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September 2, 2024 - 7:00am
The Scottish National Party is not renowned for its calm and considered approach to politics. Like the Highland hordes during the Jacobite rebellions, it tends to alternate between heroic optimism and existential despair. Having been founded in its current form 90 years ago, the SNP is heading for the slough of despond.
After a year of denial following the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon, it is finally dawning on the party that independence is not going to happen any time soon. Mavericks such as former minister Alex Neil are saying openly that there might not be another independence referendum this generation. Even party leader John Swinney admitted at a closed session during this weekend’s conference — which was immediately leaked — that the SNP had, to use a technical term, lost the plot.
“I’m not standing in front of you in denial” he said, promising to end the habit of a lifetime. Voters just weren’t getting the message, he conceded, blaming himself for concentrating too much on “process” rather than the merits of independence. The quarter of a million voters who deserted the SNP in July’s election simply wanted to “punish them”. And how.
The SNP went from 48 MPs to nine on 4 July — a date Swinney had rashly forecast would be “independence day” for Scotland. The nationalists had been the third-largest party in Westminster; not any more. While the SNP still dominates the Holyrood parliament, polls are now forecasting that it could lose that advantage too. Party membership has halved in the last five years.
SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn blamed the coalition with the Scottish Green Party for much of the lost support. If the Greens hadn’t been shown the door in April, he said, the SNP would have lost even more than 39 seats. That’s hard to believe. But it is a measure of the party’s regret over the power-sharing arrangement which Sturgeon formed in 2021.
We argued about bottle banks instead of public services, said Flynn. He might have added that the Greens’ loathing of the oil and gas industry, which employs 100,000 Scots, was a major factor in Flynn almost losing his Aberdeen South seat two months ago. The Greens were also the driving force behind the Gender Recognition Reform Bill which collapsed after a double rapist, Isla Bryson, was installed on remand in a women’s prison.
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SubscribeI completely agree with Mr Macwhirter’s conclusion. The ghastly SNP is dead as a political force (though sadly only to the benefit of the ghastly Scottish Labour party – which props up Two Tier Kneel in the UK). Scottish Nationalism, the bankrupt, abhorrent project to make foreigners of us one from the other is also now a parrot in a sketch, an unfunny and long-past-cremation-date sketch.
One question remains – not for Mr Macwhirter but for the Media Class more generally. Many of us have loathed nationalism our entire lives and were never taken in either by its fake promises or by the inadequate politicians who pushed it. Why were you? Why did the entire media class first tell us that Sturgeon – Nicola Sturgeon! – was some sort of political giant, and not a con-artist of the first order, to be classed alongside Alistair Campbell in the integrity stakes and shunned from public life accordingly? The pandemic saw this hagiography reach emetic levels. And why did the entire media class then proceed to tell us – despite the Once In A Generation Referendum defeat – that separatism was inevitable? I’m no less prone to wish-fulfilling prophecies than the next person, but I’m not an entire media class (there were a few brave exceptions) and the relentless of this message had an impact on the political dynamic across the entire UK. We might get the dreadful politicians we deserve, but no-one deserves what masquerades for mainstream journalism in this country. No-one.
Is there anyone in a editorial or managerial role in the London media – or any of the political parties, the Civil Service etc – who didn’t go to Oxford in the ‘eighties along with all the rest of them, or who doesn’t live in the arc of the North London line between Islington and Putney?
We are governed by a tiny micro class whose incompetence is matched only by their myopia.
If only the Welsh Nats were equally as dead.
Because they either believe it or because they are too scared to swim against the progressive consensus which gets them invited to all the right dinner parties and the dopamine hit of social media validation.
You are exaggerating (of course – it’s a comment on UnHerd!). There was always criticism of the SNP among the print media. But – ever heard of fashion and groupthink? Did you perhaps at one point yourself consider the independence might well happen, whether you approved of the SNP or not?
Much journalism can indeed be poor, superficial and herd like, not to mention the propensity for publications for misleading sensational headline writing -.which also includes UnHerd!
However few if us have quite got to grips with the enormous political volatility that has become common in many western countries. An enormous victory for Labour, following cataclysmic defeat 5 years previously with much talk of the party’s “inevitable” demise.
