Poor old Tommy Sheppard’s got a contract, so he has to keep talking. And this week he said something that, if anyone really thought the constitution was still a current live political issue, would have attracted a lot more attention than it did.
Because even the SNP are now saying another indyref is – at best – a decade away.
Sheppard’s plan as outlined above is of course a comical fantasy anyway. It’s exactly the same snake oil the SNP has been punting since 2016, except that instead of demanding another referendum it effectively demands infinite referendums.
As such it obviously has even less chance of succeeding than it has in the last eight years, for all the same reasons, and doubly so since the party pushing it – once seemingly invincible at the top of Scottish politics – is now a toxic binfire.
(Sheppard himself admits as much earlier in the very same article.)
This site pointed out endlessly that the period after the Brexit vote was a God-given second bite at the cherry far sooner than we could ever ordinarily have hoped for one. The circumstances between 2017 and 2021 in particular were the most propitious an independence movement could ever have dreamt of.
That chance was first neglected, and then smashed into pieces and flushed down the toilet, by Nicola Sturgeon, and Sheppard’s vision of a mass civic movement forcing the UK government to concede this idiotic “new” plan is a farcical lie that even he doesn’t believe for a second. If Brexit plus COVID plus May plus Johnson plus Truss didn’t generate riots on the streets, nothing that’s coming in the future is going to.
No overwhelming sustained polling lead is ever coming either. We know – and have known for a long time, since before Brexit – that at least 30% of Scots would NEVER vote for independence in ANY circumstances. So we already have a theoretical ceiling in the high 60s, but it’s hard to see what would get any of the people in the middle to switch now to even start to get close to it.
Wings looked into this dilemma more than six years ago, and concluded that the only fertile ground for possible gains was Yes Leavers.
In the indyref the Yes side enjoyed a significant advantage, namely that the No camp’s dire warnings that independence would lead to losing Scotland’s EU membership was actually a plus for a significant number of people. (And among Remainers, nobody sane believed it.)
But as soon as Brexit actually happened that particular Schrodinger’s Cat was resolved, and for those people independence switched overnight from a boon to a threat. That, of course, is why Brexit didn’t shift the dial a millimetre in favour of indy despite Scotland voting almost 70-30 for Remain. Every floating soft Unionist who suddenly saw an EU Scotland as a better bet than a non-EU UK was counterbalanced by a Yes Leaver who felt the opposite.
So the idea that constantly doubling down on EU membership will ever result in a shift in the polls is a doomed one, and so of course it’s the one the SNP has adopted wholesale, because the senior levels of the party are now stuffed with intellectually inadequate ideologues, following Sturgeon’s lead.
ANY plan – not just Sheppard’s cretinous-monkey effort – that’s based on somehow amassing an irresistible level of public support is a hopeless one. The numbers simply do not permit it. A narrow win is the best win we can hope for, and that means that however imperfect it is, the only realistic route is by winning a majority of votes in an election on an unambiguous platform of declaring independence in that eventuality.
The state of all the pro-indy parties in 2024 suggests that even that is a long-term ask. It’s the only thing Sheppard is right about. But for as long as the SNP – and pretend “grassroots” groups like Believe In Scotland – continue to insist that independence also means rejoining the EU without asking the people, even the early 2030s is a target of deluded optimism bordering on flat-out insanity.
Whether pledging to hold a referendum on rejoining the EU after independence would be enough to placate the Yes Leavers is a moot question. They would presumably expect to lose it and might not be willing to take the chance, even given a fair chance to make their arguments in the very changed situation that would then exist.
But to NOT do so is to ensure failure forever.
