The SNP aren't distracted. They're distracting you.

The Holyrood election has become about what happens if the SNP will win a majority. We should make it about whether they deserve to win one.

Is there a better visual metaphor for what is wrong with Scottish Politics than the photographs of the launch of the Glen Sannox by Nicola Sturgeon in 2017?

The Sunday Post @Sunday_Post

First Minster @NicolaSturgeon launches new @CalMacFerries ship Glen Sannox at Port Glasgow yard buff.ly/2Amwm2s

Saltires were handed out to children who cheered as the new CalMac ferry slid into the Clyde to sound of bagpipes.  Had we looked closer, we would have spotted that the event was more than a bit Potemkin, with painted pretend windows on the ships bridge. More than three years later, after a catalogue of incompetence, and allegations of cronyism capitalism, the ship is literally going nowhere.

Whenever the SNP are in danger of being found out they reach for a flag. Whether they are allowed to get away with this over the next few months will determine the course of politics for years.

There isn’t going to be a referendum this year.

This is obvious because agreement is needed to ensure that any referendum has the confidence of people on both sides of the debate, is not open to legal challenge, and is recognised by  international organisations. We know this because Nicola Sturgeon told us this when she took credit for securing the section 30 order for the referendum she lost.

More importantly though, there isn’t going to be another referendum anytime soon because the Scottish Government have not done any of the work setting out a plan for exiting the UK.

That no real preparation has been done is confirmed by Andrew Wilson’s FT article, “Now is the Time for a Detailed Plan for Scottish Independence”, which was expertly taken apart by Kevin Hague. By the way, if you find yourself writing a column calling for someone to come up with a plan for the course of action you’ve already decided is a good idea, shouldn’t it make you ask yourself why you started with the conclusion rather than the evidence?

Anyway, the SNP Government have yet to publish any proposals for how a new currency policy would work, or even told us what their new currency policy is, with different parts of the governing party saying entirely different things. Nor have they set out how a harder border with England would work. Or explained out how Scotland’s public services would be funded after giving up our share of the money redistributed around the UK from the South East.

It could be that Nicola Sturgeon believes she can call a referendum without having done any of this work, and it might be that she so loses control of her party that she feels she has no choice. If so, it would be utterly irresponsible for opposition parties in Holyrood, or the UK government, to legitimise such a leap in the dark.

The lack of preparation by Sturgeon’s government is one of the drivers of the SNP’s rapidly escalating civil war. Her activists know Nicola Sturgeon isn’t serious. Things have become so vicious within the SNP that the First Ministers inner circle have taken to comparing it to the Vietnam war. The truth, acknowledged in private, is that the SNP’s talk of holding an illegal referendum this year is entirely about the First Minister digging in before Alex Salmond drops his napalm on Tuesday morning.

That is the internal purpose for the SNP pretending we’re about to have a referendum. Externally the strategy is to keep on waving flags so we don’t notice that their ship is going nowhere.

As ever, I want this newsletter to offer advice, not just analysis, so here goes.

We’ve Been Framed

It has been a frustration of mine in recent years at how difficult successive Scottish Labour leaders have found it to answer the Yes/No question that now suffocates Scottish politics. Labour hate how the politics of division have replaced the things that used to define Scottish politics– a revulsion at poverty, a belief the power of public services, solidarity with working class people across our island. We are so frustrated by this that we desperately want to change the subject.

At first, we thought we could do this by winning the referendum. But we didn’t count on quite how one-dimensional the SNP are. Then we thought if we sounded more equivocal on leaving the UK we could reach reasonable Yes voters, the ones attracted to the offer of change rather than the opportunity to throw stones at our neighbour. All that achieved was losing No voters who didn’t understand how we could argue so passionately that leaving the UK would gut public services while also saying this wasn’t the most important issue in politics.

If standing in no man’s land between Yes and No voters has left Labour taking fire from both sides of the identity war, what should the party do? I had a go at Boris Johnson earlier this week for failing to box-clever, so let me also turn that analysis on my own party.

The idea of political framing was fashionable a few years ago with books like Don’t Think of an Elephant. The libraries are still closed so let me precis it for you. If I write the word elephant you think of a large grey mammal with chubby feet and a hoover-hose nose. You can’t help it. It’s the same effect as when Richard Nixon went on television to promise “I am not a crook” and everyone just thought about crooks.

It’s about both language and strategy. The lesson is you don’t win political arguments by stepping inside your opponent’s frame. You have to use language and a strategy which moves the debate onto issues and ideas that are more successful for your side.

For you reading this, that means making an effort to move the argument about leaving the UK away from issues of identity and towards economic issues. Those flags on your social media profiles are unwittingly inviting voters to step onto the SNP’s strongest territory. They win if it is an idealised imaginary Scotland vs. COVID-battered Britain. They lose if it is more chaos with Scexit vs. money for the NHS inside the UK.

For Scottish Labour, we need to develop the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time. We should be unequivocal in standing up for what we believe in: remaining in the United Kingdom as the best way to support jobs and public services. However, we should never do that without also explaining the big con to the Scottish people: they are waving flags so you don’t look closer at their terrible record. If we don’t explain the con, regardless of how effective our arguments against Scexit are, we are doing part of the SNP’s job for them. We are reinforcing their frame.

Imagine a clip something along these lines on Reporting Scotland:

We want to stay in the UK because it means more money for the NHS at a crucial time. But there isn’t going to be another referendum any time soon. Nicola Sturgeon pretends there will be because she wants to talk about exiting the UK rather than how the Scottish Government are messing up the vaccination programme, or how they downgraded the exam results of poor kids just for being poor, or how her party has become so arrogant in power that the Chief Executive of the SNP thinks he can refuse to give evidence to the Scottish Parliament. It would be bad for getting over the pandemic, bad for our kids education and bad for the Scottish Parliament to hand the SNP a majority.

This isn’t polished language, but in a forty second clip there are just four seconds on the thing the SNP want to talk about: re-running the referendum. The rest is about Labour priorities: the NHS, poverty, education, devolution.

Too often critiques of the SNP give them too much credit. Counter arguments start from the premise that the nationalists are distracted from the things Scots really care about, when really they are just using independence as a way of distracting Scots. People won’t see this unless we point it out again and again. Today’s SNP aren’t disorientated social-democrats or absent-minded dreamers, they are cynical populists deliberately using identity politics to retain power.

So don’t step into their trap. Don’t answer questions with the premise that the SNP has already won a majority when you should be making arguments for why they don’t deserve one. Don’t equivocate on leaving the UK, but don’t use up the limited time you have to make your own argument talking about your opponent’s chosen subject.

And don’t forget to share this. Thanks.