And now the same for both the Conservatives and SNP. People love both vindictive triumphalism, schadenfreude AND doom mongering. Few of us are held to account for our predictions, and as always 20:20 hindsight is a wonderful thing.
In Scotland the traditional media, newspapers are hollowed out shells of what newspapers were two decades ago, they haven’t the heft or resources to do anything much beyond employing young graduates to copy and paste press releases that some byline pictured ‘columnist’ can bloviate about. The Scottish Broadcast media were even more supine.
The UK media, especially broadcast media, seemed to see Sturgeon et al. as just anti-conservative soundbite machines. The querying, questioning, or critical analysis by the Maitlis/O’Brien/Goodall era Newsnight, and Snow/Guru-Murthy/Newman era C4News was zero.
AS long as Sturgeon echoed their political beliefs and delivered anti-Tory, Anti UK, Anti Brexit, nostrums they were happy.
Nobody amongst the truly grassroots movement on Twitter/X is at all surprised by the chaotic state of the SNP and the rapid revision of the Murrell/Sturgeon regime… the only gobsmacked people are those ‘professional’ journalists who lobbed underarm questions at her for almost 10 years.
Speaking as an Irish nationalist, I always saw the SNP as dinner party conversation that got out of hand. I never took it seriously because if the Scots left Britain they would be leaving themselves. For better or worse, that’s the way it is.
I think that sounds better in your head than on the page. What do you mean “if the Scots left Britain they would be leaving themselves”? Do you mean that just because Scotland shared an island with England and Wales it can’t be a nation? Cuba and the Dominican Republic are in that category or are you saying that the only time countries are allowed to seek independence/secede is from 1918-1922?
The SNP seems to be made up of people whose experience is largely about whinging, blaming and promoting one-sided proposals. I have never understood why anyone thinks that a party made up of these personality types would ever be good at running a government. Demonstrating this lack of capability has merely served to undermine the very thing they are aiming to achieve.
As their local/Scottish government shows, they’re utterly incompetent and corrupt to boot! Just imagine if they’d won the referendum – with these fools Scotland would have been condemned to ‘2nd world’ economic status and the freedoms of its people suppressed under a culturally (woke) authoritarian government. It would have been a total shambles, and a nasty one too. We had a lucky escape, and I think people now know it.
It would be interesting to have a UK-wide referendum on Scottish (and Welsh) independence. I suspect that England would want to ditch the two colonies.
Could we vote to ditch the whingers and keep the nice majority?? (both countries)
How about giving the “whingers” one of the two countries to live in – and take the other one back. Which would you choose to keep ? 🙂
I’m fine with that as long as all the whingers all have to move to Wales and live there. Otherwise, you’ll have to prise the keys to my tenement house from my cold, dead fingers!
I’d rather repeal the devolution act, abolish the scottish “parliament” and the welsh “assembly” and the NI “assembly” (hereby saving millions a year) welcome them all back to the United Kingdom and stop giving a minority of loud, whiny voices undeserved amplification.
I think it ought to have always been acknowledged that, once Labour got into power, support for independence was always going to dip. Not necessarily because Labour are inherently amazing, just because the Conservatives are so unpopular in Scotland. A lot of pro-Independence messaging conflated anti-Tory rhetoric with anti-Westminster rhetoric, and was buoyed by the observation that Scots didn’t elect many Tory MPs. The Tories not being in power muddies the message.
Of course, the flip side to this is that it’s inevitable we’ll have very unpopular governments sooner-or-later in the future, and sometimes those governments won’t have many Scottish MPs. So the fat lady hasn’t sung on this one, much as I wish she would.
But sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. They seem to forget the Blair era, when half the cabinet was Scottish. And then they inflicted Gordon Brown on us.
For several generations the real, as opposed to virtue-signalled, attraction of EU membership was the opportunity it represented to share in the bonanza created by German industrial success
I suspect most intelligent Scots realise that’s over now. It’s getting harder and harder for the EU elites to conceal the true state of the eurozone economy – especially since Macron’s reform programme ended in abject failure, condemning France to continued precipitous decline.
Better to cosy up to the Americans who get richer every year by about the same degree to which Europeans get poorer.