SCOTTISH PERSPECTIVE
Media turns a blind eye to the fact that the governing party is still by far the most popular in Scotland writes Lesley Riddoch
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Nicola Sturgeon is set to close the SNP conference in Glasgow tomorrow – and much hinges on the quality of her speech.
It would be hard to do worse than Theresa May, whose coughing fit was excruciating to behold but helped disguise the total disconnect between her “One Nation” Conservatism and the evident and enduring support for austerity in the conference hall. So it may be the SNP leader’s speech will be measured instead against the perky confidence of Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson, whose easy progress round TV studios this weekend during a series of unchallenging interviews confirms she is the darling of the media as well as the Conservative Party.
Jeremy Corbyn’s emotional conference speech will also be in the minds of observers, even though many of his “radical” proposals have already been enacted north of the Border – axing tuition fees, mitigating the bedroom tax, ending the right-tobuy for council houses and the use of PFI for capital projects, and inviting a public sector bid for the next Scotrail franchise – or cannot yet be enacted because Holyrood lacks the relevant powers. But that won’t stop many unionist commentators from proclaiming (and indeed prejudging) that the SNP leader’s speech is a failure unless she names the date of the next independence referendum, reveals a cunning plan to force her way into Theresa May’s Brexit talks or finds a Magic Mcmoney Tree to combat the attainment gap and retention problems amongst the teaching, police and nursing professions.
Just as women must prove they are three times better than men, so an SNP leader and Scottish First Minister must demonstrate Superwoman-like powers to be taken seriously. In the current political climate, that’s hardly surprising.
But it also underestimates the SNP, whose success means the party now exists in many different and sometimes competing arenas.
The SNP is a government (in Scotland), opposition (at Westminster), party (in both) and a movement (in numbers but not in informal organisation or completely free-thinking demeanour). It is both the main party of Scottish government (seeking to curtail the power of local councils) and local government (seeking more cash and powers from Holyrood) and the main party representing activists who question the super-sized nature of our “local” democracy altogether.
Similarly, the SNP is the party whose members most closely identify with the predicament faced by the Catalans, but whose leadership is most acutely aware of possible reprisal by an angry Spanish government should a Catalan-supporting Scotland try to re-join the EU after independence.
All these different arenas, guises, roles and interests, all these different political traditions should be straining and tearing the SNP apart – propelling the party into the same squally waters of personal ego, complacency and territorialism that have all but sunk Scottish Labour.
To date they have not – and that is an incredible achievement. Indeed, as I write, the conference is engaged in a full and spirited debate about raising the minimum age of military recruitment to 18, led by unexpectedly passionate twentysomethings.
Of course there are big disagreements within the SNP. But unlike the other main UK parties, its members actually agree on the main objective of Scottish independence.
Unlike them though, the SNP has the problem of simply not being taken as seriously as other parties of the same size south of the Border.
Thus the SNP is the largest UK party backing continuing membership of the EU, yet that unique stance fails to win the SNP regular participation on network TV programmes. In Scotland, of course, the SNP is just one of many single-market supporting parties (including even Ruth Davidson’s Scottish Tories on a good day) but any attempt to describe that equally unique Scottish consensus on network TV current affairs programmes is shooshed away as somehow parochial and irrelevant.
No governing party is entitled to a free ride – but the SNP seems to attract more kneejerk criticism and ridicule with each passing year, as the media desperately searches for evidence of Peak SNP and Peak Sturgeon. There is no evidence that either is even vaguely imminent.
The SNP is in stride with Scotland’s growing opposition to Brexit – that fact may bore editors, but the latest polls suggest the percentage wanting to remain in the EU has increased since last summer’s European referendum, with 72 per cent of Scots pessimistic about the current state of Westminster-led Brexit negotiations and only 37 per cent of those sampled by Survation think there should never be another independence referendum, while 8 per cent don’t know and 55 per cent simply differ on their preferred timings for the second independence vote.
Instead, press coverage has focused on the fact that independence and the date of indyref2 are not on the SNP conference agenda – even though, like every other major political party, the SNP has chosen not to air an issue which needs careful thought, strategy and timing before being presented again to the electorate. As Nicola Sturgeon put it on the Andrew Marr Show: “Voters are scunnered with being forced to make big decisions – not with independence as a proposition.” Quite.
And even though the opinion polls show the SNP to be riding higher in the polls than it was after previous elections, while the Scottish Conservatives have been bumped back into third place by a self-destructing Scottish Labour party, the sceptics are out in force.
Perhaps what is emerging is the need for the SNP to try and separate the “day job” of government from the 24/7 job of promoting the cause of independence. Prominent SNP figures like John Swinney, Mike Russell and Alyn Smith have delighted (and slightly surprised) delegates by talking openly about the desirability of independence within debates as varied as education, tax, Europe, fishing and agriculture. But the case for independence needs a constant focus as well as an occasional highlight; a movement as well as a political party; a loose, inclusive and less regulated forum as well as a political party, which must perforce transform itself regularly into a self-aggrandising electoral machine.
None of this will be openly debated at SNP conference – but Nicola Sturgeon’s leaders’ speech may once again mention the independence movement.
And for many Yes supporters outwith the monolithic SNP, that in itself will be a minor triumph.