Kevin McKenna: New pro-indy party may not be a bad thing for Yes movement

With the launch of each new party the SNP’s leadership loyalists are duly provided with their orders to pour scorn on them. Thus, we’re told they can only damage the independence cause by hurting the SNP’s chances of securing a Holyrood majority in May’s elections. It’s rarely explained that outweighing this concern is the possibility of adding some list seats which might yet be required to maintain the Yes majority at Holyrood.

Yet, there are several compelling reasons to welcome the option of other pro-independence parties in May. The SNP leadership’s increasingly autocratic and authoritarian character has driven many independence supporters to despair. In the space of six years from when Nicola Sturgeon seemed to walk on water an astonishing metamorphosis has occurred in the nature of support for the SNP.

Party hacks will point to poll figures still indicating a Yes majority in May, but they are deluding themselves if they think that this is evidence of unswerving loyalty. The levels of hostility and outright bitterness towards the party leadership by many Yes supporters are breath-taking and would have been unimaginable just a few years ago when Sturgeon’s popularity seemed assured for a generation. Such is the fecklessness of Labour and the Tories at Holyrood that the anti-leadership movement within the SNP is the closest approximation to an official opposition.

READ MORE: New pro-independence party Restore Scotland launches ahead of Holyrood vote

The SNP’s Hate Crime legislation has come dangerously close to a line-in-the-sand moment for many Yes supporters who are now actively considering whether or not they can still continue to vote for the SNP. They consider this legislation to have been contrived to menace women who stubbornly cling to the belief that while gender may be fluid, sex is and always will be, binary. The legislation is the latest in a suite of performative positions – government by proclamation if you like – affecting the personal and private lives of mainly working-class people while failing to make substantial improvements in their communities.

The sense of resentment at what they regard as gesture politics has curdled into something more profound owing to the arrogance and superciliousness that comes with it. This labels those who express opposition to the leadership’s direction of travel as ignorant, transphobic bigots who are too thick to understand the nuances of it all.

The widespread anger at the leadership’s treatment of Joanna Cherry has also stiffened the sense of alienation. How can a party that proclaims its absolute belief in promoting women’s voices and listening to their concerns allow to happen on its watch the long campaign of abuse and intimidation that has seen Cherry given police protection and resulted in threats of rape from a known member of the SNP?

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That Nicola Sturgeon and many close to her appear absolutely impervious to the suffering of Cherry and others who have faced similar treatment has disillusioned many of the membership. It’s now reached the stage where the simplistic call to hold your nose and vote for the party and we can sort it all out later won’t cut it any longer: this has become a moral issue. And so, the emergence of these pro-independence alternatives to the SNP is welcomed by those Yes supporters looking for an electoral home which will preserve their integrity.

In recent conversations I’ve had with some lifelong independence supporters, the option of voting for Labour in May would have held some appeal had Monica Lennon been victorious in their leadership election.

Lennon had signalled her backing for a second referendum on independence if the SNP could secure a majority at Holyrood while campaigning for it. That she was defeated in the leadership run-off by the arch-Unionist Anas Sarwar means that Labour cannot yet be considered as a viable alternative for dissident Yessers.

Uniting all of the pro-independence parties to have emerged is an underlying sense of frustration at the SNP’s perceived lack of enthusiasm for a second referendum and its dismissal of a Plan B, especially when its conceived by those whom they deem to be “not the right sort”.

Yet, it’s Restore Scotland which, I think, offers the most interesting possibilities in its bold questioning of the SNP’s obsession with re-joining the EU following independence. One of its founder members, Ewan Gurr, formerly network manager for the Trussell Trust in Scotland, expressed this eloquently to me last night. “The reason we feel compelled to get out of the political trenches despite having already left the European Union is because the SNP have become European Unionists. They are obsessed with EU readmission and fail to recognise that more than one million Scots, without a visible campaign for leaving the European Union, voted to leave in 2016.”

In his last interview as EU Commission president, Donald Tusk spelled out why in economic terms, no nation can be independent within the European Union. An independent Scotland would be required to make several big concessions before being considered for EU membership, including accepting the weaker currency of the euro. Scotland would thus be ceding autonomy to influence inflation rates or alter interest rates. All fiscal oversight would lie with the European Central Bank. Independence? Behave yourself.

The EU is a trading club dominated by a handful of the richest nations on earth whose obeisance to the global banking system requires them to use economic muscle to bully smaller and poorer nations into submission. That French pretendy aristocrat, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, forced Britain to abandon its trading relationships with its poor Commonwealth countries as a prerequisite for joining in 1975. Furthermore, the Lisbon Treaty now compels all Euro-trading nations to join the single currency by 2024. If a newly-independent Scotland were somehow able to persuade the EU to let us join their exclusive private members lounge, which Andrew Wilson, author of the Growth Commission, thinks will take a decade, in what universe could we insist on being the only nation to join the EU but not trade with the euro?

A newly-independent Scotland really needs to talk about the European Union and our future relationship with it, but there’s no evidence that this is a conversation the SNP wishes to have. If even just a handful of MSPs from the alternative independence parties could reach Holyrood, they might just help keep the SNP much more honest than they’ve been since 2015.