Heads we win tails you lose - SNP talks defacto bollocks

If the they win most seats on July 4th it'll be a mandate for independence, but so, er, will a minority of seats

Swinney wins when he loses

It is normal for politicians to talk rubbish during elections.  It’s not entirely their fault. They live in fear of making “gaffes” like Theresa May’s “death tax” in 2017. Their political advisers tell them to stop thinking and simply repeat a key phrase, long enough for them to lodge like a limpet in the brains of voters. Hence: Get Brexit Done, Make America Great Again, It’s Scotland’s Oil, Time for a Change.

Do not depart from the script they are told. Don’t make jokes, like Boris, and don’t try actually to answer the questions put by BBC interviewers. Just steamroller over them, like Rachel Reeves did with Nick Robinson on the Today programme.

Modern politicians are allowed to say so little that they try to say nothing at all. This often makes them sound robotic and rather stupid. Like Rishi Sunak going on and on about that largely discredited claim that voters will pay £2,000 more in tax under Labour.  That estimate is over five years and has been disowned by senior civil servants who, admittedly, do not seem overly sympathetic to the Conservative cause. Actually, it is wrong for another reason.  Every dog in the street knows that Labour will have to increase taxes by a great deal more than £400 per head per year just to remain solvent.

However, while far-fetched promises are the norm in election campaigns, there is still no excuse for talking what we in the commentary community call “absolute bollox”.  You can say things which no one really believes, like the Tory party’s  promise to cut immigration, but it is wise to avoid saying things that leave even your most ardent supporters hopelessly confused. I refer of course to John Swinney’s claim at the SNP manifesto launch that a majority of SNP seats would constitute a mandate  to commence “immediate negotiations with Westminster” over independence. No one believes this for a moment, even in the SNP.   

Since both Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer, have ruled out any such negotiations the SNP would be left negotiating with an empty chair.  One imagines John Swinney harrumphing and drumming his fingers on the Cabinet Office table before leaving to catch the overnight sleeper back to Scotland. Since the SNP does not support secession, they would have to accept this humiliating rebuff with whatever good grace they could muster.

They can’t take it to the Supreme Court, or indeed to any court, because the judges have already ruled that the Scottish Parliament lacks the powers to hold even an advisory referendum on independence. Without a Section 35 Order from Westminster giving Holyrood the temporary power to hold a ballot the Scottish Government is whistling in the wind.

This whole defacto referendum idea was cooked up by SNP politicians in the late 2010s who were distraught at Nicola Sturgeon’s passivity in the face of Westminster intransigence. All those elections she’d won with stomping majorities had failed to “move the dial”on independence. The idea was to up the pressure on the UK government to allow another referendum.

I remember hearing about it in advance from eager SNP politicians, some of whom thought that a defacto referendum could even be a kind of soft UDI - a unilateral declaration of Independence - after which the Scottish government could start or behave AS IF  independence had been achieved, morally if not constitutionally .

More realistically, some hoped that an incoming UK Labour leader might recognise the result as part of negotiations on a possible coalition in Westminster.  The SNP, after all, was the third largest party in the House of Commons. Hadn’t the former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, said he was “strongly in support of people having their voice, therefore an independence referendum is something that I believe will happen probably within a few years.” Game on.

Since the SNP was the third largest party in Westminster there seemed a real possibility of a deal. And maybe there was. But it was pretty far fetched to think that any future prime minister, Labour or Tory, would ever risk a referendum following Brexit and the narrow result in 2014. Not unless they had to, at any rate. Sir Keir Starmer never voiced any interest in allowing a referendum before he became leader.

But that was not the only problem with the SNP manifesto which really is a classic of its kind. It asserts that people can be told,  after they have voted, what they voted for. This is the height of arrogance.

Many voters will be voting SNP because they hate Brexit and support the policy of returning to the European Union. Others might be so annoyed at Labour and the Tories refusing to abolish the two child benefit cap that they decide to support the nationalists on that issue alone. The SNP is also the only major party that backs  unilateral nuclear disarmament, now Labour has abandoned.  Many Scottish CND supporters, and there are more of them than you’d think, could vote SNP for that reason even if they would vote No in any future independence referendum. You cannot infer from how a person votes exactly what they voted for.

In the event, Sturgeon’s original defecto idea was discarded by her successor, Humza Yousaf, last year on the not unreasonable grounds that the SNP has never won over 50% of the vote in any parliamentary election - not even in 2015 when they won all but three of Scotland’s 59 seats.  Realising that this was a loser, Yousaf in his wisdom, proposed an alternative: that a majority of seats, not votes, in an election could be taken as a mandate to commence negotiations with Westminster on how to put “into democratic effect” the settled will of the Scottish people (or fifty percent of them).  This revised version somehow found its way into the SNP manifesto this week, which meant John Swinney had to defend it.

But what would happen if the SNP failed to win a majority of seats on July 4th?  Would that mean the defacto referendum, on whatever franchise, had been lost?  Would the nationalists then accept defeat? Since John Swinney could not possibly admit this, he was left arguing that the SNP would win even if it loses. He fell back on insisting that, because the SNP won the 2021 Scottish parliament election, the mandate stood whatever the result. It was heads we win tails you lose.

The latest YouGov poll shows that the SNP is still 4% behind Labour in Scotland, even though the margin has declined. The SNP is in line to lose up to 20 seats. They could easily come second, in which case, Labour might suddenly realise that a defacto referendum was a great idea all along. Indeed, if the polls are right, expect Keir Starmer to tell the SNP after polling day: Hey, you’ve had your referendum and you lost.