Neil Gray was one of Humza Yousaf’s keenest supporters during the leadership race, which presumably meant he strongly shared the view that the SNP should “move down a gear” on independence and scrap Nicola Sturgeon’s plan for a de facto referendum. I’ve no idea whether he now accepts the logic for the partial U-turn that Yousaf has done since then by devising the so-called “Schrodinger’s De Facto”, but nevertheless the above screenshot is the perfect illustration of why it would be so foolish for the SNP to sideline independence and try to take on Labour purely on bread and butter matters, which has apparently been the cherished dream for so many Humza-supporting parliamentarians.
What is the messaging here? Labour isn’t offering real change on five key policy areas where the SNP have delivered in Scotland, so…vote SNP so that an SNP government can be elected at Westminster to do more of this stuff? Nope, that doesn’t make sense, everyone knows the SNP can’t form a government at Westminster and aren’t interested in joining a coalition government. (I distinctly remember having my head practically bitten off at a public event in the Traverse Theatre on the day of the 2015 general election for suggesting that the SNP might or should enter into a formalised deal for governing with Ed Miliband.) Vote SNP in 2026 because the SNP can form a government at Holyrood and do good things? Well, fine, but that doesn’t answer the question of why anyone should vote SNP for Westminster in 2024. Vote SNP and we might be able to have a positive influence on government policy from the outside? Hmmm. Maybe, but even leaving aside the fact that the SNP holding the balance of power is a long shot (perhaps 1 in 20 at best), you’d need a minority Labour government to take office to have any influence at all, in which case what the hell is the point of the binary-choice SNP v Labour messaging? It just doesn’t make any sense at all, and voters will know that. They’ll say that “it doesn’t matter if SNP policies are superior to Labour policies, because at the end of the day Labour can form a government and you can’t.” They might also point out that it’s a bit daft to put photos of Humza Yousaf and Keir Starmer at the top of an SNP-Labour comparison graphic, given that Yousaf appears to be even less popular with the public than Starmer.
The SNP need an inspirational pitch that can compete with the clarity of Labour’s “vote Labour on Thursday, and the Tories will be out of office on Friday”. Fortunately, there is such a pitch available and it goes like this: “Labour offer no change at all. The real change Scotland needs is independence. Vote SNP on Thursday to give us a mandate for an independent Scotland, so that on Friday we can start negotiating an independence settlement with the UK Government, and then get on with the job of transforming Scotland with the powers of independence.” Then you can get a hearing for all your wonderful policies on bread and butter matters (assuming they are wonderful policies), because you’re putting them strictly in the context of what you would do in an independent Scotland, thus allowing voters to see a credible chain of events meaning that a vote for the SNP in a Westminster election would (or at least could) lead to the desired policies being enacted.
Since 2014, the independence movement has a proud history of finding DIY solutions when the SNP leadership have proved deficient, and I’ve been increasingly wondering in recent weeks if there is a role for us here. Being part of the pro-independence alternative media often feels like preaching solely to the converted, which is why I’ve felt that the most constructive thing I can do for now is try to show to the many SNP members who read this blog that there is strong polling evidence that their party would be doing better if they replaced Humza Yousaf as leader. It’s probably literally true that changing leader would have ten times the positive effect that chapping on a million doors would have.
But we’re also in a wholly unfamiliar situation, because the main reason the SNP are on a trajectory that could lead to defeat at the hands of Labour is that independence supporters, and specifically independence supporters who haven’t changed their minds about independence, are drifting off to Starmer’s party. Is it just possible that the pro-indy alternative media would have a chance of reaching some of those people and thus having a positive effect? We never had a hope in hell of persuading die-hard unionists to vote for pro-independence parties, because a) such people don’t read our websites, and b) to the limited extent they do read our websites it’s mainly to have a good laugh at us. But independence supporters who used to vote SNP and have only very recently switched to Labour are a very different kettle of fish. They might well give us a hearing and we might well be able to find arguments that would convince them.
I doubt if the regular readership of Scot Goes Pop contains many casual independence supporters who are now planning to vote Labour. But those people may be part of Facebook groups with the more hard-core independence campaigners, or have such campaigners among their friends list on social media. I’ve been wondering more and more if I could play a small part by writing a series of articles setting out in concrete terms how Labour are not offering much change from the Tory status quo, how Keir Starmer is patently an untrustworthy and dishonourable man given that he has backtracked on all of the key pledges he made when standing for leader, and how independence rather than Labour offers the only real change. I would then have to ask readers to share the articles with the Labour-curious independence supporters in their lives, otherwise they would never reach the target audience. I’m not sure whether it would be best to host those articles on a fresh website to avoid the in-group nature of this blog detracting from the message.
So that’s what I’m mulling over for my own part, but what we really need is an all-out, movement-wide effort to engage with switchers to Labour from our own side, to win them back, and to defeat Labour in the general election. Call it the Yes movement’s equivalent of the Manhattan Project – not in the sense of a project trying to blow up Japan or wider human civilisation, but a full-blooded, totally committed push towards a specific objective within a limited period of time. We probably have around a year or fifteen months until the election, so that’s how long we’ve got to turn things around. We have the means to do it, but we need to find the will. I said the other week that one of the semi-iron laws in politics is that divided parties don’t win elections – well, another one is that parties or movements that have lost the will to win tend to lose. Right now, the signs are not good, judging by self-indulgences such as the SNP choosing Yousaf for factional reasons when they knew damn well he was far more unpopular with the public than Kate Forbes, or a minority of supporters of smaller pro-indy parties apparently telling themselves they’ll somehow have achieved something important if they ‘target’ particularly poor SNP MPs and get them replaced by unionist MPs.
Labour can still be defeated in Scotland next year – but only if we find the will.
