Believe in Scotland is sometimes dismissed as nothing more than an SNP front, and it’s true that the last time I spoke to Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp (which was way back during Independence Live’s coverage of the 2021 Holyrood election results), I detected plenty of warmth towards the SNP and the Greens, but a distinct ice-coolness towards the Alba party, which I had only just joined. But anyone who has paid any attention to his writings will know that he has in fact been sceptical of late about the SNP’s election strategy, and that at least to some extent his concerns mirror the ones held by those of us in the Alba camp.
I certainly find very little to disagree with in his latest analysis in The National, which expresses the worry that large numbers of SNP voters could stay at home on polling day due to their party’s tepidness on the independence issue. He also wonders if warm words towards Labour in pursuit of tactical votes in Tory-held seats could be counterproductive by contributing to substantial losses in the much greater number of seats where Labour is the SNP’s main opponent.
Perhaps the one comment I might take issue with is in the closing sentence of the piece where Gordon suggests that “right now it looks more like 2017 than 2015”. I take that as a warning against complacency, but paradoxically it may well in itself represent a form of complacency, ie. a belief that 2017 represents some kind of worst case scenario, and a failure of imagination about just how bad things could get.
The reality is that the SNP are in a much, much weaker position than they were in 2017. When Theresa May unexpectedly announced she was going to the country that year, there were fears for the SNP, but those fears were that they might lose up to ten of their 56 seats to the Tories, and perhaps one or two to the Liberal Democrats. Initially it was assumed there was a floor of 45 seats below which the SNP couldn’t fall, but in fact they ended up with only 35. The YouGov MRP projection from a few days ago already shows the SNP with ten fewer than that, which means they’re on course to lose their majority and slip to rough parity with Labour. If we were really learning the lesson of 2017 we’d be thinking about how much worse things can get once the campaign is underway, rather than wallowing in imagined disappointment about how we’ll feel if things stay exactly as they are.
Today a YouGov subsample was published showing the following: Labour 35%, SNP 29%, Conservatives 14%, Greens 9%, Reform UK 9%, Liberal Democrats 4%. OK, even a subsample that is correctly structured and weighted will have a very large margin of error, and the high shares for both the Greens and Reform UK should perhaps make us a tad dubious. But if hypothetically that was the election result in Scotland, the seats projection on the new boundaries would be: Labour 34, SNP 13, Conservatives 7, Liberal Democrats 3. There would only have to be a further 4% swing to Labour (ie. Labour 39%, SNP 25%) for the SNP to be facing a near-extinction event that would reduce them literally to just TWO seats. This could end up feeling a lot more like 1979 or 1983 than 2017.
I say these things not as a counsel of despair, but to try to wake the SNP up and make them realise that they’re dabbling with strategic tweaks when the situation may require a total strategic overhaul. There’s still time to do that, but they need to act fast. Restore unity by bringing Kate Forbes and her allies back into the fold in senior ministerial positions. Galvanise the Yes support by actually giving independence voters independence to vote for. Relentlessly expose Keir Starmer for the unprincipled confidence trickster that he is – and whatever happened to Brexit as a wedge issue? Couldn’t the SNP be making far more of the fact that Scottish Labour are a pro-Brexit party trying to win in an anti-Brexit country?
Before we finish, a reminder that the Scot Goes Pop opinion poll fundraiser urgently needs a boost – let’s not leave it in limbo for months. It’s important that not all Scottish opinion polling is commissioned by anti-independence clients – we need to make sure that occasionally questions are asked that Yes supporters want asked. Donations can be made via the fundraiser page HERE.
However if you have a Paypal account the best way to donate is via direct Paypal payment, because that can totally eliminate fees depending on which option you select, and payment usually comes through instantly. My Paypal email address is:
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