This is not for Stephen Kerr

I found myself today on the verge of responding to Stephen Kerr because my painkiller-addled mind mistook him for Chris McEleny. I must apologise to Chris for this inadvertent but egregious error.

Stephen Kerr@RealStephenKerr

By right, the SNP should be staring down the barrel of a massive election loss. Yet polls show they will win. No matter where you live or who you normally vote for, you can stop SNP/Greens getting elected by using your 'Peach' vote for the Scottish Conservatives.

6:37 AM · Apr 3, 2026 · 3.54K Views

---

117 Replies · 19 Reposts · 103 Likes

The reason I almost responded to the above was that the first sentence caught my attention. It proves that occasionally even Tory bladders like Stephen Kerr can get it right. The rest of this post is as worth ignoring as everything else this guy says. But he is on the button when he says:

By right, the SNP should be staring down the barrel of a massive election loss.

Kerr’s reasons for thinking the SNP deserve an electoral arse-kicking are no doubt very different from mine. But that bare statement is unquestionably correct. if you are one of the people who have relied on the SNP to progress Scotland’s cause. The SNP’s eleven years of abysmal failure to take us any closer to independence is reason enough on its own to make pro-independence voters reluctant to vote for the SNP. When you also take into consideration John Swinney’s so-called ‘strategy’, it becomes impossible for Scottish nationalists like myself to vote for them.

But I realise that not everybody is a Scottish nationalist like me. I am bound to be better informed than most voters. Most voters just don’t take the interest in Scottish politics that I do. Most voters don’t spend the bulk of their time online reading blog articles and researching material relevant to our liberation struggle. Most voters can’t do this. They have more immediately pressing matters to attend to.

So, most voters are not aware of the extent of the SNP’s failure on the constitutional issue. Most voters get no further than recognising that the SNP has provided acceptable governance much of the time. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. But it’s enough for most voters. I don’t condemn them for this. If voters are making electoral choices that better-informed voters wouldn’t make, then the fault lies with the politically engaged community. We haven’t done a good enough job of informing people.

I won’t make the usual excuse about the British media smothering the electorate with pro-Union propaganda. We always knew this was going to be the case. We always knew that we faced a huge challenge when it comes to mass communication. We just haven’t solved a problem which is ours to solve.

If anybody is interested, the following is what I wrote when I thought that I was responding to Chris McEleny as if he had said that by right, the SNP should be staring down the barrel of a massive election loss.

The realpolitik is that the SNP was always going to be the dominant political and parliamentary force after this election. Whether you like it or not is irrelevant; this is just the way it is. We – the independence movement – made the SNP exceptionally powerful because we trusted them and knew that they had to be powerful in order to confront the British state.

The SNP leadership took the power and then abandoned the cause. But it takes time for that to filter through to the electorate as a whole. So, the SNP is going to dominate after this election. That means the only way to make this election serve Scotland’s cause was to force the SNP to rethink its approach to the constitutional issue. This is something the independence movement could have done. The independence movement did nothing. The independence movement as a whole left the SNP to do whatever its leadership wanted. And we know that the SNP leadership is not prioritising Scotland’s cause.

That the SNP would continue to dominate was known with a very high degree of certainty more than a year ago. That there was no way to remove and replace the SNP was known more than a year ago and has been confirmed on numerous occasions.

The main reason that there was no way to remove and replace the SNP is that the putative alternatives all failed to offer a clear, coherent, credible strategy for restoring independence. In particular, Alba Party failed from its inception to create a distinctive identity differentiating itself from the SNP. Now, the post-Alba parties are going down the same path of relying solely on the we-are-not-SNP message. It won’t work!

It won’t work because these putative alternatives to the SNP have not done the essential work of reframing the constitutional issue. All they are saying to the small part of the electorate that is listening is that they are more not-SNP than ever. And in some cases throwing in a narrow policy agenda that they calculate can be pinned to the coat-tails of the liberation effort. They are using independence as an electioneering device just as much as the SNP does.

I’m a Scottish nationalist. I need a place to put my votes which I can be reasonably confident will result in progress for the campaign to restore Scotland’s independence. Currently, there is no party that has convinced me that they are aware of the need to rethink and reframe the whole constitutional issue. None of the nominally pro-independence parties has a persuasive position on the constitutional issue. None of them has a genuine manifesto for independence.

If the Scottish Socialist Party or any of the other self-styled pro-independence parties want my vote, they are going to have to up their offer. The #ScottishUDI strategy and the Manifesto for Independence are the key. The parties that have joined the electoral contest late have the opportunity to pick up a ready-made reframing of the constitutional issue that they could simply slot into their offering.

The ball is in their court. I will do everything in my minimal power to assist any party or candidate who embraces the #ScottishUDI process and adopts the Manifesto for Independence. Trust me! This is what they need.