Indispensable SNP?

Is the Scottish National Party (SNP) indispensable to the cause of restoring Scotland’s independence? The SNP leadership certainly seems to think so. For many years the party’s election strategy has been built on the assumption that it will harvest the vast majority of pro-independence votes. So assured were successive party leaders of this guaranteed base vote that they came to take it for granted. Taking voters for granted is always a mistake. But whatever the SNP itself may think, to what extent is Scotland’s cause dependent on the SNP?

To be fair, there is considerable justification for the SNP leadership’s assumption that their party ‘owns’ the pro-independence vote. For most of its existence, nobody was interested in challenging the SNP’s claim to be ‘the party of independence’. Nobody wanted that title because ‘independence’ was not a vote-winning tag. Even when we entered upon what I think of as the new age of the independence campaign around 30 years ago, no other parties in Scotland were vying for the SNP’s role as the party political arm of the independence movement. Prior to the transformation of Scottish politics that occurred in the first decade of the reconvened Scottish Parliament, British Labour in Scotland dominated the scene while the SNP was regarded as as a fringe party.

As the constitutional issue moved up the political agenda, the SNP benefited from having no competition for pro-independence votes. Meanwhile, pro-independence voters were generally quite comfortable with having the SNP as the ‘party of independence’. the underlying idea, even if not explicitly stated, was that support for independence should be concentrated in the one party. I’m not sure many people even thought about it much. There was no formal strategy. It ‘just happened’ that the SNP came to be regarded as the sole vehicle for the journey to independence. If anybody did think about it, they tended to see this concentration of independence support as desirable and probably necessary. If the British state was to be successfully challenged, we would need a big, heavy hammer.

The SNP didn’t drag us along on its quest for power so much as we, the people, pushed the party into the vanguard of Scotland’s cause. It all worked very well at the outset. There was no reason to regret giving the SNP the power that derives from an overwhelming mandate or the confidence that comes from electoral dominance while the minority SNP Scottish Government under First Minister Alex Salmond pursued popular policies while governing with quiet competence and what I have termed principled pragmatism; that is to say, seeking effective solutions unconstrained by ideology but always mindful of certain very clear red lines. This culminated in the remarkable SNP victory in the 2011 Scottish Parliament election in which voters broke the electoral system to install a majority SNP government.

At this point, between 2011 and 2014, the SNP was indisputably essential to Scotland’s cause. It was indispensable.

Then came the referendum campaign and the rise of the Yes movement. Various groups and factions began to see the utility of the ‘independence’ tag as a device for marketing themselves and/or their agenda. Everybody was jumping on the independence bandwagon. Including many for whom independence was no more than a marketing device – something to lend them a bit of voter appeal. If you wanted to ride the electoral wave that was carryings the SNP to extraordinary heights, you had to don a Yes badge. A lot of people took to wearing a Yes badge.

Despite the diversity of the Yes movement and the fact that for some (many?) of the factions independence was not the highest priority, the Yes movement enjoyed a high degree of solidarity due to having clustered around a common cause – independence. Inevitably, however, a jealous eye was now lighting on the SNP’s electoral dominance. There were those who wanted a share of what the SNP had. But at the height of the referendum campaign with the Yes movement in full flood, nobody was going to openly set themselves up as contenders for the title held by the SNP. The SNP remained indispensable.

This persisted even after the tragic defeat in the referendum and Alex Salmond’s resignation as First Minister. It continued to be the case that the SNP was generally thought indispensable to Scotland’s cause well into 2015. But the Yes movement was no longer bound together by the referendum campaign. Diversity threatened to become division as will always tend to happen absent effective leadership to prevent it. With hindsight, we might consider that, had Alex Salmond not resigned he might have provided the leadership required to hold the Yes movement together. We might suppose he would have recognised the need to ‘keep the pot boiling’. We might think he would have exploited the momentum that the Yes movement surprisingly gained in the immediate aftermath of the 2014 referendum. We’re allowed to speculate.

