All for nothing

All eyes will be on the The Event Complex Aberdeen at 2 o’clock on Saturday afternoon as the 91st Annual National Conference of the Scottish National Party gathers to debate the scheme for restoring Scotland’s independence which will supposedly be the main plank of their strategy in the 2026 Scottish general election.

There is much excitement in what is still known as the independence movement despite it long since having ceased to be a single entity. For party loyalists, the ‘independence strategy’ outlined in the resolution submitted under the names of John Swinney MSP, Leader and Keith Brown MSP, Depute Leader is a work of political genius which will set us on the path to independence.

For the less misty-eyed among the party’s membership, Amendment A submitted by Oban &. Lorn Branch, Helensburgh Branch, Tweeddale Branch, Bonnyrigg & Loanhead Branch, Forfar & District Branch, Braidburn Branch, Annandale & Eskdale Branch, Lochabar & North Lorn Branch, Annan Branch is a work of political genius which will set us on the path to independence.

There are other proposed amendments. Amendment B (West Fife and Coastal Villages) seeks to stipulate that the mandate should be:

linked to more than 50% of voters supporting the SNP, or other political parties and independent candidates, that support Scotland’s Right to Choose, on the regional list

In other words, a mandate would require not just a majority of SNP MSPs as per the leadership resolution, or a majority of seats won by pro-independence parties (strangely not proposed by anyone), but a majority in the regional ballot for parties supporting not Scotland’s independence, but “Scotland’s Right to Choose“ - which is a significantly different thing. This amendment would appear to have the effect of making it SNP policy that the mandate being sought is not for independence per se but for the “right” to have a referendum on the question of independence.

This is at least more honest that the leadership resolution which purports to be about a mandate for independence but is in fact about submitting yet another request for a Section 30 order giving permission for the Scottish Parliament to authorise a referendum which will actually be no more than a glorified opinion poll and which will have no legal or constitutional effect. A referendum which could not possibly lead to independence.

The leadership resolution does at least specify what kind of referendum it refers to. Amendment B does not.

Amendment C (Dunbar Branch, Haddington Branch, Alyn Smith, Paul Mclennan) tacks on a bit about joining the EU. As you would have anticipated had you noticed Alyn Smith’s name.

Amendment D (Glasgow Kelvin Constituency Branch) is a load of worthy-sounding waffle about answering questions, engaging with the wider independence movement, and preparing a “prospectus” for independence. It doesn’t alter the thrust of the leadership amendment at all. It merely inserts a restatement of what the party is supposed to have been doing already.

Make what you will of all that. I hope it has at least set the scene. You can view and/or download a PDF copy of the full conference agenda here.

What is outlined above may be thought of as ingredients sitting on a shelf. The hope is that using only some combination of these ingredients, conference can ‘instruct’ the leadership to put in the party’s election manifesto a proposal on the constitutional issue that will be perceived by the independence movement as a viable strategy for restoring independence and at the same time be acceptable if not attractive to voters in general. Nae bother!

Except the right ingredients aren’t there. Conference is being offered a very limited set of options which can be combined in a limited number of ways. Under objective scrutiny, there is no combination that looks remotely like a credible strategy for restoring independence. No matter how you mix them, the available ingredients just don’t add up to a series of steps that lead to independence.

The bare leadership resolution we have already dealt with. It is nonsensical in that it is critically dependent on John Swinney being able to engineer the fluke of 2011. By definition, a fluke cannot be engineered. Or to be more precise, something which can be engineered cannot be described as a fluke. And the 2011 election result giving the SNP a clear majority of seats, was definitely a fluke. It came about by coincidence of a number of factors few if any of which are amenable to control. John Swinney can hope for a repetition of that fluke. He can pray for a repetition. He can sacrifice small animals to whatever gods are in charge of flukes. What he cannot do is orchestrate luck. Nobody can.

And even if those small animals were not slaughtered in vain and the fluke actually happened, the resolution still doesn’t propose anything that can lead to the restoration of Scotland’s independence. If the SNP were to win a majority of seats, voters would discover belatedly that they hadn’t voted for independence as they were led to believe, but had instead voted for the Scottish First Minister to ask the British Prime Minister’s permission for a sham referendum.

Which, incidentally, he could do right now. He needs no further mandate. But by making ‘action’ dependent on voters returning a majority of SNP MSPs he hopes to lever voters into doing just that. It is a strategy to take back votes the SNP may have lost - or be at risk of losing - to other niminally pro-independence parties. It’s all about seats, status, and short money. It has nothing to do with Scotland’s cause.

As a ‘strategy for independence’ this is a non-starter. It simply doesn’t go there. It goes down a dead-end alley we’ve already been down before.

All of this is before we even start on the implications for Scotland’s cause of a new Section 30 request. The treachery of denying the sovereignty of Scotland’s people and validating the alien doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. Gifting the British state a defence against charges of obstructing the exercise of our right of self-determination. Either of these would be reason enough to reject the leadership resolution. Yet it is extremely doubtful that either will even be mentioned in the debate.

So, John Swinney’s resolution is useless and/or toxic. Which won’t prevent conference delegates approving it with the now obligatory standing ovation for him and his sidekick, Keith Brown.

Does Amendment A transform the useless/toxic leadership resolution into something useful and nourishing? Well, no it doesn’t. Bear with me and I’ll explain.

Amendment A begins by noting that:

it is current Party Policy as agreed at the October 2023 Conference that:- consideration should be given to fighting the next Scottish Parliament election in 2026 as a de facto referendum on independence; and that a majority at that election for the SNP - or the SNP and any other party with which we have reached a pro-independence agreement - will be considered a mandate to negotiate independence.

