Tommy Sheppard: There’s no stifling of debate on why SNP lost election

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp tells me I’m wrong to suggest that the report was written prior to last month’s election defeat. I stand corrected.

It is an impressive feat to turn around a document of such scope and length within days of July 4. But it’s also worrying that a major report about the direction of the independence movement takes such little account of the fact that the principal party advocating that cause had just suffered its worst defeat since 2010.

Gordon seems to downplay the significance and consequence of that defeat by suggesting the election wasn’t really anything to do with independence. He claims that while formally the first line of the SNP’s manifesto, the party never really fought on the issue during the campaign.

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That’s just not the case. Every piece of paper I put out (and I put out plenty) bore the strapline: “For a better Scotland, independent and in the European Union.” I talked about independence in nine hustings, on social media and in a thousand doorstep conversations.

I’ve not checked with all of them but many colleagues did the same. So, we can criticise how it was communicated but it won’t wash to claim that independence was anything other than central to the SNP’s election message.

A more accurate observation might be that while the SNP talked about independence, few others did. And for a large section of the Scottish population, including some indy supporters, it simply was not relevant in this election.

Whether the SNP result signals a lack of support for independence, or simply a lack of salience of the issue, the fact remains that a defeat on this scale cannot simply be swept under the carpet. It ought to inform our strategic thinking going forward, including the role of conventions aimed at citizen engagement.

(Image: PA)

But let’s park that discussion for now, because I want to respond to the ideas raised last week by Gerry Hassan. I regard Gerry as a critical friend of the Yes movement and his pieces are always thought-provoking and challenging. I’d wish for nothing less. But his extended piece on how we got to last month’s defeat was undermined by selective interpretation and in some cases just getting stuff wrong.

Gerry is right to say that we never had a proper post-mortem on 2014 and that a lot of the last 10 years has been wasted, leaving us no further forward.

He’s right also to appeal for hard thinking now and the drawing up of a medium-term strategy to advance the cause of national autonomy. But he’s wrong to suggest this has been a wilful design deployed by the SNP leadership.

Gerry claims “the party leadership deliberately avoided conducting any postmortem to understand why Yes lost”.

Avoided? Really? That makes it sound like there was a massive upswelling of opinion among Yes activists, most of them busy joining the party, if you recall, which party chiefs somehow sidestepped or undermined.

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I remember it somewhat differently. As soon as the tears were dry after the referendum defeat, I remember getting thrown into the heat of the 2015 election campaign.

The remarkable result – getting 1,454,436 votes, exactly 50% of the total – was misread by Yes activists as a quick turnaround in their fortunes, when in fact it included many who did not support independence but wanted the SNP to stand up for Scotland in the Union.

That victory mesmerised people. It felt that things were going right and blunted their appetite to ask what had gone wrong a year before.

And then came Brexit, a peg of changed circumstance on which to hang the legitimacy of a second vote. Yes, Nicola Sturgeon argued this case, but let’s not pretend she forced the idea on unwilling Yes activists.

On the contrary, while there were some lone voices cautioning that we were not ready, most of the movement was getting high on the idea of indyref2 being just around the corner. It’s too facile to blame this all on SNP leaders. The truth is that, en masse, the Yes movement was guilty of self-deception on a pretty grand scale.

Scottish independence supporters outside the Scottish Parliament

Gerry Hassan rightly critiques several so-called strategies as being nothing of the kind. Key among these is the idea of using an election as a de facto referendum. He claims this was the strategy adopted by the SNP under Sturgeon, Yousaf and Swinney and the one on which the recent election was fought.

That is not true. In fact, the de facto referendum idea was defeated at the last SNP conference in favour of a different strategy which is still on the party’s website.

Gerry claims that the leadership are still stifling debate on last month’s defeat. They’re just not. Branches are actively discussing what happened and what to do about it. An unprecedented series of debriefings with candidates and campaign managers organised by the leadership have been extremely frank. Many party activists are openly debating these matters in the press without censure or constraint.

I agree we need serious thoughtful discussion. But let’s make sure its civil and honest as well as candid and open. Attributing motives without proof or accusing people of doing things they haven’t done isn’t helpful.