AN open letter to Keith Brown on the responsibility of the SNP

THE constitution of the SNP gives the job of preparing the party’s parliamentary manifestos to the Deputy Leader, the office you hold. Whoever wrote it, the recent General Election manifesto resulted in stripping the party of more than 80% of its Westminster seats, from 48 down to a useless clutch of nine (and led by one of the co-proposers of its fake independence line), a bum-clenchingly mortifying fiasco in a country where half of the people consistently support independence.

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But through the fug of empty rationalisation which soon emanated from the party, there has appeared what might be a chink of light, in your statement at The National’s Indyref@10 event, that we have “got to accept” that London is never going to allow another referendum. What you said is unequivocally true. We have a mountain of evidence to that effect, and none to the contrary. Some of us have been making that very point for years, and it is gratifying now to hear it from the holder of the SNP’s second-highest office.

The question which you and the rest of the party hierarchy now must face is: what does the party do about it, in order to fulfil its solemn responsibility, which is to restore to Scotland her long and ancient condition of a sovereign, independent state?

Given that there will be no further referendum, how are the people of Scotland to have their say, and how is a democratic majority vote for independence to be put into effect?

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The answers to those questions are disarmingly simple and straightforward: a plebiscitary General Election (in which your manifesto would say, in essence, “give us a majority of your votes and we will take Scotland out of the Union”), and a declaration of independence by fiat of Scottish MPs (who are our country’s supreme representatives, modern counterparts of those who took Scotland into the Union in the first place, and who would hold virtually every Scottish seat as indy members after a headcount victory).

That second step should not be necessary, because at that stage (though not before it) London will likely accept that the game is up anyway, and come to the table.

Those answers break no rule of law or constitution, and are under no barrier from London, which has always said that the Union is consensual, and which has acted on that precept, eg in the Edinburgh Agreement of 2012 and in the Northern Ireland Act 1998, both of which were only possible because the UK is not an indissoluble entity. Indeed, an election was always taken by both Unionists and separatists to be the route to independence, before referendums were ever contemplated.

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The SNP’s catastrophic blunder in July has confined it to a tiny minority of Scottish seats, so no actual threat of independence at its own hand can be made until and unless it wins the majority back at the next UK General Election – years away. Meantime, if it now adopts the plain logic of your statement it will have to put together a mock plebiscite for Holyrood 2026, where a simple majority of votes for independence would at least foreshadow Scotland’s impending exit and raise a faint possibility that London would then relent without awaiting the inevitable at Westminster.

Only if yourself and your colleagues take your honest words seriously and act on them will the SNP face up to its responsibility. Unless it does so, the party will deserve no future, and go down to ignominy.

Alan Crocket
Motherwell