The SNP has Abandoned the Wheel
The SNP is often admired by other parties by its impressive unity. People don’t rock the boat, they don’t lead voting rebellions and they don’t criticise the party leadership. They are a united front against Unionism and Westminster in a way that no other party can pull off. It’s an impressive feat of party discipline - but it has its drawbacks.
Creating this kind of unity in a party that is necessarily made up of the entire economic and social spectrum of politics requires some impressive feats of PR and policy making. At no point can the party alienate a large part of its own members or it will face the potential of a disastrous split. It can’t push too hard for socialist and genuinely anti-austerity policy or it will alienate its capitalist backers. It can’t be too pro-business or there will be rebellion in its largely ex-Labour voter base. Pushing too hard for social liberal causes will anger the grey vote and wedding too closely to nationalism and social conservatism would drive off the energetic youth.
For all the tales of woe of a Labour party split down the middle they have nothing compared to the potential for division in the SNP. It is a party united by one thing alone — independence.
The SNP leadership and MPs at Westminster have very deliberately been keeping the focus on them to maintain this unity. Brexit is the focus. Tory austerity is the focus. Showing Labour how to act like an opposition is the focus. Barnstorming speeches in the House of Commons link well with a party leader who has a firm grip on social media and staying on-message in Scotland. Unity has been achieved by keeping their supporters eyes on the prize — and not letting them drift to less dramatic concerns at Holyrood.
So focused on their mission for independence, so determined not to do anything that might divide their ranks against anything but a single-minded fixation on #indyref2, the SNP has decided to do nothing at all. It is a party of government that has simply strapped ropes to the steering wheel and gone off to shout at icebergs rather than risk division on which way to turn the ship.
Scotland presently has about as much leadership as Belgium did when it didn’t even have a government in office. It’s walking on, getting on with life, and taking the occasional stumble without anyone actually paying attention to see if it will wander into a lamp post. The education system is sliding down the rankings, the NHS is in crisis and unemployment is rising. These are all areas the SNP has under its control but they are running the gambit of inaction in exchange for unity in the independence movement.
The 2017 budget was an illuminating demonstration of a party that is absolutely fixated on doing nothing. Despite the other parties being more than willing to point this out and budget negotiations dragging on as they tried to get their government to do something, anything, nothing really changed. Despite shouting at Westminster about the evils of austerity there seems no desire at Holyrood to do anything but pass on the cuts. Despite wielding more power at Holyrood than any government has done in centuries the SNP demonstrated what can only be described as a deliberate lack of ambition or ideas. Small tweaks to investment, small tweaks to tax. It was telling that no one could actually agree as to whether local government was getting a boost or a cut.
They couldn’t risk actual change. Actual change might mean doing something some of their supporters may not agree with. It means risking unity. Risking unity means risking independence. But how long can the SNP continue to watch Scotland meander across the ice fields before its supporters actually notice the country has no direction?
The economic case for independence is getting worse, not better. Even excluding the weight of Brexit bearing down on Britain as a whole the black hole of Scottish finances gets wider with every year. Economists warn it is due to run a budget deficit of nearly 10% (three times higher than the UK as a whole) and will require as much as £19bn in Greek-style cuts following independence. Even if this is an overestimate the future does not look bright for a Scottish economy stagnating under SNP leadership.
The slow motion collapse of the north sea oil industry has torn a hole in the bottom of Scottish GDP, one the SNP seem in no rush to try and fix. There are opportunities to do so. The country sits on one of the largest sources of renewable energy in the world, a huge potential for employment of an industrial workforce, research and exports. It has a swiftly emerging digital economy, one hamstrung by SNP underinvestment in vocational education and college funding stripped to the bone with limited retraining opportunities to fill vacancies already in the thousands. But you wouldn’t have heard any of this at an SNP budget speech. Despite some steps in the right direction “shallow” SNP environmentalism isn’t enough to transform Scottish industry by the time of SNP activist demands for #indyref2 in 2018. A declining education system and serial underinvestment in retraining leaves the country with a skills shortage that undermines any chance for new emerging industries. The SNP seems to lack any real ambition or ideas as to how to actually help a Scotland with no one at the wheel. This is not to say an independent Scotland could not ever be financially viable. Scotland has a huge amount of potential and exclusive resources waiting to be tapped— but the SNP seem under no rush to ensure it is under their rule. These are things that need to be worked out before independence, not during a financial crisis and collapsing government revenue after it has been achieved.
This all raises a very important problem. The SNP want independence and they’re doing pretty well keeping that dream alive. Does anyone know what they would do with an independent Scotland? So far, it seems, they don’t want anyone to ask that question.
