STURGEON’S BROKEN RECORD
Her party is split over the route to a new referendum. Her government is lurching from crisis to crisis. And her mentor is facing trial on a string of serious charges. As the SNP leader writes another conference speech in which she’ll promise what she can’t deliver, it’s not only her opponents who are questioning her future...
NICOLA Sturgeon is no Bill Clinton but she could learn a lot from him. The undisputed king of retail politics earned the sobriquet ‘the Explainer in Chief’ for his oratorical style, in particular his knack for making different audiences hear what they want in the same speech.
Clinton could sprinkle his brand of magic on cautiously worded lines so that liberals took away a bold, progressive message, centrists a reassuring nod of moderation and opponents the discomfiting sight of a President in touch with the people and at the top of his game.
Sturgeon could use a little magic as she heads to her party’s autumn conference in Aberdeen, almost five years since she assumed the leadership and still with no second referendum to show for it. She will have to summon something like Clinton’s polysemic patter if she is to sell the same old speech to an increasingly impatient grassroots.
The hard Scexiteers will want to hear the champion of the referendum they long for. The gradualists will expect the prudent strategist biding her time in the knowledge that a second referendum, arrived at too soon, could deliver the same result as last time.
Listening just as attentively will be Sturgeon’s opponents: is the SNP leader ready to follow through with her endless sabre-rattling or will she keep stringing along her grassroots – and the country – with the continuing threat of Scexit?
At the risk of spoiling the ending, the First Minister’s speech will not mark a radical departure from all the other conference speeches she has delivered.
She will promise a rerun referendum is imminent. Those in the hall who want to hear that will cheer, while those who want a more softly-softly approach will sigh in relief that their figurehead continues to reject the urgings of those who would have her behave precipitously.
Her speech will most likely rework previous addresses to the party faithful on Scexit. She will likely promise that it is coming, but is being held up by unavoidable circumstances.
In the past, reasons for applying the handbrake have included the 2015 election, the 2016 election, the EU referendum and the ‘fog of Brexit’. Those mists can hardly be said to have lifted of late and so they can be expected to provide the excuse this time too.
THIS is textbook political jujitsu, turning your own failure into something for which your opponents take the blame, but it is a basic move and sooner or later its effectiveness on even the most loyal of partisans will fade.
Sturgeon’s identification of obstacles to a second referendum is not wrong but it is too passive for her more impatient foot soldiers. They expect their leader to make the weather, not sit tight till it passes.
Reports in the Nationalist press suggest MP Angus MacNeil and senior councillor Chris McEleny will try to crowbar a debate about a Scexit ‘Plan B’ onto the conference agenda.
‘Plan B’ is an insurance policy for when the UK Parliament denies a Section 30 order and would see the SNP assert that winning a majority of Scottish seats in the next general election was grounds alone for taking Scotland out of the UK. Others suggest the Nationalist regime at Holyrood could hold its own wildcat referendum.
Sturgeon has already slapped down the rebels, saying: ‘If there was an easy or shortcut route, I would have taken it by now.’ Party moderates will have been glad to hear this riposte. They understand that more time is needed to rethink Scexit policy in light of Brexit, on everything from pensions and trade to defence.
Rushing into Scexit would rob Sturgeon of the opportunity to fix these flaws before they come under public scrutiny in a no-holds-barred referendum campaign. Better to deny yourself the prize for a few years than risk losing it all over again.
Striking a balance between these two persuasions is important for party cohesion and to maintain the SNP as the strongest, broadest force in Scottish politics, an electoral alliance that subdues its opponents with relative ease precisely because it claims support from the widest possible segment of the electorate.
The political reality, though, is that the hard Scexiteers shout the loudest and so it is them the leadership is most concerned with pandering to.
A senior SNP source compares the dynamic to the ageold struggle between gradualists and fundamentalists that has been waged in the party for decades.
This insider, who reflects gradualist exasperation with indulgence of the excitable and the intemperate within party ranks, says: ‘How many times are we going to announce and reannounce that independence is just around the corner before even The National starts to ask difficult questions? We try to capture the energy of the All Under One Banner marchers but know it doesn’t bring us a single new vote. It’s about the fundies versus the gradualists again and right now we’re telling the zoomers what they want to hear. So we get lots of flags, talk about how it’s coming (but just not yet), then, “Oh look, a squirrel!”.’
POINTING out that Boris Johnson is a nasty piece of work is always reliable because everyone agrees with that.’ However, if the SNP wants to endure as the unbeatable electoral behemoth it has become, it has no choice but to keep the ‘zoomers’ on board.
The threat of a rival Nationalist party, specifically targeting the fundamentalist core vote, has already been touted by Wings over Scotland.
Wings, a populist-Nationalist blog, may be abrasive and outrageous in its rhetoric but it commands at least as much loyalty from the grassroots as Sturgeon herself.
The idea of a breakaway party would once have sounded fanciful but, asked to choose between sluggish Sturgeonism and a chance at prodding the
constitutional debate forward, the latter may prove too tempting an opportunity for rank-and-file Nationalists to pass up. Plus, the Brexit Party has shown that it is possible to establish a party from scratch and make an electoral impact swiftly by appealing to an acutely held sense of betrayal and abandonment.
Hard Scexiteers may once have clambered over one another to get a selfie with Sturgeon but they do not live and die with her leadership. The end of the Union, not the political fortunes of the SturgeonMurrell household, is what matters.
These are the same Nationalists who dare to think something once adulterous: that Nicola Sturgeon may not be the figurehead who leads them to sovereignty.
