In these grim times, at least we have funny animal videos to cheer us up.
Unfortunately when you write about politics for a living, everything is an analogy.
It’s been six weeks since the general election now, and you’d think that was long enough for the shock to have worn off and some of the people/parties who lost to have taken a good hard look at what happened, thought about what went wrong and started to work out how to fix it.
And then there’s the SNP.
In the immediate aftermath of the vote it looked like at least a couple of the party’s dozens of ejected Parliamentarians were ready to face up to reality.
But by a month later, someone had clearly had a word.
And Tommy Sheppard was back to blaming the SNP’s failure on everyone else.
Because how DARE your opponents attack you? The sheer TEMERITY of politicians who aren’t in power to try to spin things to their own advantage against the ones who are! Honestly, we might swoon clean away in shocked outrage.
But what’s the answer? Luckily, Sheppard has a “four-step plan”, which presumably supersedes the previous 11-point one, which you don’t hear much about any more. Let’s walk through those steps, shall we?
STEP 1: EXPLAIN THAT INDEPENDENCE IS GOOD
Woah. It’s genius. Why didn’t someone think of it before?
STEP 2: SECURE A MANDATE AND MAKE DEMANDS
Amazing. Revolutionary. Inspired. Definitely hasn’t been tried at every election for the last decade. Definitely didn’t fail.
If you’ve been gathering “mandates” and making “demands” for the last 10 years that have all been routinely dismissed or ignored (and which you can and should reasonably assume are going to continue to be), issuing empty threat after empty threat after empty threat even after every bluff is called, this site might very very gently suggest that it would be a good idea to stop doing so while you might still have a couple of tiny crumbs of credibility left.
Because voters aren’t entirely stupid.
STEP 3: INSIST ON YOUR DEMANDS
Because when demanding fails, insisting is sure to succeed!
Never mind that the Yes movement struggles to get 1000 bodies on the streets now, a “broad-based civil society campaign for democratic reform” will fire the public imagination.
“WHAT DO WE WANT?”
“DEMOCRATIC REFORM OF SOME UNSPECIFIED TYPE, PROBABLY TO INVOLVE MINOR ADJUSTMENTS TO THE SCOTLAND ACT 1998, FOR WHICH THE LEVEL OF PUBLIC DEMAND IS AT BEST UNCLEAR, AND WHICH COULD ONLY STRENGTHEN THE DEVOLUTION SETTLEMENT AND REDUCE THE NEED FOR INDEPENDENCE!”
“WHEN DO WE WANT IT?”
“TO BE HONEST WE’RE NOT ALL THAT BOTHERED.”
You’re planning march routes already, aren’t you?
STEP 4: ACHIEVE STEPS 1 TO 3
Incredible. The party that just lost 40% of its own supporters will not only instantly win them back with this candyfloss drivel, but somehow also contrive to “build a wide political consensus” for changes it can’t name, for which there is no detectable political clamour, and which could – if there was indeed a “consensus” around them – be executed just as well by opposition parties.
(Because if what you’re campaigning for is actually more devolution – and that’s what Sheppard’s plan explicitly says – then wouldn’t it make way more sense to have a devolutionist party do that, rather than one that’s supposedly pursuing independence instead, and which has just said that what it wants to do is expose the “constraints and limitations” of devolution? Why would you trust someone who wants to demonstrate that devolution is bad to improve devolution?)
The “four-step plan” is beyond insulting. It treats SNP voters – both those who stayed at home or switched in July, and those still voting for the party – as absolute cretins.
But Sheppard’s got a column to file and a word count to fill, so we suppose he has to say something even if his head’s empty. What about some of the others, who have no such obligations? How about you, Hannah Bardell?
Okay, great, so we need to be better at explaining how everything is Westminster’s fault and how jolly hard it is to be an MP, actually. That’s really helpful, thanks.
We’re, uh, not sure who or what Stephen Gethins is “the boss” of. But what’s apparently important is that we understand that the First Past The Post electoral system, which the SNP benefited massively from in 2015, 2017 and 2019, is in fact really unfair – who knew? – and things aren’t actually as bad as they seem. So that’s reassuring. Everything’s probably basically fine.
Gethins also had the astonishing insight that would-be politicians could perhaps try listening to the concerns and priorities of [checks notes] the electorate.
We’ll write that one down. Maybe even underline it. Who’s next? Great news – it’s Anne McLaughlin! She’s bound to have some deep reflections about what lessons need to be learned from the SNP’s catastrophic defeat.
So the important message to take forward into the future is that it wasn’t really all that bad a result, and that Nicola Sturgeon was brilliant and we should talk endlessly about her long list of fantastic achievements and how amazing it was for people to meet her. Got it. You’re up, Mhairi Black!
So we’re hearing “more blaming Westminster, more drag queens in primary schools, more hounding out of any dissenting views from the party”. Roger. Any more? Oh hi, Alyn Smith. What have you got for us?
So listen to voters, then tell them they’re wrong. Awesome. And apparently, after you’ve rearranged the deckchairs on the sinking ship, it might also be a cunning piece of strategy to stop being in government so that there’s more time to talk to people about independence.
That definitely seems achievable, going by the polls. But it needs to be done in conjunction with Stewart McDonald‘s plan, which is to give up on independence and focus on being happy under a Labour UK government.
And we must place our faith in a proven winner as leader. Clearly, the biggest defeat in 17 years is no time to go recklessly changing anything.
But readers, the entire premise of this article might be wrong. Perhaps we’re looking in the wrong place for answers. All these former MPs were by definition part of the problem, and people who were too close to the trees to see the wood.
Maybe what we need is a fresh, young perspective from an outsider. Someone who’s had a refreshing break and is ready to feel their feelings. Step forward the future of the SNP: Kelly Given.
It’s “change tack”, dear, not “change tact”. But having digested the full 1,133 words of Kelly’s heartfelt feels, what we glean is that what the SNP needs to be doing is to “find the party’s post-Sturgeon groove”, “[strike] a chord with the remaining membership”, “take this on the chin and reroute accordingly”, be “ready to listen”, and most of all “wake up” and “smell the coffee”.
(We assume that a sub-editor somewhere purged the piece of Kelly’s suggestions for where that groove was, which chord needed to be struck, what that new route might be, who should be listened to or which sort of coffee should be sniffed.)
And okay, Kelly Given was a cheap shot. But her boilerplate witterings were just a more artless iteration of the exact same thing from the other people quoted in this piece, who are what’s supposed to pass for the deep-thinking cohort of the modern SNP. The articles they’ve penned are vacuous noise every bit as hollow as hers.
They’re what politicians feel like they’re supposed to say, when they don’t really have any clue what went wrong. They don’t actually know what they’re doing, or even why, except in the vague hope that someone might throw them a gravy bone.
And folks, if you think for a second that any of those people are going to turn the fight for independence around, you’re the one who’s barking.
