ABERDEEN, Scotland — By all rights, they should be dead and buried.
After 18 years in power, Scotland’s pro-independence Scottish National Party, which wants to break up the United Kingdom, is on course to win again at next year’s Scottish parliament election.
Their annual conference in Aberdeen hammered home a fresh strategy of making the election all about the SNP’s ultimate push for Scottish independence. While that goal seems more distant than ever, SNP leader John Swinney hopes that, of all people, arch-Brexiteer Nigel Farage may be the game-changer his cause needs.
“I believe it will be revulsion at Westminster’s race to the right that will change Scotland’s status again,” Swinney told the SNP faithful as he closed the party’s conference Monday. “The race to the right at Westminster is one reason why independence is so urgent and necessary.”
Though he didn’t mention the poll-topping Reform UK leader by name, the implication was clear.
Since losing 2014’s referendum on Scottish independence, the SNP has claimed that successive victories in the 2016 and 2021 Holyrood elections counted as a mandate for a new referendum on independence. These claims were rejected by multiple U.K. governments, quoting the SNP’s own words on 2014 being a “once in a generation” poll. In London, Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer has made clear he won’t budge on granting a new referendum, no matter the election result.
“In a lot of ways it feels like it’s effectively the same strategy [former First Minister] Nicola Sturgeon kept pushing to no avail with some slight tweaks,” one well-connected former SNP adviser, granted anonymity like others in this article, told POLITICO.
“And I don’t know if John Swinney is really the man to get us over the line to a majority, and to then convince the U.K. government to grant a referendum, when she couldn’t,” they added.
As a veteran of the SNP who was effectively strong-armed back into frontline politics while the party was in crisis, Swinney has stabilized the SNP and is an enormously popular figure among the SNP faithful — despite doubts about whether he is truly the kind of political giant who can deliver something as monumental as independence. Others think the gruff man from Blairgowrie could be just the ticket.
“John Swinney will be on Scottish banknotes one day. There will be statues of him in Edinburgh, the capital of an independent Scotland,” a candidate at next year’s election said.
Date with a mandate
Swinney’s “tweak” to the independence push is a new target.
SNP members overwhelmingly backed his new strategy at the conference on Saturday. Under the plan, Swinney has declared that if his party wins an outright majority in May, it would be a fresh mandate for a second referendum that the U.K. government in Westminster cannot ignore.
They have precedent on their side: Britain’s then-Prime Minister David Cameron granted the first referendum in response to the SNP’s 2011 majority win.
But, unsurprisingly, the U.K. government doesn’t plan to make it that easy.
SNP strategists say Swinney’s plan is a way of galvanizing support for the SNP, which sees its own polling outstripped by support for independence, at around the 50-50 mark. It’s a strategy fraught with issues.
In addition to the practical problem of there being no sign of Labour shifting on its opposition to a referendum, another issue is the relatively high bar the SNP has set for itself .
Only once has an outright majority for one party been achieved in the Scottish parliament’s nearly 30 years of existence. Opinion polling currently points to an SNP win — thanks to the challenging Scottish Labour Party’s struggles and a split Unionist opposition — but not to a majority.
“John Swinney will think he has had a good conference. He’s put his stamp on the party and won support for his preferred strategy,” Fergus Mutch, a former adviser to Alex Salmond, who won the 2011 majority for the SNP, said.
“But the problem is, what if he falls short? If there’s not a majority secured next May, would the party members, MSPs etc think the SNP would just go quiet on independence for five years? That’s not going to fly.”
Even if the party does win a majority — which Swinney’s strategists are quietly optimistic is a possibility, if not a probability — there is still the practical problem of actually delivering to its members the promised land of independence.
“[Swinney] is putting a lot of store in terms of political precedent, and that’s fine, but we’re dealing in a constitutional environment where the only clear bit of guidance on a referendum has come from the Supreme Court, which ruled that this is ultimately down to Westminster,” Mutch added. “The SNP should be careful about overplaying their hand.”
Speaking on Saturday, Swinney said that “nobody knows the tactics I’m going to deploy if we get 65 seats … so keep watching.” His mysterious statement — suspected to involve more court action — is yet to convince everyone.
“The ball should really be in Labour’s court and the pressure on them to respect our mandate if we get it. But in all honesty, there’s nothing we can actually do,” one SNP official added.
Swinney versus Farage
Why might SNP strategists think that Nigel Farage could be an asset to the independence cause?
Despite an uptick in his popularity in Scotland, the Reform UK leader is still considerably less popular north of the border than he is in England and Wales. And the looming prospect of a Farage-led government in Westminster — he leads in the polls — makes the SNP wonder if its moment may finally come.
“You’re forgetting about Farage,” one senior SNP figure said, when asked why this latest push for independence could be different. “His values are toxic to Scottish people.”
“This could be the best time to push for this, with the Unionist vote so divided and the threat of Farage in No. 10 giving people an extra incentive to want indy now,” a second candidate at next year’s election said. “It might be now or never.”
The counterpoint to all this is that previous “game-changers” in the independence debate — notably Britain’s exit from the EU despite Scots voting against it and the election of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister — failed to move the dial.
But in the absence of anything else that could shift support for independence and make Westminster’s intransigence on a referendum unsustainable, the party clings to the hope of a new bogeyman.
“I’d like to see us spend more time building the case for independence until it’s unassailably popular, rather than banging the referendum drum again,” a second SNP official said.
“But I accept that’s not a popular position.”
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