The contrast between Labour's ongoing support for Azhar Ali and the SNP's instant withdrawal of support for Neale Hanvey in 2019 underscores how fundamentally unserious the SNP leadership were about pursuing independence five years ago

For me and a number of others who left the SNP to join Alba in 2021, there had been several steps along the way that made us realise that the SNP leadership were running away from the delivery of independence, and in its place were prioritising identity politics and virtue signalling.  Most obvious was the decision to allow Scotland to be dragged out of the EU against its will in January 2020, having repeatedly promised that was the one thing they would never allow to happen, and without any plan for urgent remedial steps in the months thereafter.  

I've never been remotely impressed by the oft-repeated Bath'ist fantasy that the SNP could have exploited their position in the 2017-19 hung parliament to cut a deal with Theresa May that would have paved the way for the delivery of Brexit in return for a second independence referendum in Scotland.  No such deal was ever available or feasible - May would have rejected it out of hand for her own ideological reasons, but even if she hadn't, she would never have been able to sell it to her parliamentary party.  So, no, the SNP couldn't have brought about independence via an unholy arrangement with the Tory government, but what they could and should have done was bring the issue of an independence referendum to a head before January 2020.  They should have legislated for a vote, and if the Supreme Court had blocked it, they should have then moved swiftly towards the Plan B of using an election as a de facto referendum.  Why didn't they?  Because they were scared of their own shadows after the shock they received at the 2017 general election, which had been unexpectedly called just after Nicola Sturgeon "called a referendum" (sic).  In fact, they gave every indication of having been psychologically broken by the 2017 election result, which was absolutely ludicrous given that by any objective standard the SNP had actually done exceptionally well.  They had won a majority of seats for only the second time in their history, and the scale of that majority was roughly on a par with the Thatcher landslide of 1987.

Another key step along the way to my decision to leave the SNP and join Alba was the sacking and subsequent brutal treatment of Joanna Cherry in February 2021.  That was a real moment of clarity for me when I realised the extent to which the SNP leadership faction had elevated their own identity politics preoccupations above the pursuit of independence.  But there had also been a similarly eye-opening incident just over a year before that, during the 2019 general election campaign, when the SNP candidate for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath - Neale Hanvey - was instantly hung out to dry upon being accused of antisemitism on rather spurious grounds that mostly centred on a careless retweet.  It was too late to remove him as a candidate, but instead they suspended him from the party, withdrew all support for his candidacy and left him to effectively run as an independent in the (wrong) belief and hope that this would inevitably lead to his defeat at the hands of Labour Shadow Cabinet member Lesley Laird.  I expressed my intense exasperation with that decision at the time on this blog - I pointed out that if the SNP leadership were serious about using the election to deliver independence (which I now realise they weren't), every single seat was vital and they couldn't afford to chuck away crucial marginal seats like confetti in a virtue-signalling exercise.  What they should have done was lived with a bit of transient discomfort and reaffirmed their support for their candidate.

Now here's the irony.  A very similar situation has just cropped up for Labour under Keir Starmer. Their candidate for the forthcoming Rochdale by-election, Azhar Ali, has been accused of antisemitism, but it's too late to replace him.  As with Neale Hanvey, the allegation is bogus, but at least what Ali did amounts to a bit more than a retweet.  The pro-Israel lobby have reacted by demanding that Labour do to Ali essentially what the SNP did to Hanvey by suspending him and abandoning all support for his candidacy, even though that would effectively mean withdrawing Labour from the by-election.  But remarkably, Labour have said no.  They've criticised Ali's comment and said he was right to apologise, but other than that they've backed him to the hilt and reaffirmed their support for him as Labour candidate.  

The current Labour leadership are noted for their obsessive 'zero tolerance' approach to antisemitism allegations, no matter how spurious or tenuous, but even they have felt able to draw the line in a politically more realistic way than the SNP managed when a crucial parliamentary seat was at stake.  Retrospectively, that tells us something quite powerful about just how (un)serious the SNP leadership were about the pursuit of independence in 2019.

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