The turmoil engulfing the SNP won’t derail the push for Scottish independence, according to key voices from the wider Yes movement, but they warn the party leadership it cannot take a “business as usual” approach. The warning comes before the party’s long-awaited convention on Saturday where SNP members will come together in Dundee to debate independence strategy, including the option of treating the next general election as a de facto referendum, a plan favoured by a majority of Yes group organisers and now being reconsidered by the party leadership. It will be the first substantial SNP gathering since Humza Yousaf replaced Nicola Sturgeon as leader and the party was rocked by the arrests of senior figures, including Sturgeon herself, as part of Police Scotland’s investigation into party finances. During his leadership campaign, Yousaf made clear his own doubts about the de facto strategy, announced by Sturgeon after the supreme court ruled Holyrood could not hold a second vote without Westminster’s consent last October, and about which many SNP MPs also have grave reservations. He also signalled a shift in focus away from legal process towards building popular support to a consistent majority. Polling shows Scotland is split on the question. The convention has already attracted criticism because it is not a decision-making event: members will have to wait to vote on strategy at their annual conference in October.
Mike Small, who edits Bella Caledonia, the online magazine that became a debate hub for Yes supporters during the last referendum campaign, believes the movement is in “completely new territory” with the SNP engulfed in internal strife. “Since 2014 the SNP has been seen as the vanguard of the movement but now that’s changed.” Small argues that recent polling showing a slump in support for the SNP while that for independence remains steady “suggests voters have decoupled the competence of the party from the principle of whether they want to run their own country”. With the SNP, previously the driver of independence policy at Holyrood, now weakened, does the initiative fall back to the grassroots? Across the Yes movement, activists report frustration at the lack of progress and need for a rethink of strategy in the face of repeated refusals by Westminster to sanction a second referendum. The movement needs “a fundamental re-set”, and to “recognise that our opponents are playing a completely different game”, says Small, pointing to escalating clashes with Westminster over the limits of devolution.
“We need to go back to basics,” agrees Maggie Lennon, of Women for Independence, which is soon to launch a campaign titled It’s nice to be asked, and which is one of many Yes groups planning increased activism over the summer. “It’s the grassroots that make the difference and we need to start ramping ourselves up to find common ground on our right to ask the question.” Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp, founder of Believe in Scotland, a coalition of national and local Yes groups, likewise emphasises the need for a strong civic independence campaign. He points out that 70% of Believe in Scotland organisers support the de facto referendum plan, and he wants to see a shared manifesto commitment that if pro-independence parties gain a majority of seats and votes in the next general election that would serve as “a mandate for the Scottish government to begin the process of Scotland becoming an independent nation”. Alba, founded by the former SNP leader Alex Salmond after his irreparable split with Sturgeon over the Scottish government’s handling of sexual harassment complaints against him, is similarly calling for an electoral alliance of pro-independence parties. But neither the SNP or Greens are entertaining the suggestion and Alba itself continues to poll low single figures.
Others in the Yes movement are more sceptical about the de facto route – pointing out the difficulty of running an election on a single issue, which has already been dismissed by opposition parties – as well as about offering negotiations in the absence of prior consensus such as the Edinburgh agreement, which set the terms of the 2014 referendum. Yousaf himself appears to be recalibrating his position, telling Laura Kuenssberg last Sunday “if we’re not able to express support for the proposition of independence through that legally binding referendum, we’ll use the general election to do that”. MacIntyre-Kemp has been invited to speak at the Dundee convention and believes the new SNP leadership is more open to the grassroots than under Sturgeon. “The SNP needs to connect with the grassroots,” says the writer and organiser Lesley Riddoch, whose new book Thrive makes the case for independence post-2014, “rather than the current bifurcation in the movement where the little people do a lot of the work and the politicians wait to see if it’s a goer”. She reports a generation of younger supporters joining the movement “who don’t know a time before the Scottish parliament or an SNP first minister, and for whom independence has been utterly normalised.” “With people who support independence, there is no way back. Westminster may have decided that’s it because there are some problems with the SNP, but independence is still a going proposition, and that’s the difficulty with trying to winkle another referendum out of Westminster – they know they’d lose it this time.”