The Long Future

As he often does, Robin McAlpine has an interesting blog post up.

Now, as alert readers will know, we’ve been calling for that on Wings for at least the last couple of years. For sane people any credible hope of reforming the SNP is long gone, by the deliberate design of its leadership, and so has almost any real pretence at pursuing independence at all. The party now exists solely to milk another few years at the gravy trough off the backs of the hopelessly gullible.

But there’s a problem with the idea.

I like Robin a lot and I have a vast amount of personal and political respect for him. But we disagree too profoundly on too many major issues – “Net Zero”, to pluck one at random – to ever be able to work in the same party. So straight away (using Robin and I as ciphers for wider groups, obviously) we already need at least TWO new parties.

I could name a bunch of other people I also like and respect and whose commitment to independence I don’t doubt for a moment, but where we’d really struggle to be in the same party for one reason or another. (If that party were to take a stance on Gaza, for example, then the vastly principled and honourable Craig Murray and I couldn’t both be signed up to its manifesto.)

There’s only one answer to that: your party has to only have one policy.

And that’s a tough sell, because if you stand for election folk want to know what you’re going to do about the economy, or immigration, or crime, or the potholes in your street. “We’ll sort all those things after independence” probably isn’t going to convince them to give you their vote, because you’re telling them right up front that if they elect you, you’re going to basically do nothing.

On first sight, though, Scottish politics does seem to offer a potential route out of that, in the form of the list system. It’s just about credible to have a list-only party with a single policy. People can use their constituency vote for a “normal” day-to-day-politics party and their list one for your indy-only party.

But since the list produces MSPs, people would still expect those MSPs to sit in Parliament and vote on stuff, and then you’re back with the original problem again. (Unless your indy-only party is an abstentionist one and only shows up for votes relating to independence. And again, you’re likely to have trouble persuading people to vote for you not to show up.)

So your imaginary party forms, wins a bunch of list seats and Robin and I get elected. A vote comes up on banning plastic teaspoons and replacing them with paper ones and, with no party policy or whips to uphold it, Robin votes for the ban and I vote against it.

Now, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that. The party system, as we’ve already discussed on Wings, is basically the ruination of all politics, and having MSPs voting with their consciences/election pledges on every issue is actually a desirable outcome.

The main problem with it is that it’s asking a lot of voters to interrogate each candidate on all their beliefs individually. The party system absolves voters of responsibility to think for themselves and encourages them just to vote for a rosette. But it’s actually a very easy problem to fix. All you really need is a party website with a page for every candidate saying “Other than independence, these are my personal views on the topics of the day, and that’s how I’d be likely to vote on them.”

However, the new fly in the ointment is that the list system basically destroys that, because you’re not voting for individuals, you’re voting for a party list. If, for example, Robin and I are #1 and #2 on the list for a region, you basically have to vote for him if you want to get me, because that’s how the system works. (And if you ONLY want to get him, every vote you cast risks electing me as well.)

So in fact you really need to be a list-only party. For individual candidates to work you in fact have to be a CONSTITUENCY-only party. And unfortunately for our new party that’s a much, much higher threshold to win seats by.

The Buckaroo Principle, named by Wings in 2018 but identified by us back in 2012, is a huge problem for the indy movement in a scenario where the main established “indy” party has been sabotaged and rendered useless at best, and in reality worse than useless. The SNP has demonstrated in the last decade just how catastrophically secondary policy matters (in this case gender ideology) can rip what in reality is a single-issue party in two.

But despite what we’ve said above, single-issue voting is actually a powerful force. It can be credibly argued that it’s won quite a few major elections in recent years. The drawback with that is that independence is now very low on Scottish voters’ lists of priorities, even among Yes voters.

The reason for that is in significant part the disastrously bad job the SNP made of governing in the post-Salmond era. The party’s brand is now irretrievably tainted in terms of broad mass appeal. Which leads us back to what this site has been saying for the last few years: there is no alternative to the destruction of the SNP as the prerequisite for rebuilding the independence movement.

This article illustrates what a long road that will be. How you create a party which focuses on a single issue yet can also get itself elected is, as we’ve just established, a question with no easy answers. The SNP managed it thanks mainly to the extraordinary political skill of Alex Salmond, and figures like that come along once a century if you’re lucky. And as we’ve seen, it only takes a tiny fraction of that time for incompetent successors to destroy all their work.

(One answer people suggest is that you need a multitude of parties, not just one. But look how that’s working out for Unionists at the moment, with the splitting of the anti-indy vote between Labour, Tories, Lib Dems and Reform actually letting the SNP slither back into power. And several parties just multiplies the amount of talent you need, which is already thin on the ground, and divides effort.)

Of course, ALL of this assumes that Holyrood can achieve independence in the first place. In recent years it’s voted twice to hold a second indyref, yet no second indyref resulted. And even Salmond needed list MSPs (16 of them) to achieve his historic 2011 majority that led to the first one. You need not only votes, but the strength of will to make them mean something, the quality Nicola Sturgeon lacked most of all among her many deficiencies.

(The reason, incidentally, Wings hasn’t paid any notice to organisations like Salvo is that no matter what the legalities of the situation might be, the reality is that there’s no route to independence that doesn’t involve a clear expression of the will of the majority of the people. If you have that, the world community will likely recognise it whatever the law says. If you don’t, they definitely won’t, whatever the law says. And to get votes you need a democratic event, which means politics.)

So in conclusion: we’re in a real mess. The only road available to us is bumpy, rutted with potholes and ditches, and needs to cross all manner of rivers and chasms and mountains. We have a major shortage of talented and committed builders and engineers, and they don’t all agree on the best route or method. And even then there’s no guarantee it’ll get us where we want to go.

It’s not impossible, though. The Irish showed us over 100 years ago that with a bit of luck, skill and audacity it IS possible to replace a country’s primary independence party more or less overnight. And whatever you might think of their beliefs, UKIP/the Brexit Party/Reform achieved their main goal with, in political terms, lightning speed.

(Formed in 1993, they got the UK out of the EU in just 22 years, rather less than the 33 it took the SNP to get a single peacetime MP elected.)

The only thing we know for certain is what the first step is: burying the SNP.