The contemporary SNP is a rolling joke. It has no credibility or seriousness as a political party, as a movement for independence or as a government. It’s best bet would be to go out into the woods, lie down and die in the hope that somehow it could be reborn. Because what is there is a waste of everyone’s time.
Suffice to say that after weeks of work by many dozens of activists involving meetings at which (comparatively) large numbers of the remaining activists attended, at which there was strong consensus and which ended with at least 43 branches of the party proposing a ‘rebel’ amendment, it hasn’t made it onto the party’s conference agenda (I’m told reliably).
I mean, we knew it wouldn’t because Swinney’s chief briefer told everyone it wouldn’t. "I wouldn’t give it much credence. Leadership has already outlined their strategy and this is a contradiction. I doubt it makes it out of the conference committee."
Clairvoyant? No, corrupt. Rules don’t mean anything in the modern SNP. It doesn’t resemble a political party at all any more; it has more of the characteristics of the Politburo or a Latin American Junta from the 1980s.
If you’ve been away, here are the basics. John Swinney came up with a ‘strategy’ for independence which involved stating the objectives of a strategy (i.e. winning) and then saying ‘so vote for me’. There’s no ‘how’ here, just wishes.
Even the most overwhelmingly simplistic analysis of this involves the SNP adding about 20 percentage points on to its current vote. That’s probably about 600,000 people who have been consistently saying they won’t vote SNP who now need to change their minds in the next few months.
So there isn’t a commentator, observer or activist anywhere that thinks this is possible. Which means someone who has an interest in independence needs a different strategy. That’s what the membership of the SNP wants. So when it was clear that Swinney was going to introduce a motion to get his ‘strategy’ formally adopted by the party, party members wanted it changed.
A degraded culture degrades further and further
This is where the futility of the modern SNP kicks in. It is partly culture, partly procedure, partly dishonesty. First, anyone who is not supine to the leadership and seeks any elected office in the party bureaucracy will be bullied out and it will be rigged and stacked with the naïve and those on the payroll.
To help you understand, I know someone who knows a member of the Conferences Committee which is supposed to set conference agendas. At a meeting fairly recently they were quizzed on why a (completely different) motion was kept off the agenda. The person was confused; ‘because the National Secretary told us it wasn’t to go on’.
When people explained that the National Secretary worked for them, not the other way round, they were genuinely baffled. It was just not done to disagree with someone on the payroll. So there is no-one left in elected positions who’ll put up much of a fight. And this has allowed relentless jiggery-pokery around the constitution.
I have explained this in some detail but the four key steps were changing the rules to stack all the committees with place people, the squeezing through of a motion which enabled the constitution to be changed unilaterally by one of these stacked committees, the creation of various means to overturn candidate selection processes and the recent change of rules which makes it all but impossible to challenge a sitting leader.
But it is endless – preventing branches from communicating with each other, refusing to provide basic information about how the party is run, electronic voting that I know a good number of people have little confidence in. A degraded culture degrades further and further.
I could explain the genesis and cynicism of all of this. The party tried to correct course by electing a slate of reform candidates and they were bullied out and then the rules changed so it couldn’t happen again. When Kate Forbes nearly won the leadership election they realised they were in trouble so made that impossible to happen again. And so on.
The whole point of this is that it doesn’t matter, because it is only worth caring about any of this if the SNP has any chance of being any kind of useful vehicle for change, and it isn’t. So how it rigs itself is no longer of any interest.
Think that is just me? I have edited this so no-one can work out who sent me it, but as one of my correspondents put it when I said to them that I thought the SNP was over as a useful vehicle: "In essence that is what all the remaining active members of [constituency association name] are also saying. None feel able to go out and canvas for a party that they no longer believe in."
That person was still a loyalist this time last year, and I’ve heard almost exactly the same point from people on about four other constituency associations. Hell, there is a SNP constituency in Scotland that quietly donated £1,000 to Common Weal ‘cos at least we’re doing something.
Swinney’s SNP is pitiful; brittle and weak and unconvincing
None of this is about who I do or don’t like. I’m a realist and you have to work with what is there. Even late last year I was still trying to propose ways in which the SNP could get back in the game (in an article in the National where I argued that they desperately needed a talent search because they needed to refresh their parliamentary group). The opposite happened, and then they basically prevented any future leadership challenge.
So it’s not about whether I want the SNP to be irrelevant, it’s that I can’t think of any way left in which to make it relevant – and neither can anyone else. If you were to do a proper asset register to work out what strengths the party has, you’d probably come up with little more than ‘name and logo’. It isn’t personnel, wisdom or reputation.
Swinney’s SNP is pitiful; brittle and weak and unconvincing. I promise you that parties that are about to achieve anything of note do not need to rig their party conference to prevent discussion and debate.
In any case, because you should never trust your emotional responses to events too much, after the Hamilton by-election I sat down and asked myself my usual question: ‘if it was you who was responsible for fixing this, how would you do it?’. For the first time since indyref I had no answers. I can’t war game the near future in a way that makes the SNP relevant.
So there are only two points to salvage from this (in relation to independence at least). First, I hope a lot of you are chastened about the role of dissent in politics. This has all happened because too many of you bought into the idea that it was the people warning about all of this who were the problem and not the people doing it. I understand the desire for unity, but unity without dissent is dangerous and leads to bad places.
Second, by this time next year any remaining pretence that John Swinney is leading us anywhere will have evaporated. At that point I hope finally the rest of those in Scotland who want independence may start the rebuilding process somewhere outside the SNP. It’s the last remaining hope for this decade.
We’ll still be stuck with a shit government but at least on independence it might be possible to do something, to achieve something. Because surely it’s finally time to be honest – we’ve done nothing whatsoever for ten years now and it’s because the SNP made it so we couldn’t.
Whether I like it, whether you like it, still this is the reality that remains. On independence, everyone but everyone knows that the SNP is about to fail again and so that makes it irrelevant. Tell me that isn’t so? Tell me we don’t need something new?