THE 2019 ELECTION CHANGED EVERYTHING

It’s a year to the day since the 2019 General Election was called and it will go down as the election that changed everything around the constitutional debate in Scotland. We were able to exorcise the electoral demons of 2017 and we were able to bring a new sense of confidence and determination to the whole campaign for independence. Since that election independence has been the majority choice of the people of Scotland according to nearly all opinion polls conducted. We recruited a new generation of Brexit remainers to our cause and we demonstrated that Scotland and the rest of the UK were on different trajectories in how they want to be governed. 

It brought the ‘no to a second referendum’ mini boom of the Sottish Conservatives to a shuddering halt and we rid the country of 13 unionist MPs with all their resources and local influence. After the 2019 election things would never be the same again. 

2019 was just about the best of times. Our second best ever result and the return of 48 SNP MPs. We secured a bigger share of the vote in Scotland than the Tories did in the UK. Most importantly we stopped being defined by the relative ‘failure’ of the 2017 result. It proclaimed that the SNP was back in business.

But let’s deal with some of the nonsense that is still being said about the 2017 campaign. It’s still the conventional view that we did badly because we didn’t campaign ‘hard enough’ for independence. The truth is In 2017 you couldn’t give a referendum away, and you were practically chased from the doors when the conversation got to independence with undecideds or previous soft indy supporters. Constitutional fatigue had gripped Scotland and people simply had had enough following the Brexit debacle and the independence referendum. The amount of people who told me ‘I’ve voted for you since 2001, I even voted Yes to independence, but I’m voting Tory to stop any more talk of referendums’. It really was that bad. The idea that independence supporters stayed at home because there wasn’t the necessary amount of independence fervour is just simply nonsense. In 2017 there were a lot of people who simply did not want to know. 

Fast forward 2 years and everything was completely different. With Scotland on the Brexit precipice independence suddenly made sense to a whole new generation of Scots. ‘No’ voters who voted remain were coming in droves to our cause and the election of Johnson as Prime Minister confirmed to people that the UK was already becoming a foreign country with an entirely different set of priorities. Scotland did not like the look of where a Johnson led hard right Government stuffed full of committed Brexiteers would be taking them. The Tories fought the campaign on the same ‘No to indyref” campaign as 2017 and the people of Scotland this time told them, after thinking about it, they actually did want another choice about their future. 

There were of course those who said that we ‘sacrificed’ SNP leverage or influence in the chaotic minority Tory position in 2019. That somehow we could hold back a Tory Government determined to force an election in some sort of ‘electoral cage’. All that confinement did was let the Johnson beast grow electorally stronger by the week. Where it would have been fun to watch them force a vote of confidence in themselves (which is what they would have done) it would have made no difference to their ultimate massive success in England. 

The only thing continuing the misery would have achieved would be to go continually round and round the futile Brexit wheel, continuing the misery, trying to find a way to stop a Brexit that was driving our support and denying the people of England what they seemed to want. The disastrous ‘people’s vote’ campaign and the consort of Blairites and Liberals who ran it were simply the most inept political ‘operators’ I have ever observed in my 20 years at Westminster. I parted company with them, and even broke the SNP whip, when it got so absurd that they proposed a vote to ‘stop Brexit’ that didn’t involve, well, a vote to stop Brexit! Jo Swinson, Chukka and the rest of them got everything they deserved. 

The defeat of 2019 also had impacts on the Scottish opposition parties. The Scottish Conservatives have now been deprived of the one thing that has sustained them over the past few years abandoning their ‘no to a second referendum’ messaging. They know that they can no longer campaign against something they’ve ‘apparently’ ruled out without conceding that one is indeed going to happen. They will now try to campaign on domestic issues forever hampered by their southern neighbours making a pigs ear out of governing in the UK. Meanwhile, Scottish Labour just appear to be crushed by the sheer weight of their constitutional and leadership dilemmas. They will once again have to campaign in what was their ‘former’ heartlands on a hard unionist agenda that no-one who used to vote for them wants to know. 

The result of 2019 has helped set us up beautifully as we go into the most important Scottish election. This will be the independence election and the momentum caused by 2019 will mean we go into it with independence at a record high and at a sustained majority. Support for the SNP is well over 50% and if borne out we will again have an overall majority. The only people who now seem to be able to beat us are ourselves, and by god, at times it seems we are doing everything possible to try and make that happen…

2019 has helped give us the best chance we have ever had to make all our independence ambitions come true. It’s all up to us now. 

