On the face of it this was moderately good election for independence supporters – and yet it fills me with worry. To explain why there are things that need to be said out loud.
Including all the smaller parties, about 43 per cent of votes cast were for pro-indy parties, down from 49 at the last election. The SNP went backwards and its list vote is has only been lower once during devolution (the 2003 election). I can’t see any evidence of real forward momentum being generated by its leadership and I don’t know where it’s going to come from.
The next five years in government is likely to be really difficult and I am not sure the team the SNP has in Holyrood is strong enough to manage it effectively.
At the end of this is the 2031 election and if the SNP continues through the next five years of bruising government on the same course it has set itself, there is a serious risk it could lose that election. The team that will fight that election is already in parliament and I’m not sure it will have become a compelling prospect by 2031.
The decision to make a personal overall majority a condition for further progress on independence looks like hubris this morning. It feels like a trap we’ve created for ourselves that we will be unable to get out of. Any parliamentary route to independence now looks closed for five years.
This isn’t about being ‘anti-SNP’, this is about where we are and where we’re going. The cause of independence is at severe risk of spending the next decade in the wilderness if something doesn’t change. We’ve thrown away ten good year and ten tough years await.
So what can the SNP do? The key is government. The Scottish Government has been twiddling the same risk-free policy levers to limited and declining results. Framework legislation, working groups, three-year-long consultations, another grant fund to bid into – these don’t get things done.
The government must create clear objectives and deliver them quickly and efficiently. Need more affordable houses? Don’t muck about with help to buy schemes, build houses. This is a very big shift in mindset for the government but it needs to have impact and it can’t keep going as it is.
The other thing it needs to do is get a better grip on the machinery of government. The civil service is running ministers, not the other way round. To be brutal, the party needs much more experienced advisers in parliament who can tame the machinery. The government mission has allies in civic Scotland; government needs to be less insular and actually listen to them.
Then again, none of this will work if the SNP pretends it can be everything to everyone. You can pretend to be on the side of both landlords and tenants, but you can’t. At some point you need to decide what is wrong in your society and take a side. It is time for the SNP to stop listening to lobbyists and start worrying about the lives of people who didn’t vote for them.
As for independence; it was the SNP’s choice to cut off any parliamentary route forward. We now have no option but to get independence back out of the parliament and into communities and workplaces. If we don’t form an effective, coordinated civic campaign with a strong central strategy, the next ten years could be very difficult indeed.