Could the SNP get some mileage out of the Flynn Factor?

As regular readers know, I think the SNP are approaching the coming general election in a completely hopeless way, with a pitch that amounts to a very unspecific "make Scotland's voice heard" which can't really hope to compete - either in terms of clarity or inspiration - with Labour's "vote for us on Thursday, get the Tories out by Friday". Really the SNP's best chance is to have a radical rethink of strategy and to galvanise pro-independence voters by actually giving them independence to vote for. Nevertheless, as you'll have seen I've still been trying to be constructive by suggesting ways the SNP could sharpen up their messaging if they insist on sticking with the much harder course.

Labour and the Tories are of course doing what they always do by feigning offence at the idea that people need to vote SNP for there to be a strong Scottish voice at Westminster - they say that Labour and Tory MPs would also be Scottish voices and would also be heard loudly.  One potentially effective way the SNP could challenge that notion is by pointing to Stephen Flynn's role at Prime Minister's Questions.  It's easy to be cynical and think that nobody watches PMQs, and it's true that the weekly event has a very small live audience, but it has a much wider reach through clips shown on news programmes and so on.  Most voters will thus be aware that the SNP in the shape of Flynn gets a regular opportunity to challenge and question Rishi Sunak.  They may also be rather impressed by the way Flynn conducts himself - not least yesterday, when he demanded that Sunak state clearly that what was seen in the ITV News footage of a Gazan civilian being murdered by the IDF constituted a war crime.  (A well-known interviewer, I think it might have been David Frost, once said that you can't force someone to answer a question they don't want to answer, but what you can do is use your follow-up to make sure viewers notice the question hasn't been answered and then make them wonder why, and Flynn very much followed that advice yesterday.)

Whether Labour and the Tories like it or not, Flynn's role does allow a Scottish voice to be heard at Westminster, and that role will only continue if the SNP do well enough at the general election - specifically if they hold onto third place by winning more seats than the Liberal Democrats do across the UK, which at the very least is likely to require that they remain the majority party in Scotland.  If Labour take over that majority status, there will be no equivalent role for a Scottish Labour MP at PMQs, and it's important that voters understand that.  Questions like the one yesterday about Gaza will simply go unasked in future.  The reality is that the Scottish Labour establishment wouldn't want Keir Starmer as PM being bothered with awkward questions about Israeli war crimes, so even if they had that opportunity they wouldn't take it.

So there we have a fairly clear-cut example of a Scottish voice being heard at Westminster, on subjects the Scottish people want raised, and in a way that does depend on SNP votes and seats.  The SNP possibly could get some mileage out of a sort of showreel of Flynn's "greatest hits", asking voters "do you really want to lose this?"

On a more negative note about Flynn, it's well known that he was one of the voices foolishly calling for independence to be sidelined in the SNP's election plans, so they could concentrate their campaigning on bread and butter issues.  In his latest interview for Representing Border he specified five issues that he thinks the general election will be fought on - 

* The cost of living crisis

* The economy

* Energy policy

* The constitution

* Migration

With the exception of "the constitution", which he probably just threw in tokenistically, how does he think any of those will work in the SNP's favour? Labour's mantra will be that if you want to do something about the economy or the cost of living crisis or whatever, you need a new government, which the SNP can't offer. 

What the SNP could be offering, though, is the radical change of independence, and that's what they'll need to do to get a hearing from voters.  But will that penny drop in time?  Ah hae ma doots.

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