If the aim is to keep party policy as it currently is, surely this would be achieved by moving the direct negative. Rather than deleting almost the whole of the leadership resolution and replacing it with something else, just offer delegates an opportunity to vote it down having explained to them why they should.

Then comes the amelioratory paragraph intended to soften the blow to the leadership:

Conference therefore agrees that Scotland must extricate itself from the United Kingdom as soon as possible, and it requires a strong SNP government to do this.

That’s fair enough. No nationalist could disagree with the first part, and while it is not strictly true that it must be the SNP, it is certainly true that we will require a strong government. As things stand, the SNP is the only candidate for that role. We’re stuck with them. The two-part question therefore is:

• Is the SNP truly commited to extricating Scotland from the UK?

• Does the SNP have a strategy for achieving this?

The answer to the first part cannot be more definite than ‘perhaps’ because the answer to the second part is a definite ‘no’. If they did, there would be no need for this amendment. The purpose of the amendment is to turn the leadership’s useless/toxic resolution into the startegy for extricating Scotland from the UK that it definitely isn’t.

The next question therefore must be whether Amendment A achieves this purpose.

There are two further paragraphs. Let’s look at each in turn:

Conference instructs the Party to prioritise obtaining a mandate from the sovereign Scottish people to deliver Independence by achieving a majority of the popular vote on the sum of the Independence Supporting Parties ’ List Votes in the 2026 Scottish parliamentary election.

This might be okay if a plebiscite election were actually capable of providing a mandate that is sufficiently conclusive to “deliver independence”, and if the amendment were actually proposing that independence be delivered. I have argued that a de facto referendum cannot be conclusive enough to mandate the restoration of independence. I found several ways of questioning the validity of such an amendment. And unlike our opponents, I don’t even want to argue against it!

If it can be questioned, it can’t be conclusive. It’s as simple as that. If it can be questioned, it will be. Those questions will be amplified and trumpeted by the British media. They will provide ammunition for Unionists in Scotland. The existing divide between the pro- and anti-Union sections of Scottish society will be deepened. Tensions will increase, aggravated by the ‘usual suspects’. An inconclusive vote for independence is worse than no vote at all.

But the amendment isn’t proposing that the vote be for independence. It does not propose that independence ensue from what purports to be a vote for independence. In this respect it is no improvement on the resolution it is supposed to be amending.

So, what is proposed by Amendment A? Here is the final paragraph:

Conference recognises that, in practice, a mandate to deliver Independence requires certain building blocks to make delivery possible and “get us over the line”. These will include a target date for independence, a provisional government to oversee the necessary preparations, and an Independence Delivery Unit to make such preparations.

As I said, independence does not ensue from what purports to be a vote for independence. Instead, delivery is delayed to allow for the establishment of a “provisional government” and something called an “Independence Delivery Unit“

A provisional government is superfluous and pointless. As is the so-called independence delivery unit. They serve no purpose that isn’t better served by existing institutions. These things have been tacked on to a very weak amendment to make it look more radical. That is all.

Why would we need a provisional government with no democratic legitimacy and no power when we already have a Scottish Government with impeccable democratic legitimacy and all the power it needs? The Scottish Government is the “Independence Delivery Unit”! That is what we elect when we elect a government that says it will deliver independence!

It gets sillier! This provisional government will be the (nominally) pro-independence MSPs elected in 2026. The mooted provisional government will simply be a duplicate of the (nominally) pro-independence majority at Holyrood taken out of the place where they have power and put into a place where they have none.

I’ve read Graeme McCormick’s effort to explain and justify this needless farting around and the whole thing just gets dafter the more he tries to polish the turd. There’s the bit about increasing this provisional government with up to 100 additional ‘seats’ allocated to nominally pro-independence parties in accordance with vote share. A sort of consolation prize for the losers. So, this provisional government could have more members than the entire Scottish Parliament.

Come to think of it, whay is it called a provisional government. It doesn’t govern anything. The way it is composed, it is more like a provisional parliament than a provisional government. But again, why would we need a pro-independence provisional parliament whose very existence presupposes the existence of a real pro-independence parliament? It just makes no sense.

These things are useless frills added to a pointless amendment in an attempt to make it look more impressive. I am not impressed!

What all this means is that whatever the outcome of the debate on Saturday afternoon, it can only be bad news for Scotland’s cause. Nothing is being proposed in any resolution or amendment which would make the SNP once again the ‘party of independence’. Even if Amendment A is passed, the only benefit is that it represents a defeat for John Swinney’s proposal for an SNP-only majority and another witless stroll into the Section 30 trap. It represents a defeat, but it doesn’t kill Swinney’s chosen ‘strategy’.

My feeling is that Swinney might accept the part of the amendment which includes other nominally pro-independence parties. This gets him out of what even he must now recognise he dug for himself when he aimed to magically replicate the fluke of 2011. The rest, he will ignore. In terms of what a (nominally) pro-independence parliamentary majority after the election implies for Scotland’s cause, nothing changes.

Notwithstanding Amendment A, we are looking at five more years with no progress for Scotland’s cause. Conference isn’t going to change the SNP. Therefore, the election isn’t going to change the decidedly dreich outlook for the struggle to restore Scotland’s independence.

I’ll finish by reminding readers that it could all have been very different. The key to making the SNP once again the party of independene was the resolution submitted by the Newington & Southside branch of the SNP. I’ll end with the final paragraph of that resolution and let you contemplate what it would have meant for Scotland’s cause if this resolution had been on the SNP conference agenda.

Therefore, Conference agrees that the SNP shall put in their manifesto for the 2026 Scottish Parliament election, that if a majority of SNP and other pro-independence MSP’s are returned to Holyrood in 2026, they will bring forward a bill to assume responsibility for constitutional affairs as directed by the people of Scotland. This will include the right to hold referendums on increased powers and independence—driven by the will of the people.