Picture the scene around a year from now. We’ve just had a general election. The SNP has gone from 48 MPs in 2019 to, say, 30. Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf announces he is starting the process of taking Scotland out of the UK in line with the policy his party adopted the previous year. Papers are published. Scottish civil servants are instructed to start preparing for secession.
The new UK administration has already given its response: there is no mandate for independence and no legal basis for its implementation. Regardless, Yousaf and his team set off for London to demand Scotland’s right to break away. He’s read the history books – or at least seen documentaries on the Discovery Channel – and knows that maintaining momentum at this moment will be critical to success.
These comical antics aside, the SNP conference was marked by another, perhaps more troubling, phenomenon: rampant misinformation.
But no UK government representative is there to greet them at the airport. Yousaf and his team get cars to Westminster and march to the gates of Downing Street, where a perplexed police officer tells them they can’t come in without an appointment. Disgusted at the way Scotland has been treated, they shuffle off to the nearest Pret to hold an impromptu press conference. The ‘flat white revolution’ might not have produced independence this day, but it will come yet, for no man has the right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation. Next stop, Brussels, where they are again ignored, but at least the coffee is better…
If this all sounds preposterous, it is no more so than what we saw at the SNP’s autumn conference this week. The First Minister and his party really do believe they can lose a bunch of MPs, see their popular support fall off a cliff and be justified in firing the starting gun on breaking up one of the world’s most established democracies. Even if you take the charitable view that Yousaf is taking his members for fools, and that in reality a majority-in-Scotland result at the next general election will merely see him ask for another referendum with the full expectation that the request will be rejected, thereby extending the Sturgeon/Yousaf kick-the-can-down-the-road strategy, the level of delusion it takes to even debate such a ridiculous policy is off the scale.
These comical antics aside, the SNP conference was marked by another, perhaps more troubling, phenomenon: rampant misinformation. From MSPs to speaker activists, it seems the SNP has a real problem distinguishing truth from falsehood.
Exhibit one is SNP deputy leader Keith Brown, who stood on the speaker stage to proclaim that Margaret Thatcher ‘was explicit in recognising the fact that if we win… the SNP win a majority of seats at a Westminster election then that is a mandate for independence’. Really? If this were true then you would think the SNP would have been shouting it from the rooftops in 2015 when they first won a majority of Scottish MPs. The reason they didn’t is because it is patently not true. Thatcher said no such thing. In her memoirs, Thatcher talked broadly about Scotland having a right to ‘national self-determination’, but there is no record of her discussing an SNP majority at Westminster as constituting a mandate for secession.
Brown then repeated the falsehood live on the BBC. If that were not enough misdirection for one conference, he was also on the radio making the following false statement: ‘It’s more expensive to have energy in Scotland than it is in most other parts of the UK, and yet the demand is greater because of our climate.’ As patiently explained last year, neither claim reflects the truth.
Meanwhile, SNP activist speakers on the stage were also guilty of regurgitating SNP misinformation on energy. One stated that Scotland has ‘something like 25-35 per cent of the whole of Europe’s potential on-and-off-shore renewable energy’. This is a statistic that had previously been widely used by the SNP and the Scottish government, so activists can hardly be blamed for repeating it. It too, however, has been thoroughly debunked.
Misinformation appears to be endemic within the SNP. Also at the conference, Brown made a big new announcement: the SNP are launching a new ‘rebuttal unit’ to counter ‘opposition narratives’ and arm activists with ‘the facts’. The chances of that unit not turning out to be a platform for misinformation seem slim. The irony of its launch being announced in the same speech in which misinformation was broadcast was, to put it politely, farcical.
Nobody will take Yousaf seriously if he turns up at Westminster next year expecting to negotiate secession. In the meantime, Scots will struggle to take seriously anything SNP politicians say at all when falsehoods are so easily being served up, even to their own party members.
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