What's the Story With the SNP's Million Newspapers?

The SNP's free sheet introduces a new narrative but they can't finish the story.

When I was wee, I was the youngest of all the kids in my family’s circle of friends. When I would play hide and seek with the bigger boys and girls, and it was my turn to hide, the others would conceal themselves in bushes or behind the bins. I would stand there in the open with my hands over my eyes. I thought that because I couldn’t see the world, the world couldn’t see me. I was easy pickings for the seeker. I remembered that this week when reading the SNP’s new newspaper.

‘Narrative’ is one of those words that politicos overuse, often without really knowing what it means. The theory is that campaigns have to tell an overarching story about politics that helps voters to see the world in the same way they do. A good narrative needs four elements:

• First, you need to set out values that are shared between you and the people you want to win over.

• Next, you need a villain who is violating those values.

• Then, you need a vision, an explanation of how things will be different if you overcome the villain and return to those values.

• And finally, you need a voter offer, a way of miniaturising the big idea into the specifics that will improve people’s lives.

This week the SNP road-tested a new narrative in a newspaper delivered to a million houses across Scotland. Let’s look at each element of the story they are telling us.

Their values section is the same old Scottish exceptionalism. So comfortable are they with self-congratulation that the newspaper claims that Scotland’s entire identity is now defined by an inclusive nationalism. However, each contributor in the newspaper concentrates on the idea that we are so different, to the point of complete incompatibility, with our neighbours in England.

The villain is just as familiar: an uncaring Westminster is squandering our natural resources and stealing our wealth. Wind and waves have replaced fossil fuels as a new, greener grievance. Of course, the reality is that resources are flowing from the rest of the UK to support green investment, but the frame of the rapacious outsider taking away our wealth is too deeply ingrained to give up on. Fiscal arguments have been replaced by pure fiction, with Kate Forbes claiming “Scotland has been treated as an afterthought at best while resources have been poured into London and the south-east of England,” despite her figures showing the opposite is true.

It is when the narrative tries to offer a vision that it becomes clear that SNP strategists are struggling. If the values and villains are specific, the vision part of the story is hopelessly vague and the voter offer is completely absent.

The vision they are looking for.

The last time the SNP distributed a million newspapers to voters, the future offer was transactional. Numbers shouted from the front pages with a clear monetary reward that could be redeemed if we agreed to leave the UK.

What is remarkable about the new newspaper is the total absence of numbers. The offer to voters in 2014 was built on a single year’s tax windfall from a spike in oil prices. Since then the fiscal position flipped. Deciding to keep our share of UK funds has been worth more than £10,000 for each of us in Scotland over what would have been our first five years as a separate state.

This leaves the SNP with a strategic paradox. How do you go from arguing that leaving the UK meant billions more for decisions based on social democratic values to convincing a social-democratic electorate to vote for billions less? Having flattered voters about how compassionate they are, how can you ask them not to care about the cuts you want them to support?

The story the SNP tell about values needs to be reconciled somehow with an economic vision. But it is impossible to square a commitment to a more equal society and well funded public spending with the consequences of leaving the UK: cuts as we lose our share of UK funds; job losses as we impose a new border on our biggest market; the costs of years of Sterlingisation and then creating a separate currency.

They know they lose if the argument is about economic reality so they have to change the conversation to economic theory. They need us to imagine the improbable instead of making a canny judgement.

They appear to have grasped onto the Wellbeing Economy agenda as a way of doing this. The idea behind this agenda is that government should not simply prioritise economic growth but should make policy with human and ecological wellbeing in mind. The philosophy has gained attention when Zew Zealand Labour’s Jacinda Ardern’s presented a Wellbeing Budget in 2019. It now has governments around the world, pledging to prioritise the happiness of their people and the protection of the environment.

The wellbeing agenda is worthy stuff worth reading more about. It informed Welsh Labour’s introduction of wellbeing goals in 2015 and the Conservatives introduction in 2012 of a requirement to factor in economic, social and environmental values in the commissioning of public services. Its underlying values enjoy broad support across the UK and it’s good that the Scottish Government is committed to it in devolved public services.

The political usefulness for nationalism is that it’s a set of principles rather than a precise policy prescription. It’s vague enough to be a substitute for the detailed vision that Nicola Sturgeon cannot offer. It offers a way of reframing the disruption and pain of disintegrating the UK as a moment of renewal. The prospect of a generation of austerity is reframed as an alternative to “short term fixes”, with euphemistic language about “tough challenges to be faced.”

The problem is that a true wellbeing agenda doesn’t mean spending less on public services, quite the opposite. Jacinda Adhern’s budget spent billions more on mental health services, domestic violence and child poverty. The SNP are unable to transform their big idea into a retail offer because any similar promise to invest in these priorities crashes into the question of how it can be paid for when we’d be giving up £10billion a year of public spending, or how they can promise spending when they cannot even say what currency our economy will use and when?

The nationalist narrative is trapped in populist appeals to exceptionalist values and exploiting grievances. To move the debate onto a positive policy agenda would reveal that their whole project would betray those very values and worsen those grievances.

