Will we see apathy or resistance when Labour show true colours?

Finally, scandal and infighting destroy the once popular nationalist party. Bought off by parsimonious concessions, a weary people drift into political somnambulance.

A distant English establishment declares the demand for freedom and the break-up of Britain is now but an unpleasant memory. A whole generation passes …

This is the true story of the Irish Parliamentary Party, which emerged from the British General Election of 1874 with 46 MPs. The IPP’s central demands were for legislative independence for Ireland and land reform for local tenanted (largely Catholic) peasant farmers.

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Under the charismatic Charles Stewart Parnell, the IPP increased their representation at the 1880 and 1885 General Elections, boosting its number of MPs to 85. The party even won a seat in Liverpool. Briefly, the IPP held the balance of power at Westminster.

As a result, Gladstone’s Liberal Party dallied with the idea of offering Ireland home rule. But the British establishment (and its bully-boy Ulster allies) played for time while delivering nothing.

Meanwhile, Parnell’s career was destroyed by a sex scandal manipulated by his political enemies. Parnell died unexpectedly in 1891. At the 1892 General Election, the remaining Parnellites won only nine seats. The dream was over and Irish freedom off the agenda permanently. Or so it seemed …

On April 24, 1916, a Monday morning a quarter of a century after Parnell’s passing, the Easter Rising began in Dublin.

There are lessons here. The first is that any national struggle has its up and downs, victories and defeats.

But the struggle for national self-determination is not premised on a passing electoral whim and so cannot be diverted forever.

The fight for freedom is rooted deep in cultural and economic oppression, in misgovernment by elites, in metropolitan disregard for local opinions and sensitivities, and in the powerlessness felt by minorities.

In the British case, an Anglo-centric establishment (including the Labour Party) and an arthritic, undemocratic state have kept Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in cultural and economic thraldom. Regardless of the failures of any nationalist leadership, the end of this outdated system cannot be avoided.

And failure there has been on a spectacular scale. Last week, the SNP lost a stunning half a million voters along with 39 of its previous 48 MPs.

Labour returned from the political grave, increasing its seats from one to 37 and securing 36% of the vote. Scotland is passing through a stage equivalent to the collapse of the Parnell-IPP upsurge.

After 17 years of voting for the SNP in the hope of achieving independence and not getting it, the Scottish working class has returned to Labour. Pragmatic to the last, it has done so in the hope of gaining some respite from its woes – austerity, inflation, rent rises and the collapse of the NHS.

(Image: Getty)

Could we be facing a “lost” generation before the national struggle flares up again, as happened in Ireland? Conceivably. But as I explained in these pages last week, Labour will inevitably introduce their own version of Tory austerity.

The economy will continue to decline. Public services will continue to implode.

Will this racing certainty provoke resistance or will Scots sink into apathy? The election has provided ambiguous answers. Alba Party’s 19 candidates fought a spirited, happy campaign to re-energise the independence movement but could barely muster 11,700 votes among them – I know, I was one of those candidates.

We tried hard to link independence with immediate issues such as saving jobs at the Grangemouth oil refinery. But we over-estimated the willingness of an electorate too thoroughly scunnered by a decade of SNP broken promises to listen to a new, small indy party.

Judging by the voluminous, number of deliberately spoiled ballot papers I saw last Friday morning, disappointment with the SNP – at Holyrood as well as Westminster – proved too great for the electorate to be ready for moving on. Instead, it reverted to what it knew best: Labour’s cynical blandishments.

And yes, Alex Salmond came up on the doorstep, pro and con. But looking at the poor result Alba got in Grangemouth despite the heroic campaign of veteran socialist Kenny MacAskill, and noting that the indefatigable Angus Brendan MacNeil, standing as an independent with Alba’s endorsement, could only muster third place in the Western Isles despite being the local MP for 19 years, I venture that personalities were not the primary cause of our miniscule vote.

(Image: PA)

More pertinent, of the SNP’s “lost” half a million voters, only 330,000 seem to have switched directly to Labour. Another 170,000 abstained altogether. Alba gallantly tried to appeal to those disillusioned Nats but failed, perhaps because many pro-indy supporters are now totally alienated from Westminster’s counterfeit form of democracy.

I fear such alienation will not necessarily evaporate in time for the 2026 Holyrood election. Conceivably, disillusioned voters could be captured by Reform – witness the paper candidate for Reform out-polling both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in the Western Isles.

Reform could hoover up Holyrood seats under proportional representation. Or alienated indy voters might abstain again, allowing Unionist Labour to make gains and sending the SNP into opposition – another potential Parnellite moment.

In a fiery column for the Daily Mail, Jim Sillars warned that “the independence movement will remain adrift until someone from somewhere within the SNP membership can sweep from its decks the mediocrities who have brought us to this pass”. Ouch!

But waiting for something to happen is not a sound strategy, Jim. Besides, the SNP’s parliamentary obsession – with its MPs ingratiating themselves into the Westminster boy’s club – is now a dead end. As Parnellism proved in Ireland, Westminster will always assimilate nationalist MPs.

Instead, we need a strategy outside of Holyrood and Westminster to win back those disillusioned indy supporters.

Putting their politics aside, we need to take a leaf out of the book of populist parties in Europe and combine politics with local campaigning on community issues. To win back their trust, the Yes movement needs to prove – in the most concrete way – that it is on the side of the poor and the dispossessed.

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Example: Yes hubs should become local campaign centres fighting rent rises and blocking local councils from closing amenities. The Yes movement has to transform itself from being an adjunct of SNP parliamentarianism into a grassroots expression of popular power.

The long hiatus in Ireland’s freedom struggle after Parnell’s death was also down to infighting between individuals and nationalist parties. Scotland has to avoid that trap or risk handing power to the Unionists for the next generation.

We need a national convention of all indy politicians, groups and civic society to rejuvenate the movement in the aftermath of this defeat.

Finally, there was one independence party which substantially increased its popular vote last Thursday.

Sinn Fein raised its majority in all seven of its seats, entrenching its position as the biggest party in Northern Ireland. This brings closer another border poll. Contrary to what Messrs Starmer and Sarwar think , the break-up of Britain remains on the cards.