Losing Alex Salmond’s majority was to be expected, given how exceptional the 2011 result was. Even costing the party more than a third of its MPs in 2017 will be overlooked if, as the polls forecast, she regains most of them in a snap general election.
What the true believers cannot forgive is her failure to turn rhetoric into the second referendum they desperately want. Every independence drive Sturgeon has announced has stalled soon thereafter. This has been ideal for her – if nothing else, she knows how to read polls and they are not where she needs them to be yet – but each delay only frustrates a demanding base.
Nor are they encouraged by her personal favourability ratings, which sketch a First Minister who sharply divides opinion out in the country. Right now, there is no obvious alternative to Sturgeon but the day will come for her, as it comes for every party leader, when members decide she is more of an electoral liability than an asset.
The Aberdeen conference will offer a glimpse into the possible futures the SNP might take. Sturgeon, who addresses delegates on Tuesday, may not even be the star of the show this year. The flavour of the month, and perhaps considerably longer than that, is Joanna Cherry, the QC and MP who led the successful legal challenge against Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament. In doing so, she convinced the Supreme Court that the Prime Minister’s course of action had been unlawful, reopening the Commons and exposing the Tories to the charge of dragging the Queen into a constitutionally underhand enterprise.
The historical import of the ruling has seized the legal establishment but its impact on Cherry is more plainly political. She will arrive in Aberdeen the conquering hero who humbled the UK Government in a way SNP members have longed to see Sturgeon do. It’s Cherry they will queue for selfies with now.
Speculation about her future and that of the SNP leadership has simmered up in recent months. Her objections to parliamentary candidate selection procedures, dissent from the Sturgeon line on gender self-identification and support for Alex Salmond have all served to make Cherry an outsider from the new establishment running the SNP.
Cherry also plays well with the grassroots because she reflects their sense of urgency in securing a fresh plebiscite on Scexit. This has made her a threat in the eyes of gradualists but leadership talk seems premature at this juncture. Nicola Sturgeon’s standing has waned but the rebels are not at the palace gates just yet.
OPPONENTS chirp privately – and sometimes not so privately – that the impending trial of Alex Salmond will bring the Nationalist house of cards tumbling down.
Salmond is expected to appear in court in the New Year to answer a series of charges related to alleged conduct while he was First Minister, the potential ramifications of which loom large. Last week, Jackson Carlaw used an interview in this newspaper to warn his MSPs against speaking in these terms, calling it ‘dangerous’ and ‘cynical’, but Tories (indeed, opposition MSPs) are far from alone in making these calculations.
There is a consensus in the Holyrood bar and tea room, the two truly cross-party spaces in the Scottish parliament, that the outcome of the proceedings, whatever that may be, could do lasting political damage to the current First Minister and her party.
If this sounds cold and callous given the nature of the allegations, not to mention Salmond’s denial of all charges against him, it should serve as a reminder that politics is debt-speculating without the scruples. Nevertheless, the trial is an event being factored in across the parties.
The Nationalist source says: ‘Everything hinges on the Salmond verdict; that’s going to cause earthquakes whichever way it goes. Cherry appeals to the zoomers but could end up being the SNP’s Corbyn moment. The membership may turn out to want her but what the members want is not necessarily electable.
‘Anyway, that’s down the road. The point to bear in mind for now is that all this speculation is going on because Sturgeon is no longer powerful enough to stop it, even though she’s the only one that can lead and win a referendum.’
That latter point is perhaps most important of all. Sturgeon stands a diminished figure but no one has the standing yet to challenge her.
Odd as it sounds, this situation might be to her advantage, for it compels members to set aside their personal feelings about the leader and evaluate her purely in terms of electoral prowess.
You may think she is a hectoring, finger-wagging, nanny-knows-best bossy boots; you may prefer your party leader and First Minister to focus on schools and hospitals at home rather than jetting around the world pretending to be an international stateswoman.
But, if you are a supporter of Scotland leaving the United Kingdom, all that matters is whether Sturgeon is better placed than any feasible alternative to achieve that goal.
As long as she can project an air of confidence on Scexit and the possibilities for a second referendum soon, she will continue to enjoy the confidence of SNP members.
HER conference speech will, of course, be aimed at other audiences, too. It will go hard on opposition to Brexit, aware of the 62 per cent of Scots who voted to Remain, and particularly to those who would otherwise vote Labour or Tory but find themselves at odds with their party’s stance.
Her remarks will also try to spin achievements out of a limp domestic record, though this will prove more of a feat.
There is a very real danger that, with Scottish Government failure breaking through on key policy areas such as the car parking tax and hospital waiting times, the Nationalists’ long (and undeserved) reputation for steady, competent government could be undermined beyond repair.
She will have to convince the public that they can still trust her to get things done.
But it is to her grassroots that the emotional force of the speech will be directed.
She will try to summon the Clintonian tactic of delivering words painstakingly chosen to telegraph enthusiasm for a Scexit referendum to one segment of her audience and quiet determination to wait and get the timing right to another.
In years gone by she has pulled off this trick with ease but there are diminishing returns to this act. This old record, scratched from overplay, threatens to break any time now.
When the magic does wear off, the grassroots will be left without a second referendum and with a leader who has consistently failed to deliver one. They once worshipped her but the cause will always be their true religion.
At that point, which may come sooner than she thinks, Sturgeon’s political future will be an open question and those who hope to be the answer will begin circling.
When that happens, she will have to explain herself to a membership that may have had enough of her explanations by then.