The reality was markedly different. The momentum was squandered as Nicola Sturgeon opted to let the constitutional issue go off the boil. She decided not to exploit the momentum but to damp it down. She made a series of choices and decisions which can now bee seen as creating the conditions for people to begin to question the efficacy of having the independence cause so closely tied to the SNP. Questions began to be asked about the need for a single ‘party of independence’. And about whether the SNP under Sturgeon was still suited to being the sole ‘party of independence’. Eventually, as we no know, this led to people questioning whether the SNP could rightly be regarded as a ‘party of independence’ at all. It was during Nicola Sturgeon’s period in office that the SNP ceased to be generally regarded as indispensable.

There were opportunities to turn things around. The independence movement had made the SNP a massively powerful weapon in the service of Scotland’s cause once. There was a chance the party could be restored to that role. That it could be made once again fit for the purpose of being the party political and parliamentary arm of the independence movement. That a party political and parliamentary arm is essential should have been undeniable. But some of the doubts and open scepticism about the need for the SNP spilled over into questioning of the need for a political party at all. Doubts about the SNP’s fitness were understandable – and remain so. Doubting the need for a ‘party of independence’ made no sense whatever. There is simply no way Scotland’s independence can be restored without a ‘party of independence’ which is also the party of government.

Here then, is the dilemma. There are grave doubts about the SNP’s fitness to be the ‘party of independence’, but no way to stop it being the party of government. At least, not in time to prevent action by the British state to make the restoration of independence by peaceful democratic means effectively impossible. And even if there was some way to remove the SNP from government, there is no party ready to replace it. No party that might serve Scotland’s cause any more reliably than the SNP. And any process that removes the SNP from government inevitably risks allowing the British parties to retake the power that was always supposed to be theirs.

So, is the the SNP still indispensable to Scotland’s cause? The frustrating fact is that it probably is. What makes it indispensable has changed somewhat. But what has most markedly changed is the extent and degree to which the SNP being indispensable is felt to be acceptable. There is a widespread feeling that the unacceptability of the SNP being indispensable necessarily implies that it can and should be disposed of. In more than a few cases, this feeling is so strong as to engender demands for abandoning the SNP which fail to take into consideration the full implications of such a move. It is politically naïve to suppose that a movement might chop off the party political arm it has nurtured to be as muscular as the SNP and suffer no ill effects.

The cold, hard, discomfiting reality is that the most that can now be said of the SNP is that it is no longer totally indispensable. There are circumstances in which it is no longer needed. There are circumstances in which it remains vital to Scotland’s cause. The situation has gotten more complicated. It can no longer be safely assumed that supporting (or tolerating!) the SNP is always necessary or the best choice. Previously, it was easy. If you wanted independence restored, you did everything you could to put the SNP in power and keep them there. Now, we have to weigh a multitude of factors when adopting an attitude to the SNP appropriate to particular circumstances.

The SNP can no longer be regarded as a safe pair of hands for Scotland’s cause. But it may well be better than no hands at all. It can no longer be viewed as the ‘party of independence’. But it remains the party of government, and will be so for the entirety of a period which is critical.

A total and immediate rejection of the SNP is potentially very dangerous for Scotland’s cause. Those who commend this are just not thinking it through. By the same token, unquestioning and constant support for the party also risks doing damage to Scotland’s cause. I will not be popular with either camp for saying this. But it must be said, nonetheless. Large sections of the Yes movement may no longer acknowledge the SNP as the ‘party of independence’. But however much animosity one feels towards the party, and to whatever extent that animosity if warranted, it cannot sensibly be denied that the SNP remains the party of government and will be so for the entirety of what is bound to be a critical time for Scotland’s cause.

Similarly, a large part of the Yes movement flatly rejects any suggestion that the SNP has failed or is failing in its role as ‘party of independence’. Given the total lack of any evidence of success, denial of failure cannot be other than illogical. That part of the Yes movement desperately needs to come to terms with the reality of what Nicola Sturgeon did to the SNP. Had they done so a while back there might have been hope of rescuing the SNP from the mire into which Sturgeon dragged it. But nothing seems to dent the faith of those who refuse to let go of what the SNP once was and recognise what it has become.

When it comes to supporting or voting for the SNP we all have to use our judgement. We have to close our ears to the clamour of those telling us we must never support or vote for the SNP in cacophonous chorus with the racket of those telling use we must always support and vote for the SNP. We should take emotion out of the calculation as far as possible and decide in each instance on the basis of what we calculate best serves Scotland’s cause.

The SNP is not indispensable. But we must dispose of it with care.