Earlier today we heard from the SNP’s depute leader Keith Brown that the party now accepts there will never be another UK-sanctioned independence referendum.
And this afternoon in the chamber the SNP also voted against the only alternative.
Alba MSP Ash Regan laid down the above motion, which supports what as far as we knew was still the SNP’s official policy in the absence of another Section 30, in so far as they even know what their policy is.
Today that motion was voted down by 125 votes to 1.
Obviously, that means that every single SNP and Scottish Green MSP in the chamber voted against it. They could have abstained and it would have been defeated anyway, but every last one of them voted with the Tories and Labour and Lib Dems instead.
But what it also means is that of the only two possible routes to independence, the SNP has now surrendered unconditionally on both of them.
It accepts that it’s never be going to be given another referendum, but it has now also formally rejected the only other democratic route that there can be. Quite what that leaves as the party’s policy, frankly, God only knows.
Just a few weeks after the SNP first came to power, the Catholic Church effectively abolished the centuries-old concept of Limbo. But under John Swinney it appears to have been resurrected. The SNP is now a “party of independence” that not only has no hope of independence, but has rejected every theoretical idea of how to achieve it.
That there are still some people who unaccountably believe in the party despite such an unequivocal public capitulation is as poignant and pathetic a demonstration of the concept of “blind faith” that anyone could ever ask for. They and the SNP alike deserve no less than the eternal damnation of Judas.
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FOOTNOTE: The SNP members instead all voted for an amendment by Ross Greer, which in the non-existent possibility that another indyref were to be held would guarantee a second defeat by tying independence to a whole raft of other policies of significant unpopularity.
