Hamish Macdonell: SNP aims to snatch election victory from independence defeat

Published on Monday 16 February 2009 20:51

MIKE Russell is the one senior SNP figure that some hard-core, woad-wearing Nationalists love to hate. He is confident, even arrogant, he is a writer, a broadcaster and (whisper it quietly) he is English-born.

The fundamentalists ganged up on him once before and managed to force him out as an MSP in 2003. However, not only is he back in parliament, but he has been given the most cherished role ever to be entrusted to a Scottish Nationalist – securing a referendum on independence.

Those same grumbling fundies who have never liked Mr Russell will probably delight in his failure if, as expected, he does not get enough parliamentary support for the SNP's referendum bill next year.

But, in doing so, they will miss the point about Mr Russell's appointment. The former SNP chief executive has been put in charge of the drive for independence only partly because of the referendum bill. The other side of this work – and possibly the most important part – will be to set the SNP up for the next election.

There is no parliamentary majority for an independence referendum. For that to happen, one of the big opposition parties would have to break ranks and support the bill and, despite the positive noises being made by Paddy Ashdown yesterday, there appears to be no realistic chance of this happening.

If that is the case, then Mr Russell is doomed to failure, at least as far as the referendum in concerned. But this is where the Mr Russell's new role will really tell.

The Nationalists are well aware that they do not have a parliamentary majority for their referendum on independence and they know that they are likely to get knocked back in the long run-in to the 2011 election.

But if that happens, they will use that defeat to their advantage, turning it into an opportunity to contest that election on a simple premise – that Scots should be given the right to choose their own future.

Appointing such an experienced campaigner like Mr Russell to this job is a clear signal of the SNP's intentions. The Nationalists will fight the election on the following message – we have governed competently over the past four years, but those dastardly unionists have thwarted our attempts to give Scots a vote on the future of their country.

They will choose to fight the election on their own terms and it will be difficult for Labour and the other unionist parties to counter this strategy.

But will the Nationalist campaign work? There are two big unknowns at play here – the first is the make-up of the government in Westminster and the second is the state of the UK economy. Both will play a big part in determining the success of the SNP's independence-led campaign.

By the 2011 Scottish election, there could well be a Conservative government at Westminster and, no matter what David Cameron says about coming to Scotland to talk to Alex Salmond within seven days of taking office, this could push more voters towards the Nationalist cause.

However, the biggest factor, by far, is the economy. There is a cosy and wrong-headed assumption, which is being peddled by some senior Labour figures in Scotland, that the economic downturn will hinder the independence movement.

They reason that, at times of economic uncertainty, voters become more cautious and do not opt for upheaval. But that is nothing more than wishful thinking.

There may well come a point when the recession is so bad that the Nationalists' arguments that Scotland would be better off on its own may start to have resonance. Why stay with the UK which is in absolute crisis when we could take our oil, whisky and what's left of our financial services industry and start afresh, they will argue.

It is also possible that their more detailed economic critiques might start to have an effect, too – their warnings that the economic policies pursued by the government at Westminster may be good for London and the South-east, but are no longer relevant to the differences evident in the Scottish economy.

But even if they start to make inroads with these big, strategic arguments, the recession will also bring a more practical problem for the Nationalists. The UK government has mired the country in so much debt in its attempt to stave off depression that an independent Scotland would be forced to inherit its population share of this if it broke away.

In the past, the SNP argument has always been that, in the course of suing for independence, Scotland would get its 10 per cent share of defence spending, foreign office spending and so on, giving it enough money to keep Scotland going. Now, though, Scotland would not just get its share of government cash, but it would get its share of government debt too, and with borrowing likely to be 170 billion next year, that alone means about 17 billion of debt for an independent Scottish Government before a single penny had been spent.

This is slightly tricky territory for Labour. It would not want to emphasise the size of the UK's debt, because that would just point the finger at those who got us there, but those same statistics would give Labour valuable ammunition in its battle against the SNP.

So it now appears as if the rough outline of the next Scottish election campaign will be as follows: it will be fought on independence (following the defeat of the referendum bill), with the SNP using the economic downturn to support its calls for a breakaway and Labour using the same context to warn against the same.

But that really should not be so surprising, as Bill Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign made clear, "it's the economy stupid". That has always has been the case and 2011 will be no different, even if the future of the country is ultimately at stake.