Conference time and indyref2
AT the SNP conference, Nicola Sturgeon let down her supporters by failing to deliver the one thing they want: a date for indyref2.
Of course, SNP Commons leader Ian Blackford leaked weeks back that, despite earlier promises, an indyref2 date wouldn’t be set.
Sturgeon knows Downing Street won’t permit another independence referendum before 2023 at the very earliest. SNP politicians such as Angus MacNeil, Joanna Cherry and Mike Russell talk up achieving independence without Westminster’s agreement for a referendum, but the SNP leader is too astute to fall into that trap. She’d end up thwarted.
She pins her hopes on a General Election resulting in a minority Labour administration – with the SNP providing support in exchange for indyref2. But she knows that’s a long shot.
So all she can do is to carry on as usual until the Holyrood election, using Holyrood as a platform to campaign for independence – and cross her fingers for a nationalist majority in 2021.
Martin Redfern Edinburgh
■ People who are agitating for Nicola Sturgeon to name the date for indyref2 must be either deaf or unable to interpret the current political scenario. Time and again we are told it is impossible or at least unwise to pre-empt the outcome of the Brexit negotiations. What is so hard to understand?
Perhaps there is a fifth column of anti-independence activists out to ensure another defeat by going to the country too soon only to lose a second – and perhaps final – time?
No-one could want independence more than Sturgeon or those of us preparing for when the time is right. Of course we wish it could be announced tomorrow but we are mature enough to wait.
Meanwhile, Yes groups all over Scotland are organised for local debate and discussion. This is the way to encourage a successful – and well-informed – outcome and not by constant negative criticism ... is The Herald on Sunday one of the irritants?
Janet Cunningham Stirling
■ Many will be thankful the party conference season is over. Now we can get back to the nitty-gritty.
That entails the divisive politics of the one-issue-obsessed and paranoid SNP; Labour’s neverending factional battles and backstabbing over ideology; the Tories continuing to be a one-woman band; the LibDems being stuck on a fence. Plus ca change. Alexander McKay Edinburgh