Fresh warfare has broken out in the upper reaches of the SNP this week, with the party leadership losing control of the ruling National Executive Committee. The results of party elections mean that Nicola Sturgeon’s internal opponents are effectively in control of the party machinery, although her husband Peter is, for now, still chief executive.
Impatient hardliners want to push more aggressively on independence, and some demand the party organise a “plan B” illegal referendum if Boris Johnson refuses to allow a vote on breaking up the UK after next year’s Holyrood elections.
In the fallout that followed the party’s conference this week, the SNP fight over trans rights has intensified on social media. Joanna Cherry QC, Westminster MP and former deputy leader, lambasted the pro-trans rights Kirsty Blackman, another SNP MP.
Cherry tweeted: “I’ll ignore the ageism as I wouldn’t expect a privileged young straight woman to know what it was like for lesbians in the Eighties.”
In other key developments…
– Allies of exiled leader Alex Salmond, cleared in a High Court trial, won key places.
– Massively famous leadership loyalist Alyn “if he was chocolate he would eat himself” Smith MP, foreign affairs spokesman, was removed as policy development convener and replaced by someone called Chris Hanlon.
– Candidates for the party’s Women’s Pledge grouping won election to the NEC. They are campaigning against Sturgeon’s changes to the law, claiming the Scottish government’s policy limits women’s rights.
– Advocates (proponents, not Scottish lawyers) of radical left-wing policies such as Magic Money Tree economics won places on the party’s policy committee.
– Quixotic Craig Murray, the eccentric former ambassador and Alex Salmond fan, won a fifth of the votes in the race for party President.
A breathless correspondent from north of the border got in touch to express astonishment that this drama had garnered no attention beyond Scotland. The Hound tried to explain that everyone else is a little busy with the excitement over the roll out of vaccines to combat the global pandemic, but no matter.
In the Scotland edition of The Times, there’s a good account of it all from Kieran Andrews. He quotes a moderate saying the NEC is “a f***ing zoo,” which is nice.
This captures the despair Nationalist moderates will feel, when they have worked very hard for years to try to win the argument that the party must appeal to swing voters and undecided moderates, rather than pitching the appeal at “zoomers” and left-wing fanatics.
None of this is likely to make much, if any, impact on Scottish voters. Recent focus groups conducted by the Unionist support group These Islands revealed a horrifying picture of many Scottish voters lacking even a basic grasp of what a currency is and what would happen after independence to money and pensions. There was the assertion that because Scottish clearing banks print their own pound notes there already is Scottish money. The concept of a central bank and banking union is not widely understood, it would appear. It probably isn’t in England either but then the English are not, yet, threatening to leave the UK.
Unionists are stuck on this question, and the SNP can only win, because even pointing out the glaring omissions in policy and widespread naivety about the economic dangers is regarded as anti-Scottish fear-mongering and offensive to sensitive Scottish sensibilities. A problem for the pro-Union side. But that’s for another day.
