Speed

I am sure I was not alone in anticipating the first SNP Conference after the referendum with some relish. After all, a fair section of the fundamentalist wing of the Party had spent most of the campaign predicting that Salmond's wishy washy version of Independence would unravel in the full glare of public exposure and lead to electoral disaster and, jings, that was exactly what had happened.

Independence was off the agenda for at least a generation and indeed, if you thought about it for five minutes,  it was now less than clear what the SNP's purpose in life now exactly was? Was it as a technocratic career structure to the limited levers of power in a devolved Scotland? Was it indeed, and instead, as a vehicle to secure the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism? Could a movement only now really united by gripe and grievance really sell that long term to anyone but the wildest anglophobe?

All of this being addressed in public view boded rich entertainment for the well disposed spectator and even richer fare for those less charitably inclined.

And yet it never happened. The Nats have come and gone from Perth leaving behind not the slightest splatter of blood on the walls of that fair city's conference centre. How was this possibly achieved, I hear you ask? How did they achieve such unanimity in the aftermath of an epochal defeat?

It was easy, they pretended it hadn't happened.

So, in a brilliantly choreographed (reduced) two day event their disgraced and departed leader left the stage without so much as a polite mention of the reasons for his going. Their new leader then inherited the throne and announced that she was confident Scotland would one day be independent. No-one was rude enough to point out that Scotland had had the chance to achieve just that state a mere six weeks past and, despite campaigning in the most fortuitous of circumstance, the nationalists had singularly failed to convince the majority of the population of the merits of that course of action.

Why they had lost was not discussed at all and indeed it wasn't even clear that they all accepted that they had lost. Jim Sillars went so far as to assert they had [only] lost arithmetically! It was as if they expected Eck one day to imitate that member of the other famous Ewing Family,  Bobby, and step out of the shower to announce that the horrific events of 18th and 19th September had all just been a dream. Except, of course, Eck had gone for some reason. It was Nicola now...................but she was just as good. She'd soon have another referendum..... or something. Anyway, here are two men in kilts and with bagpipes to lead us all in Scots wha hae.

And that was it.

Insofar as there was a a way forward it appeared to consist of trying to win as many seats as possible at the 2015 UK General Election. In the light of which putative achievement "Westminster" had better listen or........something.......... will happen. Not entirely clear what but it's early days. What it certainly won't be is support for a Tory Government. Most certainly not! Only a Labour Government would ever get the support of the Nationalists. Although we in this hall are all agreed Labour and the Tories are just the same anyway. Which does rather make you wonder why we would support a government formed by either of them? Their supporters all hate Scotland, particularly the Scottish ones. Although I suppose, when you think about it, in an essentially binary Party system, failure to support a Labour Government would look, to the uninitiated, awfully like support for a Tory Government? Ach well, Christmas is coming, I vote for a bit of early Turkey!

And so the delegates went on their way and my own televisual viewing shifted from the Perth Conference hall to watching Slovenia qualify as the most recent nation to prove a disappointment to Scotland.

But, later yesterday evening, @andimecbandi expressed a desire herself for an early festive experience and we stumbled upon Ms Sandra Bullock in While you were Sleeping buried away in our movies on demand.. I like a good romantic comedy and am a great admirer of Ms Ms Bullock's oeuvre. 

But as I watched the action unfold I realised what the SNP Conference had reminded me of and it was one of Ms Bullock's other films: Speed.

You will recollect the storyline. A bomb is planted on a bus and is primed to explode should the bus's speed drop below a certain velocity. For reasons I can't now recall, Ms Bullock ends up driving the bus. ( I know this is ridiculous but it's a movie!). This being Hollywood, there is a happy ending but the tension of the preceding plot derives from the knowledge that if the bus stops everybody on board gets blown up.

And that was the SNP Conference. Nicola was at the wheel knowing that if they conceded they had stopped going forward then they'd all get blown up.

The problem for Nicola and her partisans is that in this case we are in the realm of Holyrood, not Hollywood. Of fact not fiction. The bus already crashed on 18th September. No amount of dreaming otherwise is going to change that.