A response to Stew's latest abusive attack (yes, it's Monday AGAIN)

The controversial and increasingly far-right Somerset blogger "Stew" seems to have been more than a tad triggered by my blogpost of last night, in which I pointed out that the catastrophic failures and errors of judgement of the people behind Alba and Liberate Scotland have ended any chance of a non-SNP route to independence, and that therefore John Swinney has to at least be given a limited window of opportunity to make his own strategy (which I made clear that I do think is flawed) work.  I suspect the reason Stew is so touchy about this is that he knows perfectly well that he personally bears partial responsibility for the failure of Alba in particular, and therefore for ending any realistic hope that next year's Holyrood election will be used as a de facto referendum.  To some extent that's a feature not a bug - Stew doesn't even want the election to be about independence, and instead wants it to be about a breakthrough for the soft-fascist and ultra-unionist Reform UK, and by extension some sort of 'cleansing destruction' of the independence movement as we know it.  "To win independence we must first kill independence" is the preposterous, if thus far unspoken, Stew motto de jour.

It's all very well for anyone to say that Alba are right to propose that independence parties should use the Holyrood election to seek an outright mandate for independence, and that the SNP leadership are wrong to reject that idea.  But in circumstances where the self-appointed elite of Alba (and the true elite centred around Ahmed-Sheikh, Wilson, Donoghue, Cullen, etc, are very much appointed and not elected) have idiotically squandered any chance of taking a leadership role in the independence movement by behaving like a poundshop Mafia for the last four years, it's a bit redundant for them to complain about being on the losing side in the battle of ideas over strategy.  When you've left the pitch clear for the SNP to monopolise the leadership role, it's a statement of the obvious that the SNP leader will have the discretion and space to make his own strategic calls, however dubious the rest of us might be about them.  "It shouldn't be like this, it should be like that" is the plaintive wail of Stew, which a) constitutes a loss of contact with the real world, and b) evades his own partial responsibility for creating this situation in the first place.  

No, Stew, if you don't get your own way on strategy and policy, the answer is not to "destroy everything and start again", because there'll be nothing left to start again with.  Even if Swinney turns out to be wrong in his strategic choices, and he may well do, we have to conserve and protect the strengths we have as a movement if independence is ever to be won, and to a large extent that does mean preserving the SNP in the here and now.  "I have been spurned, so the movement must be purified in flames" is narcissistic twaddle that we should have no time for at all.

Stew is on particularly weak ground in his "Build Indy Support (FAILED)" point, because it was only yesterday that I set out in detail how his graph showing the evolution of indy support under different SNP leaders was totally fraudulent.  You're entitled to your own opinions, Stew, but not to your own facts.  The first step is to admit the graph was a lie, and then by all means a discussion can be had based on the actual facts.

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