THE SNP are facing internal discontent over the draft agenda for the upcoming national conference after excluding proposals to examine how to convince No voters to change their views – while including other “pointless and performative” motions.
The SNP’s conference committee has internally published a “long list” of 33 resolutions which may be discussed and voted on at the annual conference in late August, with agreed motions becoming party policy.
Speaking to The National, members in the party expressed confusion as to why “premature” motions – such as what Scotland’s national anthem should be – have been included while others about how to increase independence support were not.
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One SNP delegate, who asked to remain anonymous, claimed the membership had expressed “universal disappointment” at the current draft agenda.
They pointed in particular to a motion submitted by the Edinburgh Central branch – which was rejected by the conference committee – that called for the SNP to hire a “reputable independent research organisation to engage with ‘No’ voters … to ascertain the various bases of opposition to independence among our fellow Scots and what might be done to assuage them”.
The SNP delegate said: “We lost [in 2014], and we lost significantly, by 10 points. That's a big loss, actually.
“When we started discussing this [at SNP meetings], I had assumed that we had done as a party some research into why we had lost … But as far as we can tell, we have never done a single thing to figure out why we lost and how to win the next one.”
They raised concerns that, without engagement looking at the losses in 2024 and 2014, some debates at the next SNP conference could turn out to be “self-evidently a pointless and performative exercise”.
“The core is we want to be an independent country and there is nothing on this long list that deals with that – unless you believe that having a discussion by ourselves about a new national anthem will somehow make independence come closer.
“If you keep doing what you always do, you're just going to get what you always get, which in our case has been failure.”
The comments echo similar concerns raised in a letter sent to the party’s national secretary by the SNP Tweeddale branch, who questioned why no time had been allocated at conference to take stock of the General Election result.
“The draft agenda for the 2024 conference was formed before the election and is no longer fit for purpose,” the letter stated.
“Prevarication will lead to more people leaving us and ultimately risks another and worse electoral disaster in the Holyrood vote.”
A message from SNP national secretary Lorna Finn, included at the beginning of the draft conference agenda, states that decisions on which resolutions get debated will be made after “all registered conference delegates [are able to] indicate a rating for each potential resolution”.
However, SNP members raised concerns that this was unclear in its meaning: Will delegates’ voting preferences select the motions, or will they be treated as purely advisory and the leadership retain tight control over what gets discussed?
As the SNP face internal pressure to examine election losses to advise future campaigns, Stewart Kirkpatrick, the former head of digital for Yes Scotland who is not a member of the party, is running a series of surveys looking to do just that.
Kirkpatrick, who launched his project at YesWeDidNae.scot in May with the goal of informing the next pro-independence referendum campaign, said the SNP should not shy away from scrutinising uncomfortable results, such as the July General Election.
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“Clearly after the election, some hard thinking needs to be done about how independence gets delivered, and an important part of that is asking questions about why we didn't cross the line in 2014,” he said.
“That doesn't have to be about apportioning blame, but it is about lessons learned. We're watching the Olympics at the moment. Every single athlete analyses their performance after the big event and works on how they could do better. I would encourage the SNP to look at it in those terms.
“How can we do better? How can we go further? What can we learn from the exercise we carried out in 2014 to help us deliver on the prize? Don't be afraid of asking questions about your performance, because that's how you get better.”
Simon Barrow, national secretary of the SNP Trade Union Group, the party’s largest affiliate body, further called for the party to consider how it can find a “fresh offer to the people of Scotland, and a further public shift in favour of the nation taking its destiny into its own hands”.
He said “that definitely means listening and learning, not least to those who remain sceptical about independence but whose support will ultimately be crucial to achieving that historic change”.
Barrow argued that both the SNP and the wider independence movement needed a “shift in thinking and perspective, backed up by listening and action”.
He said: "The vast majority of people across Scotland want decent public services, a strong NHS, an economy that works for all, housing and education for all, and a green future for us and our children. So the key question is 'where does power need to lie politically and economically in order to make those changes possible?'”
An SNP spokesperson said: “The agenda for SNP conference is a matter for party delegates and the conferences’ committee.”
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