More analysis of the fateful strategic decision the SNP made on Saturday - and my thoughts on how we can best move forward from here

From a psephological point of view, the most interesting question about next year's Scottish Parliament election is whether or not the pro-independence parties in combination will win a majority of seats.  That is a very real and finely-balanced question - as things stand at the moment, I would say that there is perhaps a 60-65% chance that the SNP and Greens in combination will win a majority of seats, and a 35-40% chance that they will fail to do so.  In the latter circumstance it will probably only be a narrow failure, but a miss is as good as a mile.  Until the SNP's fateful decision at the weekend, the difference between winning a pro-indy majority and not doing so would have looked like the difference between victory and defeat for the SNP leadership and for independence itself.  But now, it looks like the only difference would be between one type of defeat and another type of defeat - a self-imposed defeat, because the SNP itself has declared that a pro-indy majority is nowhere near enough for victory.  Essentially all the suspense has just been drained from the election, because we now know with a very high level of confidence that defeat, in the absolutist all-or-nothing terms that the SNP have defined defeat, is firmly on the cards.  This is something that we as SNP conference delegates have done to ourselves (well, not all of us, but by a majority vote), and it's a really odd thing to have done.  It's pointless to pretend that it's anything other than a very odd thing to have done.

Because what is definitely not a psephological point of interest about next year's election is whether or not the SNP on their own will win a single-party overall majority.  In percentage terms, I would say that there is maybe a 0.5% chance of it happening and a 99.5% chance of it not happening.  That is simply because we have a proportional representation voting system which is designed to prevent any single party from winning a majority on its own, and in general it does that job very effectively.  If a weather forecaster told me that there is a 0.5% chance it will rain, I don't think I would even bother packing an umbrella.  When people say that lotteries are a "tax on stupidity", they don't mean that it is literally impossible for anyone to win the lottery jackpot - clearly people do win.  It's just that it's so close to impossible for any given individual to win as makes no difference, and it's therefore rational to say that they are simply throwing their money away for no purpose.  

So by the same token, it's rational to say that it's not a question of what John Swinney will do *if* the SNP do not win a single-party majority, but what he will do *when* the SNP do not win a single-party majority.  The laws of arithmetic do not yield to sheer force of will.  They do not change just because the SNP has inexplicably chosen to set itself a near-impossible target.

Now it may yet be that the pro-independence parties will fail to win a majority of seats between them, in which case it's all an academic point.  That would have constituted a defeat anyway, regardless of what happened at the weekend.  But if the pro-indy parties do win a majority between them, and the SNP fall short of a single-party majority, which at this stage looks like the most probable election outcome, that will be - as Toni Giugliano pointed out in his speech - a victory that we have chosen to turn into a defeat.  I really don't understand what the plan is in that eventuality or where John Swinney proposes to go from there.

One theory is that Mr Swinney doesn't think Scotland is ready to pursue independence (his comments in the Salmond/Sturgeon BBC documentary were consistent with that), and therefore he's consciously set up this strategy as a sort of "painful but necessary demonstration" to the independence movement, ie. when the single-party majority isn't won, he will say: "You see?  We fought this election flat-out on the independence issue, we threw the kitchen sink at it, but the public simply weren't listening to us.  Now we must heed that painful lesson and take the slow road to build the public's trust gradually, and I'm the man for that job." However, if that is what he has in mind, there are two obvious problems.  Firstly, in order to win support for his resolution at conference, he built expectations sky-high that not only would the single-party majority be won, but that he would personally ensure that it happened.  Several of the supportive speakers, notably Kate Forbes and Stephen Gethins, urged delegates to vote for the motion on a "back John Swinney to deliver the goods" basis, with the subtext being that even if you doubted the logical coherence of the plan, trust in the leader and loyalty to the leader should trump those doubts.  So if Mr Swinney doesn't meet the expectations he's built up, it's hard to see how he can then credibly present himself as the man best-placed to lead the SNP on a "pivot to the slow boat".  Essentially he's staked his leadership on literally delivering an independence referendum in a very short period of time via a single-party majority.

The other problem is that if pro-independence parties do win a majority in combination but the SNP don't win a majority on their own, I would suggest the lesson the independence movement will take from that is not that we were pushing too hard for independence and should slow down, but instead that we were self-evidently daft to bet the house on a single-party majority.  And I would also suggest that anyone dismayed by what happened at the weekend should use that as really strong motivation to get as good a result for the SNP as possible at the Holyrood election, because if, say, the SNP win 60 seats and the Greens win 12, I think it's pretty likely that delegates at future SNP conferences will learn the correct lesson and realise that the new strategy was a dreadful mistake that must never, ever be repeated.  And that means a good election result will indirectly help us to win independence, albeit a few years later than should really have been necessary.

I know many people felt they were slipping into an alternate universe when a speaker at the debate said that she had honestly thought that an independence referendum was imminent several years ago, but had woken up to reality now, and wanted the rest of us to join her in the real world, stop chasing shadows and back a credible way forward, by which she meant the leadership motion.  Anyone listening to that speech would have been forgiven for thinking that the SNP have been pursuing de facto referendums for the last ten years, and it's that which has proved a hopeless failure - when in fact they haven't tried a de facto referendum even once.  What they have tried, and tried, and tried again, and has hopelessly failed every single time, is precisely what the leadership have successfully argued must be tried yet again in a new "let's make it even more difficult for ourselves" variant form.  If you want to argue that the de facto referendum plan has failed every time it's been tried, get back to us when you've allowed it to be tried even once.  If you want us to believe the current plan of seeking a Section 30 order is the credible grown-up alternative, get back to us if you ever manage to break its seemingly endless run of being tried repeatedly without even the remotest hint of success.

Contradictions and paradoxes abound in the new variant of the Section 30 strategy.  We're told that the SNP will be campaigning on "Scotland's right to choose", when in fact the SNP have just decided for the very first time that Scotland does *not* have the right to choose, or at the very least that it does not have the right to make certain choices or in certain ways.  For example, if Scottish voters look at a Green party manifesto that offers independence, and if they vote Green on that basis, the SNP are now saying that is not a decision they have a right to take - or at least that it's not a decision the SNP will respect or recognise the legitimacy of.  We're also told that a key part of the strategy will involve reaching out to the rest of the movement and uniting it, but how are you even going to get a hearing from the non-SNP parts of the movement when you've just told them that they have no legitimacy whatsoever and that votes for them don't even count?

For what it's worth, I have no doubt that when the history of the Scottish National Party is written, this strategy will look like a weird and exotic little blip.  It will soon collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, because belief in Scottish self-determination is in the SNP's DNA.  A situation where the SNP are themselves curtailing Scotland's right to choose in certain circumstances will not and cannot be sustained for very long.  But as I stated above, the best way to get over this blip as soon as possible is to win as good an election result for the SNP as possible - that's what will most powerfully demonstrate to delegates at future conferences that the only real barrier to independence is the single-party majority strategy we've needlessly imposed upon ourselves.  Don't listen to the siren voices of the Stews of this world who are trying to convince you that somehow the way to win independence is by first destroying it with a vote for the far-right British nationalist party Reform UK.