Membership of the SNP [Scottish National Party] has officially passed 100,000, giving the party a massive campaigning advantage as it enters a potentially historic General Election.
Not bad, with Scotland’s population standing at roughly 5.3 million.
Herald Scotland (my emphasis added)
The vast army of foot soldiers means the SNP heads towards May 7 as the third-largest party in the UK – twice the size of the LibDems, two-thirds the size of the Tories, and half the size of Labour….
The latest polls suggest the SNP, which currently has six MPs, could win more than 50 of the 59 Westminster seats in Scotland. However, senior party figures believe 30 would be a good result, as they expect to be squeezed by Labour and the Tories as voters focus on who they want to be Prime Minister.
… Two years ago, at its 2013 spring conference, the SNP was welcoming member number 25,000. Its quadrupling since the No vote in the referendum means one person in 50 in Scotland is now a member of the party, the equivalent of Labour or the Tories having more than one million members at UK level – something neither party has enjoyed since the 1950s.
So the ‘no’ settled the question, eh?
Over at CapX, Gerald Warner has a review of a book written by Alex Salmond (the former leader of the SNP) on the referendum campaign:
Salmond is right to assert that the referendum changed Scotland forever, or at least threatens to do so, though he cannot claim personal credit for that dubious achievement. The authors of the current state of anarchic incoherence in Scotland’s constitutional relationship to the rest of the United Kingdom and the consequent threat to the Union were David Cameron and the other incompetent and cowardly leaders of the Unionist parties.
Salmond accurately pinpoints this as early as page 2 of his account, describing how he watched David Cameron responding to the referendum result on television by reiterating his pledge of lavish more powers for Scotland: “I think ‘You silly arrogant man… no one realises the door that Cameron has just opened.” Indeed. The true story of the Scottish debacle is not the electorate’s closing of the door to independence at the ballot box, but Cameron’s re-opening of it, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
This, of course, is something of a Cameron trademark.
Warner:
Cameron has never had the slightest rapport with the British public, let alone the Scots. His political instincts and talents are virtually non-existent. Cameron is a man who cannot see a pass without selling it. Alex saw Dave coming.
Those last two sentences are fair. The first is not. Cameron does have quite a degree of rapport with the British public. He just doesn’t know what to do with it. And when it comes to the game of politics his grasp of both tactics and strategy is, well, feeble would be too kind a word. In his dealings with Brussels, Cameron has been consistently outmaneuvered, and as Warner explains, the same has been true in the prime minister’s attempts to handle the Scots. The referendum was inevitable; the incompetence with which it was handled was not.
Warner is, however, too quick to dismiss the extent of the challenge posed by Salmond, both intellectually and politically.
Intellectually:
Salmond prefaces his narrative with a potted survey of Scottish history. This was unwise. Anyone who is so historically illiterate as to cite “every movement for radical change in Scotland, from Jacobite to Jacobin” would be better advised to eschew attempts at historiography. The Jacobites, supporters of Divine Right monarchy, were a reactionary movement attempting to reverse the radical change imposed by the Whigs in 1688. Salmond, however, sees the past through a prism of Braveheart kitsch separatism, to which historical reality must be adapted for political purposes.
That misses the point. Braveheart was nonsense, but it did the trick. And the adaptation of historical reality for political purposes has been central to most successful nationalist movements.
Warner is also too complacent about the political implications of the referendum result. Yes, the vote to remain in the UK was, mathematically speaking, respectable enough, but, looking at the generational breakdown of the vote, the only truly clear win for the unionist cause seems to have been amongst the over-65s, reflecting both the natural caution of older voters and a degree of comfort with the idea of overlapping British and Scottish identities that is increasingly rare amongst younger folk, something that suggests that hopes that the referendum would be the end of the matter were always misplaced.
But Warner may well be right about this:
[T]he future of the United Kingdom is even more in doubt than it was during the referendum campaign. Alex Salmond is now aiming to invade Westminster with a sizeable army of MPs, at a time when political deadlock is likely. He will then deliver the coup-de-grace to the Union.
Well, if he’s given the chance he will certainly try.
And the polls would suggest that Salmond’s going to get that chance.
Comments