[Robin McAlpine Blog] This won’t be the SNP’s shitshow conference

[ALBA-Bot]

This won't be the SNP's shitshow conference

There are usually three party conferences going on at once – in the same venue. There is a conference which is about telling the public a story. In the same place and quite separately there is a conference which is about trying to control your party membership. And then there is a conference for the courtiers of the media.

The first conference is about soundbites, the leaders’ speech and ‘vibes’. The second conference is about suppressing debate and trying to buy off the grass roots – quietly. The third conference is about trying to persuade the hack pack that you are in control and everything that happened was what you wanted to happen.

Strangely, it seems that the SNP’s weekend bash is going to be a unified affair, a single conference with a single purpose. The only purpose of the conference is a wrestle between making it go wrong and making it not go wrong. Everything is geared up to that end.

I don’t think John Swinney has a message he wants the public to hear which he can deliver at this conference. He wants to say ‘stop Reform’, but he (probably) knows that this will set his members on edge. They’re tired of the party campaigning against things simply to secure power and riches.

And there really isn’t any difference between trying to control the members and what he wants the journalists to take away from this conference. He is throwing his very inconsiderable all at this single task.

Pretend you like me. Pretend we’re unified. That’s it.

It is very perilous for Swinney this conference. He’s going to get away with it for the single reason that there is an approaching election and my guess is that the conference delegates will be just about compliant enough for the sole reason of not wanting to harm the party’s electoral prospects.

But they really, really aren’t happy. This unhappiness is both tangible and intangible. It has a focal point in the independence strategy and a number of ancillary real issues the membership isn’t chuffed at (no-one is impressed with Swinney’s domestic policy agenda – or rather his lack of one).

The party membership really hasn’t warmed to Swinney as a leader. They like him as a man but he was genuinely unpopular as leader last time and no-one wanted him back as one this time. There was a bit of hush when he undertook his power grab because people were so, so unsettled by Humza Yousaf’s relentless chaos.

The SNP’s voters are not going anywhere else, but that includes the polling station and it is that which has been losing Swinney significant electoral position

But that hush has drifted into ever-present mumbling and grumbling. That is really all driven by what everyone now calls ‘vibes’. You can come up with all the rationalisations you like for what the party isn’t happy with and why they’re not happy, but in truth it is mainly about the feeling that this is a weak, characterless, uninspiring administration of technocrats.

Literally no-one in the SNP was saying ‘I wish we were more boring, more predictable, utterly dull and completely centrist’, yet such is party centralisation that that is what they got. There isn’t and never has been anything you’d call a ‘Swinney faction’ in the SNP. Honestly, in as far as he has such a thing it consists of Stephen Noon, Colin McAllister and Stephen Gethins.

I don’t want to be gratuitously unkind but that is like an insomnia cure. Think of the concept of ‘inspiring, uplifting and motivating’ and now think of exactly the opposite and you’re in the right territory.

SNP members see themselves as an insurgency, not a church fete, not a provincial accountancy firm, not a lunchtime nap after Bargain Hunt. The membership wants passion and what it’s being offered is perfunctory missionary position in the dark listening to Kenny G on an old CD player.

The problem they have is that ‘sorting your vibes’ is all good and well if you’re talking about sprucing up your wardrobe or adding a pop of colour to your living room. Sorting the vibes of a political party is a tricky business. You can’t turn the same people into different people and no-one at the top of the SNP is what you’d call ‘vibe heavy’.

So they’re unhappy, but Swinney will get away with it because of the upcoming election. And once he gets this conference out of the way it’ll be onto what he’s really trying to do here. Forget the polls for a second which everyone who knows much about it warn me are misleading. Whether Swinney can govern or not is not a done deal.

The idea he’s going to get an overall majority in the Scottish Parliament is a bit silly but he’ll undoubtedly lead the biggest party. The question is, between these limits, whether he can govern, and that basically means can he get within one other political party’s worth of votes for a majority. If you can form a majority with a single party then it is perfectly easy to govern (which has been happening since devolution).

But if you need two other parties to form a majority? That is a very tall ask. It is not an easy thing to do at all. Swinney (by all accounts I’ve heard) wants to do a deal with the Lib Dems because he himself is a conservative who isn’t going to be happy compromising to Ross Greer. So he has to get close enough that the number of seats he falls short is less than the total of seats held by the Lib Dems.

I amn’t going to go into this here but the more pertinent factor in deciding whether that is the case is not polling but motivation. If Swinney’s voters all turn out, he will be OK. But that is not what has been happening since he took power. The SNP has really struggled to get its voters out because they’re tired of the party and largely disappointed by it.

They’re not going anywhere else, but that includes the polling station and it is that which has been losing Swinney significant electoral position. The best bet is that this will happen again, so it is a question of to what extent it happens.

The party is angry and disillusioned, but it is not suicidal and it will pull its punches this year

And that is the reason the SNP has started talking about independence at all. It could probably have skipped an independence debate at this party conference if they hadn’t put it on the agenda. But the leadership is in a desperate ‘core voter’ race and so they will say independence again and again and again and hope its ambient power gets people off their sofa.

Of course, I’ll bet you money that the election campaign turns out to be a ‘stop Reform’ campaign, but they need to goose their core vote first. Hence all the indy stuff. And yes, it has slightly backfired because what Swinney/Noon mean by independence and a strategy for getting it and what the membership mean is miles apart.

Which means that Swinney’s core vote strategy turned into a ‘conference from hell’ strategy. You won’t go far without hearing one of Swinney’s team telling anyone who will listen that this is a pre-election conference and unity is essential.

My feeling is that this will indeed work. The party is angry and disillusioned, but it is not suicidal and it will pull its punches this year. It won’t be plain sailing and I’m rather guessing they’ll lose on the indy debate, but discontent will be quarantined into that debate and won’t spill over into the wider conference.

Here is my guess though; the price of it will be a horror show next year. I don’t think the SNP are going to do as well in the election as the most positive polls suggest. This looks to me more like 2017 than 2019. The SNP will comfortably be the bigger party but I don’t think it is going to find governing all that easy.

And I suspect it will create some kind of alliance with the Lib Dems and I think that is going to provoke conference even further. I’d put money on it that you will barely hear the words ‘independence’ slip from the First Minster’s mouth from June next year onwards.

Which means that the party is most likely to explode not this year but next. And that is just fine for Team Swinney. It is driven by one thing; Swinney’s desperate desire to rewrite the history book. He was going to go down as a failure, a nice man out of his depth who was given a shot at leadership and blew it. He wants to erase that history and will do anything in pursuit of that end.

So yes, I think this will be a single-purpose conference and it’s purpose will be to control the membership and be seen to control the membership. By Monday I expect the journalists will be writing that it went pretty well for him and everyone will sail on quite pleased with themselves.

But it will solve nothing and it will do not more than delay the reckoning. Either way, you can’t be that bad and that dull and not face a reckoning. It is coming.

Source: This won't be the SNP's shitshow conference