The Walking Dead

Party Conferences have two purposes. Firstly they allow the Party's activists, among their own herd, to  feel important, although in any well run Party they will not actually be. Secondly they require the media to pay your Party some attention and provide some favourable coverage. In both respects the SNP Conference has been, for them, a disaster. It is no wonder their leadership postponed it repeatedly.

Sturgeon's interview on the Marr show today was a meltdown moment. She was caught out lying on not one but two occasions. About two unrelated matters, the first of which, about how many people in Scotland were dying of Coronavirus, was a performance which, in its indifference to the population she governs and  regard instead for protecting her own image, would have put Donald Trump to shame. 

Whether this will be a breakthrough moment only time will tell, but I suspect wiser heads in the SNP have appreciated for some time that Nicola is only the air in an increasingly over inflated bubble and that someone might come along with a pin at any moment. If she has just evaded this pin today, there will be others to come. In my lifetime first Ally McLeod and then Fred Goodwin went from being the most admired person in Scotland to the most despised person in Scotland within the space of a month. If it became common currency that Sturgeon had used an hour of live telly every day not to inform the people of Scotland but to lie to the people of Scotland, you could see a similar moment coming. 

But the second way in which the conference has failed is in making the Party's own activists, herding among their own, to feel important. Don't take my word for this, look no further than The Reverend Stuart Campbell, proprietor of the Nationalist's favourite website, Wings Over Scotland. He suggests the SNP leadership are treating their ground troops like (his simile) mushrooms. To be kept in the dark and fed shit. Now, to describe many SNP activists as as insentient as mushrooms is probably an insult to funghi worldwide but, if those continuing to support the leadership's strategy of waiting for the UK Government to grant them as.30 are stupid, how much more are those wanting a "Plan B"?

There is literally no Plan B. Insofar as I can even comprehend it, it consists either of passing a referendum bill at Holyrood and waiting for the Supreme Court to vote it down. And then to be..... aggrieved. Or instead have a referendum about something else such as "Should Holyrood have the right to have.....a referendum?".

What all this ignores is that their has been a referendum in 2014 where, on a record turnout, 55% voted to remain in the UK. All the attention has been on the relative recentness of that event. Not enough of the decisiveness of it. Not just regarding the result but regarding the turnout. Now, were the SNP to have some sort of other referendum and get 2.1 million votes, or even something remotely approaching that, then I kind of agree that might make a difference. But there is literally no prospect of that! And if the Plan B team think otherwise they are not just stupider than a mushroom, they are stupider than a grain of salt. The only kind of goal they are pursuing is an own goal. 

The SNP is now existing in a strange zombie like incarnation, They can move about. They can, to be fair, still bite people. They certainly continue to take chunks out of the Scottish Labour Party. But they are in truth the walking dead. They should stop herding about  to draw attention to that.