PLAN B IS NOT THE ANSWER

So it looks like Plan B is to be debated at conference and the party will have a chance to decide if this is indeed the ‘deadlock breaker’ that will end all our referendum woes. Borne out of an implacable belief that ‘Boris’ will ‘never’ agree to a ‘Section 30’ its proponents contend that this will be the route that will allow Scotland to chose. 

But what exactly is Plan B? What does it actually do and has it any chance of actually working? 

Sometimes like the proverbial constitutional bus several Plan Bs come along at once. If you look round ‘Yes’ social media you would find plenty to chose from. There are the various UDIs, legal challenges, covenants and wildcat referendums all claiming to be the real thing.

But the Plan B that will present itself to conference is a pretty straight forward affair. It proclaims that a victory based on a parliamentary majority will lead to negotiations to independence. In advance the UK Government will be offered a final opportunity to ‘give’ a Section 30. Refusal would mean that the UK Government would meet the full force of, well, an election… But an election like no other. In fact a ‘plebiscite’. 

Reading the motion I’m not entirely sure if there is also to be a programme for Government and a policy platform for the next Parliamentary term or whether it will just be independence and nothing else. What is entirely certain is that all the unionist opposition parties would refuse to agree to an election framed on this basis. Unlike a dedicated referendum there will be no opposition case and nobody representing the union case. It will therefore be the SNP fighting some sort of quasi referendum and all the other parties contesting a scheduled election. 

This then leads immediately to countless questions around democratic legitimacy. Forget the fact that no other nation has ever done anything remotely like this before it breaks every notion that independence should only be secured on the back of a public majority. We would also have to assume that the Scottish people would somehow go along with their democracy being appropriated like this, and that is a very big assumption…

But before we get into all of that surely the most basic question is what happens when the UK Government says ‘No’ to a Scottish Government newly armed with a mandate to ‘negotiate’ independence, as it most definitely will? 

This is a UK Government that has said ‘No’ to another agreed referendum and which consistently says ‘No’ to devolving the powers to Scotland to hold a referendum. We are apparently invited to accept the notion that they will turn 180 degrees on their heads and say – ‘OK we’ve done everything possible to stop you having another referendum but we’ll agree to negotiate independence with you because you won an election’? After being told repeatedly about the perniciousness of the UK state and the certainty of the ‘Boris veto’ it is beyond naive to believe that they will somehow so readily acquiesce to the result of an election?

‘We’ll just do it anyway’ you might then say. Well, this is where we start to get into some seriously tricky territory. ‘Just doing it anyway’ means we would be doing something broadly similar to what Catalonia did when they won their uncontested referendum – without actually winning a referendum! This would in effect mean we would be declaring some sort of Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI). The consequences of that could not be more serious. 

Almost certain to be one of the first things to happen is that we would have all of this immediately ruled illegal and be disenfranchised from the entire international community. We would be left in the sort of hellish limbo currently endured by the people of Catalonia. The idea that the Scottish people who have conducted the debate around independence constitutionally and legally for decades would somehow embrace a ‘UDI’ is almost beyond preposterous and is just not going to happen. 

Of course UDI might be the furthest thing from the mind of the ‘plan B-ers’. It may be to them a means to simply exercise further leverage on the UK to ‘grant’ the plan A of a referendum, as some have indeed suggested. But this then takes us right back to their ‘Boris veto’ without taking us any further forward in our independence ambitions having wasted a great deal of time and support in the process.

What a ‘Plan B’ does more than anything else is let the Tories off the referendum hook. They are getting beat and they know it. They know that if the SNP replicate the conditions of the 2011 election and secure another majority it is all more or less over. All their current planning and strategising is simply screaming ‘we are in big trouble’. The Tories know a referendum is coming and the only people who have absolute faith in the Tories sustaining their current ‘No’ to a referendum are the Plan B-ers and others on social media.

The Tories in fact can’t believe their luck. They know the last chance of their union being saved is if we beat ourselves. Their only plan is to say ‘No’ then hope that this No is accepted as their last word and gospel on the matter and then count on the frustration and division building. They could not be more delighted at the way this simple but effective plan is working out. The loudest cheers of an SNP conference backing this Plan B motion will be in the offices of the Conservative party. It would be a total vindication of their ‘Plan No’. They, without doing practically anything, will have pushed us down the road of the electorally unpalatable whilst ending their referendum difficulties. 

The only good thing about all of this is it that this damaging debate will come to a head. We as a party will debate a ‘Plan B’ and the result of conference must be respected and we then all get back to winning our independence.

I very much hope the Plan B motion is comprehensively defeated but despite all my many reservations if this is what the party decides then I will do all I can to make it work. 

I hope all the Plan B-ers will do the same if the motion is defeated