Richard Walker: Bitter SNP division will not win hearts and minds

It was a brilliant innovation which replicated in a digital space the networking opportunities the physical world conferences offer delegates in their bars and cafes and the now legendary conference karaoke.

Thousands of discussions took place on the conference website on a whole range of issues. I’m sure most were good-natured, passionate and humorous because in my experience that’s the type of party the SNP is.

As editor of the Sunday Herald in 2014, I keenly felt the responsibility of giving voice to a passionate and committed movement as the referendum approached. After the vote and after the launch of The National I continued to feel that, if anything, more keenly. The supportive relationship The National enjoyed with its readers has remained a constant source of strength and succour.

This week, just days after conference, social media posts portray a party bitterly divided; perhaps even engaged in a battle for its soul. Former friends are tearing lumps out of each other. Abuse is being thrown around with little or no restraint.

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While some are celebrating “taking back the party”, others are suggesting the changing composition of the SNP’s National Executive Committee are making them feel less safe. I can’t be alone in thinking that a sense of perspective is urgently required.

A bit of context. Fifteen consecutive opinion polls have shown a majority of Scots are in favour of independence. The biggest lead is 58%, the average around 54%. We have never enjoyed such a decisive majority and the campaign proper has not even started. We should be united in optimism and in determination to push those figures up higher yet.

Of course there are – and probably should be – disagreements about tactics, but most of these revolve around Westminster’s response to a whacking SNP majority in May next year. We’ve got to achieve that majority first. The pandemic is making an already difficult task even trickier, but none the less the First Minister has placed independence at the heart of the May election campaign and – crucially – at the heart of rebuilding of our country when the pandemic recedes. No-one will be in any doubt that a vote for the SNP is an explicit vote for indyref2 and will be understood in the UK and beyond as exactly that.

The entire approach of the party has been geared towards this election. The Scottish Government has consistently behaved in accord with democratic principles, despite being arrogantly spurned by a Westminster Government obviously motivated by ideology rather than the best interests of the UK or any of its constituent parts. We have the moral high ground when we join battle with Boris Johnson.

Yes, I personally would have liked some other tactics deployed in the journey to here, but who cares?

The time for those arguments is over. We are where we are – and it’s a better place than we have been before.

Yes, there are some big decisions to take if Westminster stands in the way of the democratic will of Scotland. But not right now. As a movement our job – our responsibility – now is to return a massive pro-independence majority at Holyrood next year.

Yes, there are some very deep fissures within the SNP and the deepest is the Gender Recognition Act. I know that no amount of “wheesht for indy” platitudes will build a bridge across that chasm. Nevertheless a bridge must be built, just as it was built in many of the most bitter divisions in the world. If there was a way to forge a peace process in Northern Ireland – and I know the deaths during the Troubles make such a comparison ridiculous, but I use it to show the scale of that Herculean task – then surely we can find a way of discussing disagreements without tearing ourselves apart.

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And that’s the big issue here … how to discuss our disagreements. I see no purpose here in taking sides or weighing up the relative merits of the arguments.

I would say that if you want to win hearts and minds for gender self-ID simply stating “transwomen are women. End of” isn’t going to do the job. Similarly, if you want to oppose a gender reform commitment that was after all in the 2016 SNP manifesto perhaps branding a generation as the “woke brigade” isn’t the smartest of moves. There is a tendency today when having an argument to rush past the debating process and go straight to hurling personal insults. If we truly seek resolution, the tactics currently being employed are not working.

I’m a privileged white man so I accept I’m not the best person to plot a course through this particular minefield, but my point is that such a course has to be found and the only way of doing that is by talking. SNP members shoulder the responsibility to find a path to unity. They owe it to generations who worked tirelessly to get us to the positive position we find ourselves today. They owe it to the thousands who woke up politically in 2014 and placed their faith in the SNP in the depths of post-referendum despair. They owe it to the poor and disadvanted for whom independence offers a better life in a better, fairer country. They owe it to a proud and committed movement of which the SNP is a prime part but a part nonetheless.

That doesn’t mean we need abandon core principles and beliefs about the type of country we must build after independence, but it does mean we need to find a language to properly debate divisive issues with respect. It does mean we need to turn our backs on self-indulgent verbal attacks which will, if they continue, undermine our best chance of gaining that independence.

In the end, this is down to each of us. It’s not down to an edict from the SNP leadership. It’s not down to party policy or enforcement. It’s down to us – you and me – to show restraint and self-discipline, to honour debate and discussion ... in short, to act as if we were already in the early days of a better nation.