You’re the SNP. You’ve been in government in Scotland for 19 years on the trot. You have nothing to show for it besides ferries that can’t sail and blokes in women’s jails. Your leader has the personality of a gas bill and you go to the polls in May to ask for another five years. What do you?
Apparently, you tell voters that they’re voting on whether to remove Keir Starmer from Downing Street. I’m not making that up. They are, but I’m not. The nationalists have unveiled their re-election campaign with a poster of Starmer and the words ‘Gone in 100 Days?’
100? Amateurs! Andy Burnham will have found a way to remove him long before then. In case there is any doubt as to their line of argument, the party has made it explicit: ‘At the Scottish elections on 7 May, the people of Scotland will be handed the power to sack Keir Starmer and choose a fresh start with independence by voting SNP.’
Mary McCarthy once said of Lillian Hellman: ‘Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the’. When it comes to the SNP, I wouldn’t even trust the punctuation. On 7 May, the people of Scotland will not be handed the power to sack Keir Starmer. For one, prime ministers aren’t appointed or dismissed at the ballot box; that prerogative belongs to the sovereign. For another, this will be an election to the Scottish Parliament, not the UK parliament, and the prime minister is a UK minister, not a Scottish minister. The Scottish Parliament has as much power to remove the prime minister of Britain as it has to remove the prime minister of Burkina Faso.
Somehow, this isn’t even the most fanciful part of the SNP’s claim. The elections on 7 May are also not an opportunity to choose a fresh start with independence by voting SNP. The Union is reserved to the UK parliament and, again, this is an election to the Scottish Parliament. The Supreme Court has confirmed that legislating for an independence referendum falls outwith Holyrood’s competency. The outcome of May’s elections will have no effect on the constitutional arrangements that govern the UK. For that matter, to anyone still voting SNP to advance the cause of independence in 2026, I am a Nigerian prince and have a $100,000,000,000 fortune which I need to deposit in your bank account.
Can I take a wild guess at what’s going on here? I wonder if the SNP’s internal polling is less bullish than the public polls we’ve seen so far. I wonder if they say the party is on course to win the most seats at Holyrood but will fall well short of a majority, maybe so short that even the Greens wouldn’t be able to get them over the 65-seat finish line. In that scenario, they would likely still form the next government but they would have to compromise with the opposition to get legislation passed. They would have to discover a virtue utterly alien to the SNP: humility.
If this is what’s behind the ‘sack Starmer’ campaign, maybe it’s a base motivation issue, or maybe it’s Reform tempting some immigration-sceptical and socially conservative supporters, or maybe leader John Swinney is trying to keep the ambitious Stephen Flynn at bay. (Good luck.) Whatever is going on, the SNP appears much less assured going into this election than previous Holyrood polls. I wouldn’t say they’re panicked, but they’re certainly nervy.
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