For all the sound and fury, there is no other way forward for the SNP - Joyce McMillan

As I write, President Joe Biden’s special climate envoy John Kerry is on his feet in the Signet Library in Edinburgh, giving a lecture to Scotland’s new Global Dialogues network about the challenges posed by the climate crisis.

His lecture was introduced by First Minister Humza Yousaf, who announced his intention to honour Nicola Sturgeon’s decision, at the time of Cop 26 in Glasgow, to commit Scottish government funds – a modest £24 million, in global terms – to help those countries and people currently hardest hit by climate change.

And for the First Minister, this afternoon of reflection on the global climate challenge is likely to come as a welcome respite from the daily grind of current Scottish political debate; which often seems to exist on a planet where the entire idea of climate change – and of policy designed to combat it – might have been invented by Green leaders Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater purely to annoy the ordinary Scottish voter.

When Nicola Sturgeon resigned as First Minister, a long six months ago, predictions were rife, of course, about what might happen in the aftermath of her long leadership. What few predicted, though, was the avalanche of absolute nonsense about the SNP and the wider independence movement, and about the strategies they should now adopt, that would become the daily stuff of Scottish political coverage and discussion, over recent months.

That Nicola Sturgeon and her husband Peter Murrell left behind a colossal mess in terms of party management is obvious. It is clear that the outgoing leadership’s approach to marginalising dissent from party members. and making policy in a small inner circle, created huge tensions in the party that now require a radical change of tone and structures; and it remains to be seen whether former communications boss Murray Foote, appointed this week as the new SNP Chief Executive, will be able to manage those shifts.

For many of those who became disgruntled under Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership, though, mere criticism of the previous leadership’s management style has not been enough. For many former party “big beasts”, their bile against Nicola Sturgeon – not untinged with envy of her outstanding electoral performance – has also spread into dismissal of her entire period as First Minister, and implied or actual opposition not only to her policies on climate change, as embodied in the Bute House Agreement with the Scottish Greens, but to her general liberal stance on social matters, and the careful positioning as strong voice for European-style green social democracy that characterised not only Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership, but also the 2014 referendum campaign led by Alex Salmond, now a hero for some SNP and ex-SNP dissidents.

Now of course, if the SNP wants to mark Nicola Sturgeon’s departure from power by making a sharp swerve to the right, that is a matter for its members. What is striking about this period of exceptional sound and fury in Scottish politics, though, is the remarkable absence – amid the storm of high-profile dissent – of anything that even remotely resembles a coherent alternative to the kind of policy line advocated by Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf, and by Alex Salmond before them.

Among the possible changes of direction advocated for the SNP and the independence movement since February – often by people who do not support independence at all – have been the idea that the party should move to the centre-right and become more business-friendly, that it should flirt with the kind of social conservatism embodied by Kate Forbes, and of course, that it should ditch the Greens, and stop even thinking about implementing standard green measures. For the wider independence movement, the recommended solutions even include somehow arranging for the independence movement to be led by some organisation other than the SNP – as if other electable pro-independence parties were readily available.

And what all of this storm of speculation serves to obscure, of course, is that there is no way forward for the SNP – no magic bullet, no instant solution, no easy exit route from a 300-year Union – except to push on along the path they have been following ever since the early 2000s, when Alex Salmond carefully positioned them just to the left of the UK Labour Party, the only position from which they can win a critical mass of support in Scotland.

If they shift to the right on economic matters, they find themselves in direct competition with both major UK parties, and abandon their chances of attracting the votes of those too disillusioned to vote for either. If they shift to the right on social matters, they lose the support of young Scots, and risk being labelled as a reactionary party of the nationalist right of the kind all too common elsewhere in Europe. And if they abandon the Scottish Greens, and the strong green commitments implicit in their own policies, then they lose all credibility as a progressive party with a serious handle on the single greatest problem facing all governments, across the world.

Asked, back in the spring, to make their choice between that steady-as-we-go approach, and the change offered by Kate Forbes, SNP members chose the Sturgeon supporter Humza Yousaf to take the party forward through this difficult transition.And if the party could now use a more inspirational phase of leadership, offering a more vivid, detailed and persuasive vision of a possible independent future, it is hardly likely to achieve that by abandoning the policy positions which have so transformed its electoral fortunes over the last two decades; and which, once the dust of this transition settles, will be seen to offer by far the strongest platform for continuing progress, in the years ahead.