Wings Over Scotland | The Wheels Of Industry

Last Friday’s edition of The National ran this guff:

And as we often are, we were put in mind of the greatest politics book ever written.

We’d really need to quote a much longer section to fully convey the point – ideally just read all of the piece linked above – but this passage will suffice for general purposes:

“What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself.

Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war.

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It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.”

So let’s talk about the independence industry.

Or as Orwell put it, “The war is now within measurable distance of its end”. Kemp’s claim is obvious bollocks. Plaid Cymru are now the party of power in Wales but they don’t have a majority, they’ve pledged NOT to hold a referendum on independence, and if they did there’s essentially no chance they’d win it. Support in Wales usually bobbles around between 25% and 40% with DKs excluded.

Similarly, we can’t even find much in the way of evidence of Sinn Fein even seriously talking about a border poll in Northern Ireland. Much like the SNP in Scotland, they tend to talk it up a bit during elections then immediately kick it back into the long grass.

And of course the UK government has less than no interest in granting any more referendums in the foreseeable future, having been quite terrified by the unexpected closeness of the Scottish one and then losing the Brexit one.

So what of this “strategy for victory”, then? Kemp has a surprise for us.

Apparently the “true” support for independence is actually less than 40%. That’s what Kemp says would be the result of a “de facto referendum” conducted via a general election. He doesn’t cite any evidence for that figure, although it does pretty much correspond with what pro-indy parties got in the Holyrood election in May.

There’s little prospect of support for either the SNP or the Greens rocketing in the near future, and no sign of any new party with any traction, so let’s accept that proposition for the sake of argument. Now what?

This, though, is cobblers of the very lowest grade. For reasons we’ve explored extensively in the past, using a Westminster election rather than a Holyrood one is an epically terrible idea. You’d struggle to even get heard in a media which would be focused on UK issues, and you’d only really have one party to vote for – the Scottish Greens are a total irrelevance at Westminster.

That leaves it all on the SNP, and (as Kemp notes), the SNP are a shambles of a party that even many indy supporters won’t vote for.

In a Holyrood election you have the huge advantage of two votes, and thereby you can campaign on the basis of using the constituency vote as your de-facto indyref and the list vote as your normal election vote, making it much easier for people who don’t support the SNP to vote “for independence” while still backing their preferred party.

Heavens, we’re getting dizzy trying to track all these U-turns. Does he want a de-facto indyref or not? At this point we honestly don’t know. Just a few paragraphs ago he’s told us we’d get less than 40% in such a vote, now he wants to have it in three years anyway, in the most doomed-to-certain-failure manner possible.

What’s your game, Gordon?

“Impulsive”? Christ above. We’ve been demanding Westminster outline a defined route for over a decade now – since at least the Brexit vote of June 2016 – and they’ve swatted it away like a mildly annoying moth on a summer’s evening. The chances of them having a sudden change of heart between now and 2028 are roughly on a par with FIFA agreeing to replay the whole World Cup due the the referee’s refusal to give Scotland a nailed-on penalty against Morocco.

?

(And about the same as the SNP finally coming up with all the serious work on the case for independence that they’ve so conspicuously failed to do in that decade. What does he think has changed? Has the party suddenly recruited an army of geniuses?)

This drivel is what the SNP has been punting relentlessly at voters since 2015 and all that’s happened as a result is that SNP support has plunged from 60% to the mid-30s. The definition of insanity, they say, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

But that assumes you WANT different results. And there’s the rub. Because if you did you’d be trying a bit harder than this:

Billboards and petitions. Whoop-de-sodding-doo. (We all know how much attention we pay to political bumf shoved through our letterbox, and 75,000 is a pathetic number – just one for every 34 households in the country – anyway. What are the people who get one going to do, call the whole street round to read it together?)

As for the “Scottish Citizens’ Convention”, Kemp and Believe In Scotland have been trying to flog that ridiculous pig-in-a-poke for years now and it’s an absolute honking embarrassment of a plan.

But as we pointed out yesterday, punting this quack-hooey at the hopelessly gullible is a nice little earner for BiS’s parent company Business For Scotland. Failing to deliver it year after year keeps the (folding, not clinking) money rolling in and Kemp in an undisclosed, but we’re quite certain enviable, salary.

Independence either happening, or definitively failing, would see that gravy train crashing straight into the buffers. The only thing that keeps it rolling along (apologies for the mixed metaphor) is a carrot on a stick, constantly dangling something a couple of years ahead, no matter how implausible, whether it’s an 11-point plan or yet another talking shop, committee, “task force”, “Summer Of Independence” or whatever.

Even as shonky independence strategies go this one’s a duffer, for a truckload of reasons so blindingly obvious that we feel bad about insulting your intelligence by spelling them out, so we’ll just do a few of the biggest ones.

(1) There is NO chance of the SNP willingly surrendering their political ownership of the concept of independence. They wouldn’t even accept votes for other indy parties at this year’s election as being votes for indy, they insisted only SNP ones counted.

(2) Even if they did (they won’t) and the “common national banner” took every seat at Westminster, so what? The SNP got 56 out of 59 in 2015 and they did nothing. They did nothing when they had numerical leverage in 2018-2019 either. If they had any cunning plans, those were the times to whip them out.

(3) You get zero “legitimacy” from a discussion process that Unionists have absolutely no reason to participate in. Why on Earth would they lend any sort of support or credibility to a venture expressly and openly designed to achieve the thing they most oppose? So you’re talking solely to the people who already agree with you, persuading no-one and getting nowhere.

(4) If BiS know the people capable of getting us from where we are now to a position of being ready to win a de-facto indyref, where the heck are they and what have they been doing for the last 10 years, when the circumstances have been so favourable? Washing their hair? Were they just waiting for all the momentum and impetus of Brexit, COVID, May, Truss and Starmer to die down because they didn’t want to make it too easy?

The snake oil they’re selling isn’t even oil, it’s toilet water. The independence industry wants your money to pay its wages, and that’s the end of their interest in you. If they had anything to offer, they’d have done it by now, but then they’d be out of a job and have to do something a little harder than organising a dinner and a march for a few hundred people once a year.

In football, if you produce nothing for a decade you get the sack. But Scottish politics is a gig for life. When you’re cruising, you don’t rock the boat.