Increasing number of indy parties is confusing voters – here's why

Obviously, we have the SNP but now with half their post-referendum membership and minus 10,000 folk in the past year. Next – at a stretch – we can include the Scottish Greens, but minus chirpy Robin Harper.

The Scottish Socialist Party is still around along with its leader Colin Fox. But the SSP are a shadow of their former glory and has spawned another schism, Socialists for Independence. An earlier SSP breakaway – Solidarity – have folded into Alex Salmond’s bullish Alba Party.

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We’re not finished. We also have the abstentionist Independence for Scotland Party created and led by the indefatigable Colette Walker. The ISP’s John Hannah scored a very respectable 236 votes in last Thursday’s Armadale and Blackridge local by-election, versus 777 for the SNP, letting Labour sneak in.

But that’s the problem: the fissioning of the nationalist electorate. And yes, I know there is proportional representation, but the increasing fragmentation of the national movement is confusing the voters and wasting energy. The Starmerites are the only beneficiaries.

Thursday’s other by-election, in Dunblane, saw the combined SNP-Green vote outpoll Labour but the latter still won.

The latest contender in the crowed nationalist lists is blogger Peter Bell’s new New Scotland Party, dedicated to calling for a unilateral declaration of independence. Peter is a national treasure as well as an iconoclast. But another indy party?

Yes, I know Peter has a distinctive voice and I know the case for UDI rather than the SNP’s eternal obsequiousness to the British state is worth making. But if we set up indy party after indy party and shout at each other from a distance, the movement will degenerate into a sterile talking shop. Fragmentation equals paralysis.

Frustration with the SNP’s pious constitutionalism and parliamentarianism has also produced a host of “non-party”

mini-parties such as Salvo/Liberation Scotland and All Under One Banner. I mean absolutely no disrespect to either organisation, both of which are necessary. But AUOB’s marches, while brilliantly executed, are conducted in something of a political vacuum. And Salvo, who claim 5000 activists, are in danger of talking only to themselves. Ultimately, winning independence is about politics – and politics means elections.

Since the 2014 referendum, the SNP parliamentary party has virtually subcontracted much of the hard graft of persuading the uncommitted of the indy cause to the Business for Scotland group and its offshoot Believe in Scotland.

These campaigning operations are the brainchild of the tireless Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp. In private, Gordon is not uncritical of the SNP leadership. But the sad truth is that BfS knowingly fills the propaganda gap left by the SNP’s fixation on managing Holyrood under UK Treasury rules, rather than rousing the nation to action.

Result: the sound economic arguments being put forward by BfS are in practice always divorced from the praxis of SNP ministers. Again, politics gets separated from campaigning and the pro-indy electorate become confused and bemused.

Yet everybody knows that the proportion of the Scottish electorate supporting independence still hovers around 50%, despite these spits and the travails of the SNP leadership. And the SNP are still polling around 30%.

The latest Sunday Times/Norstat poll gives the SNP the most seats at the next Holyrood election (plus four for Alba) but with the likelihood of Labour being in a minority administration.

And there you have it: support for the movement remains strong but we are in danger of frittering it away and allowing the Unionists back into government in the Scottish Parliament largely because of our own – growing – divisions.

This must stop.

If I may quote Lenin in his centenary – what is to be done? Our fragmentation and disunity have several root causes. There is clearly a massive disagreement over the parliamentary and excessively constitutional direction of recent SNP strategy. Making everything depend on Westminster granting a second referendum was a dead end, especially after the Supreme Court ruling. We all know that.

But the SNP leadership has to admit it did little on its own to mobilise public support for the referendum project. That let Westminster off the hook. So obviously we need to agree a new line of march that everyone can get behind. In the short term, that is easier said than done. We have three questions to answer.

First, how constitutional are we going to be? I don’t mean resorting to violence, but rather to what extent are we bound by Westminster’s rules of the game – legal, political and economic? This boils down to how we put pressure on Westminster.

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No national liberation movement has ever succeeded by staying within the rules, for the precise reason the rules are rigged in London’s favour.

Conclusion: we need to debate the role of civil disobedience, mass protest and parliamentary obstruction in our campaign. Second, what mandate are we seeking from the Scottish people whose sovereignty we claim to promote? There is no obvious alternative but to seek a majority of the votes in any election arising in Scotland. That is the true democratic gold standard.

But that strategy requires greater unity in the movement and at least the agreement of all parties to put an unambiguous mandate for indy on the ballot paper.

Third, what forms of practical unity are possible? There are lots of egos in the Scottish national movement and lots of historical and personal baggage to overcome. But when was that ever not the case?

People are proposing the calling unifying indy conventions of one sort or another. Some of this is grandstanding, some well-meaning but too early. We need talks about talks, before issuing actual calls for conventions.

Meantime, in the constituencies, it is surely possible for the activists from competing indy groups to organise joint campaign days and joint public events. I know of at least one constituency where preliminary discussions on such united action are taking place.

Also, I think there is a space for a new, autonomous indy youth movement open to activists from all the pro-independence groups. Young Scotland, anyone?

Regarding the basis for joint action, there is no shortage of issues, especially on the economic front. We need to seize the agenda from Labour and that agenda is predominantly economic.

Starmer’s (above) latest inanity that “it will only get worse before it gets better” proves Labour will do nothing in the face of rising energy bills except steal Scotland’s power resources. This is a political weak point we have to exploit tenaciously and tirelessly.

We need joint mass leafleting shouting: “No rise in electricity and gas prices! No to giving away Scotland’s energy resources! Scotland’s energy in Scotland’s public ownership!”

Growing divisions in the indy movement are a sign of weakness, not strength. If we can’t co-operate as a movement, how can we hope to build a new nation? The real test of leadership is working with folk you can’t stand, not denouncing fellow nationalists.

Ten years on from the referendum, the indy cause is becalmed. We need discipline, unity and focus. Looking outward is always better than looking inward.