SNP risk wrath of Little Kilts
EVERYONE has their problems with Brexit. Theresa May has her swivel-eyed little Englanders, Jeremy Corbyn has grumbling Remainiacs … and Nicola Sturgeon has?
The SNP leader has, arguably, the most neglected group of voters in the UK – the one third of SNP supporters who voted for Britain to leave the European Union.
Ignored by the leadership, forgotten in the party line on Europe, SNP Brexiteers are a lost tribe to whom hardly anyone speaks and few hear.
They have their elders, Alex Neil and Jim Sillars, versatile politicians who were riled into action this week when two of Sturgeon’s influential former advisers tilted at backing a second EU referendum.
No, no and trice no said the leaders of the Yes-Leave tribe. A Brexit re-run vote would also mean a re-run of any future vote for independence, said Neil, playing to the nationalists’ ultimate prize.
Sillars was typically frank. Alienating Yes-Leave supporters by backing another EU referendum would cost the SNP the next Holyrood election. “We’d lose,” he said.
The story Sturgeon presents to the world is of Scots as good Remainers, which by a large margin they were.
Having had her impulse for an immediate independence referendum in the wake of Brexit quashed, she has fought hard to keep Scotland as closely aligned to the EU as possible.
But a third of her supporters want the very opposite and she has still to square that circle.
They are part of a wider group of Scots, one million of them, who voted for Brexit and they are all a problem for Nicola Sturgeon.
Although support for independence in the divided nation is fairly constant, there is a lot of churn, as pollsters say, under the surface. The key group the SNP must persuade on independence are those who voted No in 2014 and Remain two years later.
Some could be taken across the line by a disastrous hard Brexit, leading to a Boris Johnson Tory government.
For the likes of Mike Russell, who raised the prospect, this is not Project Fear – it is Project Hope.
But there is a downside, a much larger swing among those who voted “Yes” to independence but then voted to Leave the EU.
According to pollsters Yougov, 35 per cent of the Yes-Leave voters have abandoned independence, with 25 per cent now saying they would vote to stay in the UK. I guess thirteen Tory MPs are evidence of that shift.
How to stop alienating Leave voters in their camp is an SNP headscratcher.
Pete Wishart, contemplating how his own majority evaporated in 2017, has at least given the issue some thought.
He wrote: “The people who stayed at home last year were Yes voters who voted to leave the European Union.
“Proceeding to another indyref with this unresolved will be like proceeding with one hand tied behind our back.”
We have been waiting so long for Andrew Wilson’s Growth Commission, containing the new economics of independence, that when it is finally launched it would be best analysed by Neil Oliver and Sir Tom Devine for historic value.
To be up to date and keep the Yes coalition together, the report will have to consider the case for Scotland outside the European Union.
Given the unwritten independence manifesto for the last 40 years is that Scotland would leave one big club, the UK, and replace it with the security of another, the EU, this is a big ask.
Brexit is not just a Little Englander phenomenon. The Little Kilts, “na fèilidhean beaga”, are just as isolationist and a problem for any politician who wants to take Scotland into the world.