I read Martin Hannan’s letter describing his reasons for leaving the SNP and thought that I would register my thanks to him in the face of the bitter and childish criticism that he received from some quarters on social media which unfortunately bore out his comments that the SNP was more and more becoming a cult. His reasons for resigning struck a chord with me on a personal level. I joined the SNP in the aftermath of the 2014 referendum, and quickly saw practices and attitudes which were entirely unacceptable, and which as far as I could see went all the way from a rotten branch right up the tree to SNP headquarters. What I saw at a local level has been replicated and magnified many times at national level, and for those who tried to pretend that our branch was an exception, only now are they seeing that it was just a part of a bigger, cancerous whole. I left the SNP as quickly as I joined and I believe, like Martin now does, that you cannot stay in and fix this from the inside, for that means getting down in the sewer with your opponents and joining them, and who with any modicum of self-respect wants to do that?As an activist with more than one independence group, Martin has been a great friend to us in our efforts to grow and promote our activities. You only have to read his articles to see that he lives and breathes independence; his credentials as a supporter of independence cannot be called into question. That’s why people across the independence movement and especially within the SNP should be sitting up and taking notice. They cannot afford to lose good people like that – yet they are, hand over fist. Membership numbers have fallen drastically recently, and those who claimed credit for the 2014 rise seem unwilling to accept responsibility for the 2021 crash. Many of those members were once folk who would go out and chap doors for nothing more that the thought that they were helping achieve something better, and were let go with nothing but a thank you email from Peter Murrell, not the heartfelt, unscripted video which a select few received from Nicola Sturgeon. Some of the most dedicated supporters are becoming demoralised, and how do you motivate people to chap doors when the best they can offer is to tell you to keep your eyes on the prize and hold your nose while you vote for the SNP? In 2014 we were offered “hope over fear”. Now we are being offered Westminster corruption with a tartan paint job. As an independence supporter and activist, I cannot take that message onto the streets. I know that we are far beyond the point where the internal differences of the SNP can be resolved over a handshake. We can now only sit back and wait to see what we can salvage from the wreckage, before regrouping to fight again. In Scotland some things never change.
An Independent Scotsman 