Ruth Davidson

After 14 years, SNP are still singing the same song

TOMORROW, Nicola Sturgeon makes her keynote speech to the SNP party conference. As it is a wholly online affair, unlike other parties, it will be hard to take the temperature of the room. But we’d be forgiven for thinking it may be a touch more muted than the fervour of previous years.

Leading up to the event, deputy leader Keith Brown rallied the faithful by declaring that, over the months to come, SNP members would make the case ‘which will lead us to independence’.

But, after 14 and a half years of government, and seven years on from the referendum, does anyone truly believe that Nicola Sturgeon, Ian Blackford and John Swinney are just a few months and one more heave away from breaking up Britain?

I was elected to Holyrood in the 2011 Scottish parliament election that delivered the SNP their one and only Holyrood majority. It was a startling achievement which paved the way for the referendum to take place.

My entire decade as an MSP was dominated by the constitutional question. And, at times, I have been an enthusiastic combatant in the arena – fighting for what I believe in, which is that being able to be Scottish and British too is a positive. That these two identities can coexist and be worn lightly – complementing each other rather than being in conflict.

I can recite all the stats and facts you want about union dividends, or cross-border trade, or defence investment, or a hundred other metrics which show Scotland benefits from the Union that we helped create and continue to have ownership over.

But the question has always been a much more elemental one for me – that I am Scottish and British.

Those who advocate independence seek to take that British part of me away, to say I am no longer both, and they will not truthfully tell me what I gain in return for that loss.

Now that I am no longer in Holyrood I feel I have a greater benefit of distance. A perspective that I perhaps didn’t have when I was in the daily maelstrom of the debate.

I can honestly say that Scotland feels further from the SNP’s stated goal than at any point over those past ten years. Imperceptibly, a momentum that first Alex Salmond, and then Nicola Sturgeon, sought to build to take them over the line has begun to ebb away and daily frustrations have become running sores.

Promises made in 2014 – like funding an independent Scotland’s coffers off the back of the oil industry, or being able to set up the apparatus of a new state in 18 months – have turned to ash.

Nicola Sturgeon’s new green credentials have set her against oil and gas, while this SNP government can’t even build two ferries in triple the time they said that they could build an entire country.

People have noticed. Two new polls by YouGov and Survation last week again showed independence as a minority pursuit. That’s now 27 of the last 30 polls in Scotland showing the nationalist juggernaut falling short. But the headline question on voting intention won’t have been the one bothering nationalist strategists.

The real story is that independence has dropped to eighth in the list of Scottish voters’ priorities, while only about a quarter of SNP supporters saw it as a key objective. When even the rank and file would prefer focus to be directed towards health, the economy and social care, the idea that secession is mere months away is for the birds.

NO wonder Ms Sturgeon’s big preconference BBC interview was so tetchy. With net approval ratings plummeting to less than a quarter of their high point during the pandemic, the First Minister snapped her way through a question about when she might leave office.

Claiming that she was only being asked because her opponents couldn’t beat her, so they wished her gone, was a nice piece of sophistry. But she’ll know herself it was an interview with Vogue magazine where Ms Sturgeon opened up on life after office – musing on writing a book or fostering children – which set the hare running.

The nationalists will always push for independence. That is their right. And too often those on the pro-UK side have been complacent. Those who want to see the UK continue need to make and remake the case for it.

But, right now, the Scottish people are speaking clearly. After ten years of a politics where the constitution has crowded out every other policy area, it is time for politicians to turn their full attention to the daily needs of this country – health, education, jobs, social care, justice, reducing inequality and raising the health, wealth and ambitions of all our citizens.

If our current MSPs attack that with the same zeal previous parliaments have poured into constitutional wrangling, we will see a new and better Scotland.