June 13, 2024 - 7:00am

During this election campaign, SNP politicians have largely put the independence question on the backburner. “I don’t ever remember seeing an SNP campaign like it where basically hardly anybody mentions the ‘I’ word,” declared Laura Kuenssberg in an interview with the party’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn on Sunday.

She’s right and it is all very strange. Just over a year ago, Nicola Sturgeon was vowing to turn this election campaign in Scotland into a “de facto” referendum. Yet here we are at the sharp-end of the election and, as Flynn replied to Kuenssberg, it turns out that “we are in a general election campaign and that means we need to focus on the biggest issues at Westminster.” These, according to the SNP, are austerity, Brexit and the cost of living. Independence: not so much.

Focus groups conducted in Scotland during this campaign perhaps hint at the reason. It’s not so much that SNP voters have stopped backing independence, as polls still find support at around 45%. It’s that, at this election, independence is viewed by these voters as totally irrelevant. They are bewildered by initial attempts to crowbar the issue into an election that is palpably about the bigger UK-wide picture. It appears Flynn and new SNP leader John Swinney have admitted the facts and decided to go with the flow.

In truth, that decision isn’t so different from the way the party has run campaigns over the last few years. As opponents have long noticed, the SNP would focus on independence to begin with, to make sure its base was engaged. Then, nearer election day, the party tended to shift its focus to whatever bigger issues were engaging the country at large. In 2019, it was Brexit — and the SNP scooped the field as a result.

Five years on, however, and the signs are that the SNP’s independence shuffle has passed its sell-by date. Firstly, and after more than a decade of promises, core voters are rightly fed up with the SNP’s failure to advance independence one iota. As one strong pro-independence friend told me recently: “For the first time in my life, I don’t know who to vote for.” And secondly, mainstream Middle Scotland has noticed the SNP’s underwhelming domestic record and has begun to discover that other options are available, most notably a repolished Labour Party.

The SNP’s former leader Alex Salmond is turning his fire on his former colleagues. Now heading up the tiny independence-ultra party Alba, he noted acidly that he had been sent a “begging letter” over the weekend from SNP headquarters asking for money, which mentioned independence no fewer than seven times in four paragraphs. “When they’re looking for money from independence supporters,” he said with relish, “they talk about nothing else but independence, but when they go on TV debates the word never passes their lips.”

Alba won’t pick up any seats from the SNP. Rather, it may be the case that on 4 July Scotland’s “grumpy Nats” stay at home, or even lend their vote to Labour.

Swinney has now opened the possibility of Sturgeon returning to the campaigning fold in the coming weeks, despite the criminal investigation into the party’s finances hanging over her and her husband. It adds to the impression that, for the SNP, this campaign is less about strategy than it is about chucking what’s left of the kitchen sink at the Scottish public in the hope the voting muscle memory of the last decade kicks in.

But the bond that the party once had with voters has been weakened by the last 18 months of scandal and misfortune. And simply not mentioning the “I” word won’t make up for that.


Eddie Barnes is director of the Our Scottish Future think tank.

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