Rather than honestly reassess whether leaving the UK makes sense, the SNP simply aren’t willing to look at the problems their central policy would create. The funding of public services, the costs of a new border, the impact of the confusion around currency, all are ignored. They seem to believe, as wee Blair did, that if they don’t look at it, nobody can see it. They must realise they’ll be found out in the end.

It’s all getting a bit boring.

Little wonder that the nationalist campaign feels stuck in the mud. A new poll today from Yougov is the latest to show that, for all her unchallenged power, and all the gifts her opponents have handed her when Nicola Sturgeon says she is going nowhere, she really means it. The poll shows:

• Voters are scunnered by the never-ending constitutional debate. The proportion of voters ranking the constitution in their preference for the Scottish government’s top three priorities has fallen to just 13 per cent.

• Even amongst SNP voters, only 28% rank independence as a priority.

• Just 40% of voters now say they’d vote for Scexit.

Of the last 30 polls, just three have had a majority in favour of leaving the UK. The hubris of last year when the SNP claimed a “new settled will” feels long ago.

Sturgeon’s own rating fell by 40 points as people tire of her failings in government. If the opposition can offer a vision for devolution that contrasts with the failures of the SNP and the fantasies of the nationalist movement, it could be transformational. And my goodness doesn’t our politics need that alternative?

In case you missed it…

This is the first Notes on Nationalism in a while (you can tell when I’m snowed under at work - apologies) so there is a lot to catch up on. Here’s the best of the last wee while.

• I’ve counselled against giving the ‘Greens’ the oxygen of publicity. Attacks on them simply serve their shared strategic purpose of making their party a permanent SNP surrogate for nationalist second votes. It’s hard to be disciplined when they seem determined to create terrible stories of betrayal on a weekly basis. However, I did say that when the Greens harm themselves we should exploit it. There will be no more damaging blow landed on the ‘Greens’ than that they inflicted on themselves.

  Jack Foster @jackfostr

  Responding to criticism of Green Party co-leader Patrick Harvie - who’s been accused of being an “apologist” for Nicola Sturgeon - @Ross_Greer says “it’s fair to say that Greenpeace don’t really understand Scotland”. #COP26 @LBC @LBCNews

  The only thing anyone should say about them from now on is this: we remember when you went to an international climate change conference to attack Greenpeace in defence of the SNP’s position on oil exploration.

• In the ultimate betrayal of her supposed defining mission to improve the education of kids from poorer backgrounds, Nicola Sturgeon is imposing swinging cuts on the funds designed to help those very pupils.

• Jack McConnell gave a must-read interview to Holyrood magazine where he warns supporters of the UK to make a case for a redistributive union rather than becoming existentialist mirrors of the SNP. He voices a righteous anger that is too often missing from Scottish politics.

  “Where’s the progress, the big ideas? I despair about the delivery of transport. I cannot believe that we’ve had rail strikes every Sunday in Scotland since January or February and there hasn’t been even a public argument about it until the last couple of weeks when it may have affected COP.  I mean, the idea of devolution was to create better public debate in Scotland and more accountability. And it seems to me that we’ve ended up in a place where we have the opposite. And I don’t know how to change that.”

• Stories abound on the crisis overseen by the SNP in our NHS. Anas Sarwar continues to uncover a culture of cover-up at our biggest hospital. Meanwhile, an internal document suggests that the ‘watchdog’ who is meant to be looking after us was more interested in delaying the release of bad news until after the election. And Professor Paul Gray, former Chief Executive of NHS Scotland has reminded us that the crisis pre-dates the pandemic.

• The brilliantly talented Brian Cox was rightly pulled up by Euan McColm for his distinctly un-civic nationalism. “We are Celts,” he said. “We have a different sensibility, we have different cultural routes. We are not the same as the south.” Too often celebrity nationalists are given a free pass for pretty ugly political views. Hardly an eyelid was batted when Angus McFadyen tweeted about making English immigrants feel unwelcome in Scotland, frothing “if it’s a war they want, it’s a war they shall get”. A few weeks back comedian Daniel Sloss went out of his way on Conan O’Brien’s podcast to stress that when he talked about hating the English, it wasn’t just banter. If celebrities in the rest of the UK found themselves so enthusiastically othering another group, their peers would call them out. Why not in Scotland?

• If you’re looking for a visual metaphor for what the SNP have done to Scotland, you’d struggle to do better than what has happened to the People’s Palace winter gardens.

  Paul Sweeney MSP @PaulJSweeney

  Below is what the leader of Glasgow City Council, Susan Aitken said in January 2019, in response to me raising legitimate concerns on behalf of my constituents about the future of the historic People's Palace Winter Gardens. And this is what the Winter Gardens looks like now. 👇🏻

  

  

  Susan Aitken @SusaninLangside

  📢PAUL SWEENEY MAKING THINGS UP KLAXON📢 The heating will stay on, the most important species have been moved to other glasshouses & the remainder will be maintained as required. Feel free to ignore the below & carry on with your day. https://t.co/HCjDCoWNjx

• And finally, while their house paper fantasises about new cargo routes to Belgium, a reminder that our island communities are being abandoned by the SNP.