By Stuart Crawford
Before I warm to the theme of this piece, and in anticipation of the torrent of bile and venom it might well attract from the usual suspects, I think I better lay out my credentials.
I have always been a supporter of Scottish independence. In fact, I’ll go further, and say I have always been a supporter of Scottish sovereignty – the full nine yards, foreign policy, defence forces, different currency. In the past I was a member of the SNP, and indeed was a party political candidate in the 1999 and 2001 elections. My sentiments towards an independent Scotland have never wavered, and I still feel the same way today.
But, like many other observers and commentators, I’m just beginning to wonder if the SNP and its agenda has reached its high water mark, and whether the tide is now receding.
Consider the evidence. The stark truth of the matter is that, sadly, the SNP administration has actually achieved very little during its four years in power. Admittedly, that this is so has not been entirely its own fault; being a minority government it has from the outset been vulnerable to the other political parties ganging up on it to stymie its agenda.
But even where there has been political consensus its achievements have been somewhat underwhelming. Yes, there are probably more policemen on the beat, and yes we’re still moving towards the abolition of prescription charges (although only less than 10% of the population pay for their prescriptions anyway, so we’re firmly in the land of gesture politics here). However, there has also been a raft of other policies and pledges which have been publicly abandoned or quietly allowed to fall by the wayside. Class sizes, minimum pricing for alcohol and the referendum on independence are but three of these.
There may, of course, be good reasons for some of these unfulfilled promises. It’s a common hypothesis amongst the commentariat that the SNP didn’t really think it was going to win the 1997 election. Accordingly, its election manifesto was more the wish list of a party expecting to be in opposition than a carefully crafted and costed blueprint for government.
A classic example of consequences came early on in the SNP administration with the abolition of tolls on the Forth and Tay road bridges, a populist manifesto pledge introduced almost immediately to promote the feelgood factor of the new government. But the original thinking behind this was that the revenue lost through the removal of the tolls would be compensated for by the cancellation of the Edinburgh Airport Rail Link and the Edinburgh trams project.
As everyone knows, the Scottish Parliament was not persuaded to abandon the trams. Essentially, in its overwhelming desire to hit the ground running with a popular measure, the SNP put the cart before the horse and started off its four years in power with an immediate £500 million hole in its budget calculations. Naïve at best, foolhardy at worst.
The SNP’s reputation in government has also been tarnished by things which have happened on its watch which have neither been its fault nor matters over which it has had any control. Take the recent winter weather for example. Obviously the Scottish Government has no control over the weather. But the SNP was, unfortunately for it, the party in power when folk up and down the country were either stuck in their cars, had burst pipes flooding their homes, or were running out of heating oil. Leaving aside Stewart Stevenson’s infamous Newsnight Scotland interview, which gave the distinct impression that the government didn’t have a clue what was happening out there, the SNP was, unfairly perhaps, found guilty by association.
The current Scottish Government has been hampered too by various policy initiatives and pronouncements which just don’t pass the commons sense test. Chief amongst these is its almost pathological fascination with renewable energy.
Now, look, I’m just as much in favour of utilising sustainable, renewable sources for our energy as the next person, but nobody in command of their marbles can subscribe to some of the more outrageous flights of fancy which are popular, it would seem, in SNP circles.
Do we really believe that Scotland will produce more than 100% of its energy requirements from renewables at some point in the near to middle future? No, because it just doesn’t pass the test. It may be, of course, that this is more of a statement of aspiration rather than a target, but if so then it should be caveated as such. This over-emphasis on renewables in the face of contrary evidence, allied to the party’s unwillingness to even consider the cleanest and (arguably) greenest energy source of all, nuclear, does the SNP’s political credibility no favours at all.
Add to this the polls, which indicate that Labour is in the lead ahead of the elections. Sure, these are early days, and the only important poll is the election itself. But evidence from the doorsteps garnered by some of the SNP hopefuls who are putting in the street work at the moment suggests that the polls may not be far off the mark. There also seems to be a growing body of evidence that the issue of independence, once the SNP’s USP and raison d’etre, is falling out of favour even amongst habitual SNP voters.
Finally, there is the paradoxical detrimental effect that being in government has had on the SNP overall. George Robertson, that most unappealing upholder of the Scottish Cringe, infamously commented that devolution would kill Scottish nationalism stone dead – or something along those lines. Much poo-pooed at the time, his words have come to have a ring of the truth about them. But not possibly in the way he meant at the time.
It’s not so much that the cause of nationalism is dead, although the enthusiasm for independence may be on the wane. It’s more that those who were amongst nationalism’s most effective proponents have had their attention and energy diverted. In short, they all got jobs through being elected to the restored Scottish Parliament. Almost at a stroke nationalism was emasculated. Some of the most effective and persuasive of the SNP’s campaigners found themselves, heaven forfend, running committees and, more recently, holding ministerial portfolios.
There is at least one current cabinet secretary who was far, far more effective in Scottish political life before he chose elected office, and others whose guns have been spiked by the humdrum tedium of Holyrood’s everyday business. As we head towards the May elections, the focus is much more on getting re-elected than it is on moving toward independence. The purpose has become lost in the process, and the SNP is suffering because of it.
Taking all of these factors together, then it is perhaps no surprise that some see the SNP on the downward slope from the crest of the wave. We have been here before, of course. Back in 1974 the SNP returned seven MPs to Westminster in the February General Election, and then 11 in the subsequent election in October, with over 30 per cent of the vote. But this was followed by the disappointment of the 1979 devolution referendum and after the 1979 election the SNP was left with only two MPs.
Many said then that the SNP had reached its high water mark in 1974. They were proved wrong, of course, and today the party is arguably at its strongest ever, electorally speaking at least. But the waters seem destined to recede again, and who can say when the levels of support at the 2007 Parliamentary elections might be seen again?
And yet, and yet. There may still be hope. The SNP’s election strategy is being driven by Angus Robertson MP, the party’s leader at Westminster and also its defence spokesman. In his background reading for the latter role he will, I am sure, have come across the writings of Sir Basil Liddell-Hart, perhaps the best known of the British military thinkers of the inter war years of the 1920s and 30s.
Liddell-Hart espoused the principle of the indirect approach. In his own words:
In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there; a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance.Whilst clearly designed as a principle for military operations, the indirect approach has applicability in many other walks of life, politics included. The SNP has long been thirled to taking on the Labour Party in its traditional strongholds, the post industrial wastelands of the central belt and elsewhere. A strategy, it might be argued, not too dissimilar to General Sir Douglas Haig’s cunning plan on 1 July 1916 on the Somme. With the way things are in Scotland at present, that sort of campaign plan might have the same result as Haig’s attack nearly 100 years ago. On the other hand, out here in East Lothian the jaikit of Iain Gray, sitting constituency MSP and coincidentally leader of the Labour party in Holyrood, may well be on a shoogly peg. Thanks to recent boundary changes the constituency is now the 11th target seat on the SNP list, and a competent and energetic candidate is making his presence felt. What might happen if you cut off the head of the beast? Here is the nub of the SNP problem as the 5th May looms. Direct attack or indirect approach? Reinforce success or reinforce failure? Is the tide coming in, or going out?
Related posts: