SMILES, CHEERS – AND AN ENORMOUS DOSE OF DELUSION
IT was supposed to be a big, blubbery group hug, the kind that emotionally spent football players pull themselves into after losing cup finals on penalties. Robbed, gutted, crushed – not to say knackered after giving it the full 110 per cent – the SNP delegates were meant to muster at the party conference in Perth, shake their heads at the injustice of it all and rake dejectedly over the embers of their failure.
And what a failure. Let us not forget the boy Salmond had a clear shot on goal after carving the Union’s defence wide open. It was, said pundits, possibly the best chance they were ever likely to have. He only went and ballooned it over the bar. Oh woe.
But there was worryingly little of the above as the SNP annual conference began yesterday, just eight weeks after a defeated and deflated Alex Salmond announced it was all over for him as party leader and First Minister.
Instead, visitors found themselves not intruding on private grief but rather too soberly attired at what appeared to be a victory party – for the losers. Had we wandered into the wrong team’s dressing room?
Nope. The uncomfortable truth was simply this – having lost the most important vote in their history, the SNP still appeared to count more reasons to be cheerful than any of the supposedly victorious parties.
As Mr Salmond himself joshed yesterday, hours after his deputy relieved him of his leadership: ‘They thought it was all over. It isn’t now.’ Warming to his theme, he added: ‘It must be infuriating for our unionist opponents to see us lose the referendum and then go on to prosper. They are totally disorientated. They cannot understand what on earth is going on.’
Then again, nowhere are collective misunderstandings indulged and perpetuated more than at party conferences – and the SNP continues to labour under a mountain of them. The delusional default setting of the typical delegate was illustrated in a straw poll by online news website BuzzFeed asking attendees to write down who or what they blamed for the defeat on September 18.
‘The BBC’ said SNP member Robert Nicol. ’The BBC, press and Westminster intervention,’ expanded another. ‘UK Media’ confirmed a third. The ‘ f ear- mongerers in Labour and the Conservatives,’ were Chris McDonald’s scapegoats, while Catriona Clarke complained that ‘the old let the young down’.
Not one opined that the SNP failed to make a convincing economic case for an independent Scotland, that Mr Salmond painted himself into a corner on currency or simply, that more people valued the Union than they imagined.
The whiff of delusion was clear, too, in the words of one early speaker, Julie Hepburn, who recalled, as a homecoming soldier might, her darkest hour – dawn, September 19 – when she had to wake her young daughter and tell her the referendum had been lost.
YES, friends, that’s when she herself lost it. Yes, sob, it was the pained expression on the tot’s innocent wee face. ‘I felt like every child was looking at me in disbelief, as if I had stolen their future.’ Really? I felt faintly nauseous.
Annabelle Ewing MSP was playing the infants-we-owe-it-to card too. ‘There are primary school children who want to know when are we going to hold the next referendum,’ she informed party members. That’s right, she had us believe, they were sucking on pencils pensively, then saying to teacher things l i ke: ‘Instead of spending all those billions on destructive nuclear weapons, wouldn’t it be a better idea to use the money, say, to build better schools and raise education standards? Hmm, Miss?’
Yes indeed, delegates, even our little ones are clued in on the issues, and it is all part of the ‘political reawakening’ of a nation which had been deep in slumber until the referendum sounded the alarm. Now all we needed was another referendum for the benefit of those who did not wake up quite quickly enough for the first one. Well, that or some fresh air.
Outside in the Perth Concert Hall lobby the merchandise stall for Yes paraphernalia was promoting the same brew of delusion and denial.
A Yes bumper sticker to broadcast your views on an issue settled sup- posedly ‘ for a generation’ two months ago? That’ll be £2. A T-shirt bearing a crude reproduction of Nicola Sturgeon’s signature? Yours for £15, Sir – a tenner more for the hooded sweatshirt version.
OR perhaps Sir would prefer the Scottish ’N’ Proud (SNP, geddit?) line of leisurewear because, of course, pride in our nation and supporting the Scottish National Party are one and the same, aren’t they?
But not all was bluff and bluster. Not with 60,000 new SNP members to add to the pre-referendum membership of just 26,000. Not with polls suggesting 46 per cent of Scots will vote SNP at the next Westminster election and 48 per cent backing the party at the next Holyrood poll. Not with crisis stalking each of the main opposition parties.
The SNP’s spike in numbers was a clear message, said MSP Bruce Crawford, that Labour ‘will never be forgiven for working hand in glove with the Tories’.
Christine Grahame MSP, meanwhile, pointed a bony finger at an imaginary pile of ballot papers before her and terrified the little ones with the revelation that Tory and Labour votes must sit side by side in it. Ye Gads! Say it isn’t so. The Labour Party and the Conservative Party agreeing on something, fighting for it, winning. There will be hell to pay.
Indeed, it’s happening right now. ‘The Labour Party in Scotland are already paying the price for standing shoulder to shoulder with the Tories,’ Alex Salmond assured the hall. He was probably right.
And many would agree with his claim that ‘for Scotland all has changed, and changed utterly.’
But the new Scottish political landscape is not so very different. It is still full of fairy stories and bad pantomime villains.