I couldn’t help but put my head in my hands and groan when I started to the see social media come alive with angry SNP members and groups demanding that Lisa Cameron immediately resign and trigger a by-election for jumping ship and defecting to the Tories, and by the time Humza Yousaf himself called on her to do “the honourable thing” I could almost hear the ‘Hypocrisy Bus’ reversing out of the garage.
In February 2023 the Scottish Government rejected a petition which would have made it a mandatory requirement for elected representatives to stand down in the event they no longer represented the party ticket they were elected on. Not one SNP MSP supported this, so we have to ask, if this is not good enough for Scotland’s parliament, why should we demand it of the Westminster one? Had the SNP supported such a move then I’d be at the head of the line demanding she resign, but they didn’t, and as such they will just have to suck it up and deal with the fallout.
The current bin-fire which engulfs the SNP is one of the most disheartening events we, as a broad church independence movement could bear witness to. The SNP, as the de-facto head of the Yes camp very nearly took us to victory in 2014. So to see this, the latest in a long line of self-inflicted disasters, does none of us any good. At every point in recent years where the SNP have had the chance to take the right path, they have gone up cul-de-sacs and taken wrong turns until they have become completely lost, to themselves and to the voters. They have suffered so many injuries that they now remind me of “The Black Knight” in Monty Python, and I can only imagine that at the next Westminster election their campaign slogan will along the lines of “we’ll bite your legs off”.
The party membership must take their fair share of the blame, but many appear to have adopted the same self-deluding attitude as the party leadership, having lost the ability to “see themselves as ithers see us”. Unless there is a serious change within the SNP in the immediate future then I am no doubt that the SNP will lose many seats at Westminster next year, and while that may be a personal disaster for the party, it will be a bitter blow to the wider Yes movement.
In 2014 there was one party with independence as it’s raison d’etre. Now there are at least another two, while others are independence supporting, such as the Greens and the Scottish Socialists. After the Rutherglen by-election, Labour made the claim that the SNP voters were deserting them to go to Labour. Committed independence supporters may be leaving the SNP, but there is no evidence they are going to Labour, indeed all evidence points to them moving to other independence parties, and very few go full on Lisa Cameron and jump to a British Nationalist extremist party.
I fear that without a change in leadership and direction from the SNP, in the short term, the campaign for Scottish independence will come to a halt. Should Labour win the next UK general election, there may from some quarters be a sigh of relief that the Tories are gone. All that will have been achieved in such a case is a brief respite in which we can await their return to government, but what will really change in the interim anyway? Labour are moving so far to the right to ape the Tories, that we may as well not bother in the first place. The only long term solution for Scotland is independence from the basket case UK. The SNP cannot be allowed to put that at risk. To any SNP member who will be attending your conference, the Yes movement reminds you: “Carpe Diem”. Make your voices heard and stop the rot now. Otherwise we all suffer for your actions.
(Letter to The National, 13/10/23)
An Independent Scotsman 