If the SNP conference is to be denied the chance to consider the "rebel" motion, then John Swinney's plan must either be defeated or amended to remove the harm from it

I was asked by a commenter on an earlier thread what I think of Robin McAlpine's new piece claiming that the "rebel" motion, proposed as an alternative to John Swinney's heavily-criticised strategy for winning independence, has been rejected behind closed doors and will not even reach the floor of the SNP conference.  If true, this is not a major surprise, because a source had briefed the press weeks ago that it would all play out this way.  I obviously agree with Robin that it's hopelessly inconsistent with the principle of internal party democracy - and incidentally it's also inconsistent with the logic of even bringing the Swinney plan to a conference vote in the first place, because if the leadership's attitude is that "John has chosen his strategy and he must be allowed to lead", then why not drop the pretence of a democratic process and just impose the strategy by diktat?

As I've rehearsed at length previously, I also take the same view as Robin that the Swinney plan is unworkable and seemingly designed to fail, because the outright SNP majority that is being proposed as the threshold for a mandate for an independence referendum is utterly unachievable.  But where I part company with Robin is in his assessment that all of this means that the SNP have become "an irrelevance".  That clearly makes no sense in relation to a party which forms the government of Scotland and looks set to be re-elected for another five years of power next May.  It's also a nonsense in a world where there is no credible alternative to the SNP as the vehicle for winning independence.  Alba squandered any chance of being a viable alternative by turning itself, grotesquely as a form of conscious choice, into a Stalinist freak-show.  And the only minor-party alternative to Alba is the "Liberate Scotland" alliance, which is roughly one-third composed of a far-right party which wants to do a Belarus by withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, to ban *all* economic migration, and to determine the citizenship of an independent Scotland on ethnic grounds.  Er, no thanks.

So the SNP remain the only game in town, and we just have to work from within to try to improve the situation somehow.  If the rebel motion doesn't make the conference floor, the next best outcome is to radically amend the Swinney motion so that it closely resembles the rebel motion.  If that's not possible, the next best outcome is to defeat the Swinney motion altogether.  And if it's not realistic to do that, the very least that needs to happen is for the motion to be amended to remove the most harmful stuff from it.  As I've said before, no plan at all would almost be better than the Swinney plan, which would leave us in a worse place than ever before by setting a precedent of the SNP going into an election essentially agreeing with the UK government that no referendum should occur until some sort of ludicrously unattainable threshold is reached.  That could make it impossible to achieve independence for literally decades to come.  The voting system simply isn't designed to produce single-party majorities.

In the words of Hippocrates, "first do no harm".  If the best that can be achieved at conference is to ditch the single-party majority target and replace it with a multi-party majority for securing a mandate for a referendum, I would consider that a win of sorts. It would still mean that the 2026 election is a dead end for winning independence (what we really need to do is use the election to seek an outright mandate for independence itself, not for a referendum), but at least we'd be avoiding the self-inflicted wound of setting a disastrous precedent.

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