Particularly alert readers may recall this from a few months ago:
An SNP pledge? About independence? Bound to be kept, then, right?
We jest, of course.
But more pertinently, this specific one hasn’t been either – despite being passed by conference, which is still officially the SNP’s decision-making body.
Councils all over Scotland have been posting their official election notices online now that the deadline for candidates has passed, and the term “”Independence for Scotland”, or words to that effect” are conspicuously absent from all of them.
(Such phrases would have to appear on these notices if they were going to be on the ballot papers, and as you can see they do in the case of other parties including Alba and the Scottish Family Party.)
Readers may also have noticed a distinct shortage of mentions of the subject in the SNP’s election broadcasts and debate appearances. But there is, of course, one area where they’re not shy of bringing it up.
Because when the SNP wants money, indy is right back on the agenda (even if it’s not on the ballot paper). And there sure isn’t much dough coming from anywhere else.
That Herald piece points out something Wings has been telling its readers since 2022 – that the SNP’s key source of income is now the UK government. But the party knows that if it loses a bunch of MPs at this election that revenue stream will take a big battering, so it’s gone back to milking its diehard supporters.
Even so, this is a wee bit on the nose.
The SNP, now teetering on the brink of total financial catastrophe after years of squandering millions of pounds with very little to show for it, is fighting the election on a budget of bean fumes. (Of what little money it does have, £60K of it is still owed to a man charged with embezzling large sums from it.)
And yet it’s still too embarrassed to mention independence in public. Only the fast-plummeting number of people still in the party have to endure being treated like gullible chumps and shaken down until the coins fall out of their pockets.
It remains to be seen how much more of that they’ll bear.
