THE tragedy that has engulfed the personal life and career of Stewart Hosie has many dark, dismal and depressing aspects but does at least offer one shard of hope: it’s an opportunity for the SNP to consider very carefully its plans for its summer independence push.

Hosie was widely expected to lead that push but his announcement yesterday that he will stand down from the deputy leadership of the party in the autumn makes it virtually certain that the independence role will also slip from his grasp.

There will, of course, be much fevered speculation over who will now be charged with rebooting the independence case ... all of it wasted energy. Because who will lead the push is of far less importance than what it is actually FOR.

In truth, it’s never been exactly clear what the initiative announced by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon at the last SNP conference in March was supposed to achieve, other than to bring conference delegates to their feet in unanimous acclaim (which, to be fair, it managed in spectacular fashion).

That section of her speech was high on emotion but short on detail. “Patiently and respectfully, we will seek to convince you that independence really does offer the best future for Scotland,’’ she told those who had voted No in the referendum.

At the time it seemed likely that a UK vote to leave Europe while Scotland voted to remain would itself be a trigger for a second independence referendum, because the outcry from Scotland would prove politically irresistible.

Now that probability has receded and much mainstream thinking within the independence community believes Brexit would have to be combined with a further Tory majority in the next Westminster election in 2020 (and indeed the probability of UK Tory governments for decades to come) before the clamour for independence becomes deafening.

That would mean a second independence referendum would not be held for at least four years ... a long time to retain the demand for change and extraordinary levels of political engagement.

There have been other changes since that Sturgeon conference speech, most notably a bruising Holyrood election campaign which set different camps within the wider Yes movement against one other.

In the weeks since the election result we’ve seen some important moves to heal those wounds, or at least start the process. In the online Broadcasting Scotland Sunday TV show, Full Scottish, which I’m involved with, former YesScotland boss Blair Jenkins last week floated the idea of reconstituting that organisation. In fact, there have long been murmurs of discontent over the decision to shut down YesScotland after the referendum result.

In last Saturday’s National, SNP MP Mhairi Black argued that it was time to “get the band back together”, a metaphor for rebooting the Yes movement.

All of which means that the independence initiative still due to be launched by the SNP this summer has three main responsibilities, which (in no particular order) are:

1: To identify the main arguments which failed to convince voters in the independence referendum and to formulate answers which have a much better chance of doing so;

2: To identify the most fertile grounds in which those arguments could take root without launching a seemingly endless referendum campaign with no actual referendum in sight;

3: To pull together all those strands of the Yes campaign which still exist – Bella Caledonia, Common Weal/Space, Newsnet, Women for Independence, Business for Scotland, The Greens and, yes, even Rise and more – so that when the indyref2 campaign begins in earnest the movement doesn’t have to be rebuilt from scratch.

That’s impossible to achieve within one summer – so it’s lucky we have four years.

It’s also a lot to ask of a party which, like all political parties, has self-interest programmed into its DNA. But then, the reason why the SNP enjoys astonishing levels of support is that Scots regard it as very much more than just another political party.

The National is a newspaper of the Yes movement rather than the SNP but let’s be honest. Only the SNP can deliver independence to Scotland and no other strand of the movement has done anything like as much to bring that dream tantalisingly close to reality.

But who would argue with certainty that it can – and even should – get the Yes vote up to the 60 per cent mark all by itself?

The SNP is arguably Scotland’s most remarkable political success story but its triumph is built on the beguiling possibilities of a dream. It will take a movement to bring those possibilities within reach. The time to rebuild that movement is now.


Sex scandal stress forces Hosie to step down as SNP deputy leader