independent, and from then on the task will be to apply pressure on the UK government from every quarter to give effect to that decision. There’ll be no guarantee of success, but that’s the nature of the beast.
If Yousaf is true to his word and puts “a vote for the SNP is a vote for independence” as the opening words of the manifesto, it gives voters an opportunity to vote directly for independence in a way that we didn’t think was going to be possible. It doesn’t matter what the SNP’s motivations are for allowing this, what matters is that the opportunity is there. So it seems to me that we as rank and file independence supporters now have three priorities we need to concentrate on –
1) Keep Yousaf to his word. We’ve seen countless promises on independence strategy broken by the SNP leadership since 2017, so the fact that Yousaf says he’ll do something does not necessarily mean it will happen. The slightest sign of backtracking or watering down must be called out loudly.
2) Continue the pressure on Yousaf to step down if he fails to turn around the SNP’s slump in the opinion polls, or to win the Rutherglen by-election. This one almost seems like a contradiction, because a change of leader could open up the question of the independence plan yet again and we could end up with something worse. But that’s a risk worth taking, because the single most effective step towards garnering the needed votes for pro-independence parties would be for the SNP to install a more voter-friendly leader.
3) Take the fight to Labour. I have no time whatever for the notion that the purpose of the general election is to “target” particularly useless SNP MPs and divert enough of their votes away to smaller pro-indy parties to ensure that they lose their seats to Labour or the Tories. No matter whether the SNP keep Humza in place as leader (and as I’ve already said, they would be foolish to), seeing off the Labour threat will still have to be the absolute priority for the whole independence movement. My suspicion is that many voters are turning to Labour because of nothing more than a residual cultural pull. Most of us grew up surrounded by people who would say in sheep-like fashion “ah’m a Labour man because ma faither was a Labour man and his faither before him”, and those kind of unthinking impulses don’t, sadly, just vanish within a single decade. There’s still this vague sense that Labour are “the good guys” from people who probably don’t have a clue that Labour under Starmer are a right-of-centre party which passionately supports Brexit and opposes public ownership, and which would essentially represent a continuation of Tory rule under different personnel. We need to find innovative ways of confronting Labour-curious voters with some hard truths.
