Pro-Indy rivals are fighting like ferrets in a sack
THIS from the SNP’s longest-serving MP last week: ‘Hearing all sorts of tensions in Alba. They are a weird “coalition” of social Conservatives, anti EUers, traditional leftists, libertarians, even Q-Anon-ists.
‘Been told it can’t hold. The Inevitable Judean Front schisms are already in the post. Just a matter of when.’
So spoke Pete Wishart, laying into those who have joined Alex Salmond’s new party – seemingly oblivious that the same ‘weird coalition’ he mocked were mostly SNP members just days before.
For a party which declared on the launch of Alba that it was ‘perhaps the most predictable development in Scottish politics for quite some time’, the SNP’s erratic responses to it have belied any sense of that prediction.
Watching his first MP defect, SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford called departing exJustice Minister Kenny MacAskill ‘an increasing embarrassment’ and declared that ‘his departure is somewhat of a relief’. When MP number two, Neale Hanvey, followed, the silence from SNP HQ was deafening.
Since then, we’ve seen Nicola Sturgeon continually put on the spot about whether she would work with her former boss, mentor and close friend of more than 30 years.
She used a newspaper interview to say Salmond would have to apologise to the women who brought sexual harassment complaints against him first, before adding that he was standing only because ‘he loves the limelight and can’t bear not to be on the stage’.
On the radio, her position changed to saying that a‘ super majority’ of independence supporting MSPs which didn’t represent the views of the country would be illegitimate.
‘Anybody who tries to suggest there’s a shortcut… or that we can somehow game or trick our way to independence, frankly, is misleading people,’ she said.
Sturgeon added a strange attack on his enjoyment of a flutter, calling him a ‘gambler’ who ‘backs the horses on an almost daily basis’. I almost choked on my tea. As part of the Better Together campaign in 2014, I tried to show the reckless gamble that Salmond was asking the country to take, and his most furious defender was Sturgeon.
She demanded people take a leap of faith with him and said he was a safe pair of hands in whom to entrust Scotland’s future.
BY Friday, the First Minister had changed tack again, telling the television news she was ‘not planning to work with Alex Salmond’ and ‘won’t be seeking to work with Alex Salmond’. Neither of which, in politician speak, is a flat-out denial.
‘Not planning’ something is usually code for: ‘Look, I don’t want to, but if I’m pushed into a corner I am leaving myself enough wriggle room should I feel I have to.’
The SNP ranks rejoiced upon the first poll indicating whether such an unwished for union would be required or not.
With Alba recording just 3 per cent in a Survation survey, such a result in May would likely offer up no MSPs to Holyrood from Salmond’s new party.
However, a word of warning. Polls of this type have a 3 per cent margin for error meaning, in theory, that the actual level of support could be up to 3 per cent higher or lower.
The difference in the Scottish voting system between a list party recording 3 per cent and 6 per cent across the country is about eight seats – a Holyrood grouping already bigger than either the Greens or Liberal Democrats and easily enough to hold the balance of power.
Personally, I think Salmond standing again is a grotesque spectacle which serves to show how far his severe character flaws have diminished him, while the whole affair also diminishes Scottish politics. The faultline it has exposed in the SNP shows Sturgeon’s claim that she leads ‘the most united of all the parties’ is mere hot air.
The SNP clearly has no idea how to deal with being outflanked on independence by Salmond and the party’s messaging careers from talking tough, to insult to light dismissal and back again.
But one thing all pro-Union voters should take heart from is that with this rabble fighting like ferrets in a sack, they are beatable. A nationalist majority is hanging by a thread. Time to go to work.