A few weeks before the general election, I used my iScot column to bemoan the fact that there was no billboard ad campaign from the SNP (or any other pro-indy party or organisation) hammering Keir Starmer and Labour. I felt Labour's narrow poll lead in Scotland was potentially highly vulnerable if voters became better acquainted with Starmer's well-documented history of lying, cheating and breaching trust, and indeed with how right-wing Labour's programme had become. However, I did concede that if the SNP simply didn't have the money to run such a campaign, there wasn't much that could be done.
However, now that we're on the other side of the general election, the independence movement has a golden second chance, because if Labour were vulnerable before July, they're even more vulnerable now - voters have spontaneously started to notice Starmer's true nature and his popularity has fallen off a cliff. We'd now be pushing at an open door with billboard ads that make voters think about how Labour presented themselves as 'change without independence' and have utterly failed to deliver or have even been a change for the worse. That effectively leaves voters with nowhere to go other than independence if they're looking for a radical change for the better.
So my heart started to sing this morning when Believe in Scotland sent out an email announcing that they intend to run another two billboard ads and are giving followers a chance to choose between three options, two of which are in line with what I think is the correct messaging. One points out that Labour's own research shows that 4000 pensioners will die as a result of the winter fuel allowance being cut, adding that "Scotland didn't vote for this". Another says "Starmer gets freebies while your granny freezes - Britain is broken". I think "Scotland didn't vote for this" is the more effective of the two, because "Britain is broken" is open to interpretation and not everyone will realise that the nudge is towards independence. They might think they're being urged to "fix" Britain with a new government.
Nevertheless both are good, and therefore I was dismayed when I submitted my vote and saw that the runaway leader in the poll was the only one that doesn't tackle Labour, and instead reverts to the independence movement's comfort zone by portraying the saltire as "dreaming big" and the Union Jack as "living small". That doesn't really do anything at all - it's affirming and feel-good for the hardcore of already committed independence supporters, but doesn't hit any buttons for people who have yet to be convinced.
This is where I think potentially bad campaigning decisions are made when they're taken by radical independence supporters who assume that the rest of Scotland think like themselves. I recently took a look at small pro-indy parties to see if any of them would be a suitable political home for me in the event that Yvonne Ridley's boast proves true and a decision has already been taken to expel me from the Alba Party. But I found that almost all of them were making the same kind of mistakes as Alba, but on an even bigger scale - lots of talk about "national liberation" and "salvation", which in my view sounds like alien language to most voters.
Not long before Alex Salmond died, I was asked why I thought Alba had failed thus far, and I said that I thought perhaps the party's branding had been conceptually flawed from the start. Although I'm passionate about the Gaelic language, from a hard-headed point of view the name Alba may have been a mistake, because for many voters it may have conjured up an image of a romantic, "Celticist" party, far removed from their own day to day concerns. The smaller parties aren't learning from that error as far as I can see. If a non-SNP, non-Alba party of independence is ever going to emerge as a serious contender, I suspect its messaging will have to go in a very different direction from the natural instincts of those who set it up. It'll have to promote itself as a party primarily concerned with solving specific economic or social problems (or seeking to rejoin the EU, or whatever), but one that just happens to be utterly uncompromising in viewing independence as an essential part of the solution to those problems.
As it turns out, there just isn't enough of a gap in the market for a party catering for voters who think the SNP isn't going far enough or fast enough on independence. The SNP have well and truly monopolised the market as "the party of independence", and that isn't about to change. But where there may be a gap is by first speaking the language of voters' real world preoccupations, and then tying those preoccupations to the urgent necessity of independence. That way you might even get soft No voters backing a Yes party, and help build a pro-indy majority in the Holyrood popular vote without directly harming the SNP much. (From a more Machiavellian point of view, there's also a clear gap in the market for a pro-independence version of Reform UK, ie. one that blames everything on immigrants, but that's certainly not something most of us would ever touch with a bargepole.)
