Thoughts on that by election

My mum is not doing any better. She’s not really conscious any more. They are giving her strong painkillers and sedatives to keep her comfortable but are no longer giving her any other treatment. We are going to see her this afternoon. I fear it’s only a matter of time now until she passes away. It could be a couple of days, or she might stabilise and last a couple of weeks more, there’s no way of telling. But it’s not looking good.

The hardest thing for our family right now is the helplessness. But I needed something to take my mind off things so have written some words about that debacle of a by election last week.

The result of Thursday’s by election in Hamilton, Larkhall, and Stonehouse should not just be a wake up call to the leadership of the SNP, it should be stripping off all their bedding, dowsing them in a bucket of cold water, all while blasting a fog horn in their ears. The SNP lost this by election to a semi-articulate Labour candidate, chosen on the basis of cronyism and his links to Rangers football club, a man whose main contribution to his campaign was to absent himself from most of it. The SNP lost to a Labour party which is currently deeply unpopular, having reneged and U turned on just about every promise it made to win last year’s Westminster general election, a Labour party which is punishing the disabled, the poor, and pensioners while protecting the wealthy, enabling a genocide in Gaza and boasting of its decision to put bombs before bairns.

The big winner in this by election was the sofa. Labour’s vote was down about 3600 on what the party received in 2021, but Labour won because the SNP vote was down even more, by around 8800 votes.

SNP voters just didn’t bother turning out to vote, and that’s what lost the SNP a by election that they really needed to win. By blowing it we are now back to the media narrative of a failing SNP and the likelihood of an anti-independence majority in the next Scottish Parliament.

This is what happens when the SNP goes through an election campaign avoiding saying the i-word, independence. This is not a mistake that the SNP can afford to make again. The SNP is supposed to be primarily a vehicle for Scottish independence, not a vehicle for making life under Westminster just a little bit less crap. If the SNP cannot or will not talk about independence and join up the dots for voters, explaining at every turn how independence is not just some abstract concept which would be nice to achieve at some point in the future, but how it directly relates to improving the lives and well being of the people of this country here and now, and how it is the solution to the political malaise afflicting us, a malaise which has opened the door to the con artists of Reform, then it’s a party without purpose and those who voted for it in the past will just stay at home as they did in Hamilton last week.

The SNP does not have the media backing enjoyed by the anti-independence parties, neither does it have the deep pockets afforded to Labour, the Tories, and Reform by their multi-millionaire backers and their corporate donors. What the SNP has is a mass membership of ordinary people willing to donate their time and energy, but if that membership feels demotivated and excluded from decision making, its enthusiasm quickly dissipates and there is no mileage in the SNP’s tank.

Support for independence remains high, 54% in the most recent opinion poll, a poll which employed 2014 weighting, a methodology known to artificially reduce the true level of independence support. But almost half of those in Hamilton, Larkhall, and Stonehouse who can be presumed to support independence did not bother to vote for the leading pro-independence party in last week’s by election, and that is because the SNP failed to give them a reason to, it failed to demonstrate how a vote for the SNP was going to advance the cause of independence.

The SNP cannot make that same mistake in next year’s Holyrood election or we face the nightmare of a Scottish Parliament with an anti independence majority when the UK goes to the polls in a Westminster general election which on current trends is likely to result in the election of a hard right Anglo-British nationalist government led by Nigel Farage, a far right government which will remove the UK from the European Treaty and Court of Human rights and which is fundamentally hostile to the entire concept of devolution. No amount of Holyrood mitigation is going to protect Scotland from the devastation of public services, austerity on steroids, and the destruction of civil rights which will ensue.

Last week’s by election also saw the almost complete collapse of the Tory vote, which seems to have defected en masse to Reform. The Tory vote diminished to single digits and the party was lucky not to lose its deposit. Over the coming weeks and months we can expect even more Tory councillors to defect to Reform in Scotland and for Reform UK to replace the Conservatives as the main party of right wing British nationalism in Scotland, a party which is completely unmoored from the traditional unionism which once characterised the Tories in Scotland, a form of unionism which was implacable in its opposition to independence but which at least recognised Scotland as a nation in a multi-national UK.

That conception of the UK does not exist in Nigel Farage’s party, which sees the UK as a unitary single British nation and essentially as a greater English state. There is no place for Scottish political distinctiveness in such a polity. Farage’s party is not a unionist party in the traditional sense, it does not recognise the existence of Scottish nationhood, for Farage Scotland is a historic region of the UK with no greater political relevance than Northumbria or Wessex. Reform UK is not unionist, it is incorporationist.

It was a serious tactical error on the part of the SNP to focus their campaign on the threat posed by Reform UK. Farage’s party is truly vile, but it mostly poses an electoral threat to the Conservatives, and to a somewhat lesser extent to Labour. Independence supporters are far less likely to defect to Reform. What the SNP needs to do is to give independence supporting voters a reason to turn out and vote SNP instead of sitting at home.

This is not a time for timidity, it’s a time for boldness and bravery. The SNP desperately needs to reconnect with the grassroots of independence support and find a means of enthusing and reinvigorating the independence campaign, or all will be dissipated in sterile managerialism and the sofa will be more attractive to most independence supporters at next year’s Holyrood election. Then we risk sleepwalking into the nightmare of Farage’s Greater Little England from which escape will be all but impossible.

It’s not enough for the SNP leadership to say that independence is front and foremost, they must demonstrate it, and must show a willingness to defy and disrupt Westminster’s erosion of the devolution settlement and its arrogant contempt for the democratic right of the people of Scotland to choose their own future.

The stakes have never been higher. John Swinney is a nice man, a decent man, but right now that’s not enough. A lot more aggression, assertion and defiance is needed. No nation on earth ever won its independence by asking for it nicely, and neither will Scotland.

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