Tommy Sheppard knows a John Swinney you don’t know.
And who, conveniently, you’re not allowed to see.
Traditionally, this is the opposite order to how things are done:
Normally, you tell people what you’re asking them to vote for BEFORE they actually vote. You don’t explain your plans AFTER the election, especially when they already voted for you at the LAST election and you didn’t do any of that stuff.
And that goes double when the thing you’re hinting that you’d do is the same thing your party promised before the last Holyrood election, reiterated less than a year ago, then explicitly ruled out doing as recently as two weeks ago.
Because if it’s urgent, and time is short, why not do it now?
Why do we have to wait a year for a convention, and why would it be dependent on an SNP victory in the election? That doesn’t sound like you’re interested in “cross-party alliances”. That sounds like all you’re interested in is votes for the SNP.
It doesn’t say “independence supporters” here:
For the avoidance of doubt, Wings’ view is that an indy convention is a waste of time. There’s been no shortage of talking shops since 2014, not one of which has produced a damn thing except a suggestion of more talking shops. But it’s even more of an insult to voters’ intelligence to promise them something useless when everyone knows that you’re not going to deliver it anyway.
Sheppard can’t even do his audience (if you can call a group as tiny as readers of The National an “audience”) the basic courtesy of keeping his bullshit straight from one paragraph to the next.
Did Swinney have a strategy or not? Presumably those are the sorts of questions that the pesky press or public might have rudely asked if they’d been allowed to observe the conference, so phew, lucky escape there.
Nor can he identify the problem.
Wait a minute. These people ALREADY “think Scotland should be independent”. So why do we need to convince them of the reasons? Why do they currently think we should be independent, if it’s not about making Scotland better by making our own decisions? Just for a laugh? Just to flick two fingers at the English? Sheppard doesn’t bother to tell us, so it’s hard to conclude he understands them.
What the actual balls? These people want an independent Scotland but have NEVER voted? Not in 2007, not in 2011, not in 2015, not in 2016, not in 2017, not in 2019, not in 2024, not in 2021, never? And you think you’ll turn this decades-long apathy around by… asserting the Claim Of Right? Are you out of your tiny fricking mind?
(The Claim Of Right was asserted in, and endorsed by, the UK Parliament as recently as 2018. Barely anyone noticed, and absolutely nothing happened as a result. The UK government continued to refuse a second indyref and that refusal was backed by the Supreme Court in 2022.)
The simple fact is that there are two viable strategies for achieving independence without the permission or co-operation of Westminster, and the SNP refuses to adopt either (it very briefly flirted with a terrible version of one of them, then ditched it again almost instantly). Indeed, it won’t even discuss either of them.
If you ask John Swinney what his strategy is, he mumbles incoherent drivel about building support (even though the SNP has failed to shift the dial a millimetre in a decade of incredibly favourable circumstances when it commanded an actual majority of public opinion, and is now about as popular with the electorate as vomit in a wetsuit) and independence just sort of somehow magically happening as a result.
But hey, maybe he said something totally different in Perth at the weekend. Maybe he revealed a plan so cunning that even Edmund Blackadder would have been forced to doff his cap to it.
A plan so irresistibly ingenious that all those people who Tommy Shepperd says want independence but don’t want to vote SNP (or to vote at all) would have no rational choice but to unite behind it, deliver the SNP another overwhelming electoral mandate, and have us independent by Christmas.
In which case, it seems a terrible shame that voters aren’t allowed to know what it is.
