EUAN MCCOLM: NATIONALISTS ILL-PREPARED FOR PAINFUL LESSON ABOUT LOSING

Unless every opinion poll over the past year has been wrong, swathes of nationalists will, in the early hours of Friday morning, begin to learn a painful and – for many of them – novel lesson about democracy.

Battalions of SNP activists and candidates, many of whom would self-identify as bright young things, have grown up in an era of nationalist domination of our politics.

Polls suggest they are about to find that just as a party’s stock can rise, so it can plummet.

‘The thing is,’ says one veteran SNP strategist, ‘these days the party’s full of people who’ve never lost anything in their lives. They won’t know what to do with defeat.’

Selfie

In the general election of 2015, less than a year after leading the Yes campaign to failure in the independence referendum, the SNP won a remarkable 56 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats, leaving just one apiece for the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

In that election, an SNP candidate could guarantee a seat so long as they had a selfie with Nicola Sturgeon.

 In that election, an SNP candidate could guarantee a seat so long as they had a selfie with Nicola Sturgeon.

The SNP may have failed to repeat that feat in subsequent elections, but the Nationalists have enjoyed successes more than adequate to maintain their grip on Scotland’s politics.

Polls now suggest the SNP will lose many key seats to opponents attacking from both left and right.

The revitalisation of Labour under Sir Keir Starmer has been quite remarkable.

If, as expected, Labour wins back seats across the Central Belt – seats that fell amid much dawn-of-a-new-era speechifying from politicians who assumed the landscape upon which they manoeuvred had been permanently reshaped by SNP victories – then the already fracturing story of the unstoppable march towards independence will be further hobbled. And while Scottish Labour is making a comeback in urban areas, the Conservatives continue to prevail in swathes of rural Scotland.

Not only are senior SNP figures bracing themselves for losses to Labour in Glasgow, they believe the Tories can hold on to, and perhaps even consolidate their grip on, existing constituencies.

‘I’ll be happy with 20 seats,’ says one SNP activist with decades of service at the highest level in the party, and there’s no evidence he’s trying to play a clever game of expectation management.

The timing of events has not been helpful to the new leader of the SNP. It has, you see, forced First Minister John Swinney to reveal his true face sooner than he might like to have.

When Mr Swinney replaced Humza Yousaf just two months ago, he – in common with his SNP predecessors – began his duties with a speech to the nation in which he reassured the Unionist majority that he would be a leader for all, not just the minority who wish to see Scotland break away from our closest neighbours.

Scandals

But an election campaign on the back of scandals – from the police investigation into SNP funds to the breathtaking abuse of expenses by former health secretary Michael Matheson – which have seen support for the party plummet by more than 10 points, has forced Mr Swinney into what can only be described as a core-vote strategy, promising that a majority of seats in Scotland will empower him to engage in talks on independence with the United Kingdom.

The truth is that a majority of Nationalist MPs in Scotland after this election will no more empower Mr Swinney to demand independence talks than it will empower any of us make any demand of the UK Government.

The First Minister’s promise that a vote for the SNP will mean independence is no more credible than if, for example, I was to claim that a majority of Nationalist MPs would empower me to begin talks with the UK Government about banning cats and returning Mars bars to their previous size.

Mr Swinney promises – as did Humza Yousaf and Nicola Sturgeon – that which he cannot deliver because he fears losing the support of those who have stuck by the SNP through good years and bad, the true believers who have always been comfortable about shifting policy positions on the basis of what is, at any given time, deemed most helpful to the SNP’s objective of breaking up the UK.

Once, for example, it was important never to vote on a matter of spending in England. Nobly, Nationalist MPs declared that they would not cast votes on issues which were devolved. The message was simple and direct: They, as Scottish MPs, wouldn’t dream of ‘meddling’ in English matters.

Then, the same MPs, realising money spent on services south of the Border triggered proportionately higher spending in Scotland, decided – nobly, of course – that they would vote on these matters after all.

Who truly knows where John Swinney’s party is on that or any other issue, right now?

Stunned by the departure of Nicola Sturgeon as leader last year, SNP members rallied around Humza Yousaf only to be rewarded by a period of prolonged chaos in the party. Mr Yousaf was supposed to build on the ‘progress’ made by Ms Sturgeon. Instead, well…

There is something rather embarrassing about listening to Mr Swinney, who was supposed to repair the damage caused by Mr Yousaf, repeat that ‘referendum mandate’ myth because he is so desperate not to lose votes to Alba, the vanity project of former First Minister Alex Salmond.

Stalled

The SNP first came to power in Holyrood in 2007 on the back of support from pro-UK Scots. In those days, independence was favoured by fewer than 30 per cent of voters, compared with 45-plus who now back breaking up the Union.

But the SNP’s campaign has stalled. Indeed, the result of tomorrow’s election is almost certain to show support for the party sliding.

Every seat the nationalists lose should be marked not only as condemnation of the failure of members at both Westminster and Holyrood, but as further proof the independence project now lies in tatters.

For years, Nicola Sturgeon promised her followers a referendum she could not give them. The former First Minister outran her failure to deliver for almost a decade.

The SNP is in no mood to similarly indulge Mr Swinney.

Rather, many of those SNP supporters who can be guaranteed to turn out in support of the party, right now, are blood and soil types who want to hear the sort of Braveheart nonsense their leader has been giving them.

Devoid of new ideas for an independence plan already firmly rejected by Scots, the SNP isn’t even pretending to care what anyone but the most devoted believer in the cause wants.

The truth is that keeping the core on board is all that matters rights now.

The independence campaign isn’t just broken. Independence itself is over as any kind of viable prospect for the foreseeable future.

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2024-07-02T20:06:17Z dg43tfdfdgfd