Well, well, well. SNP conference has gotten off to a rather, er, interesting start. As one might expect, the subject of independence has dominated the first day of the big meet-up in Aberdeen. The party’s strategy as laid out by First Minister John Swinney says that an SNP majority at next year’s Holyrood election would be a mandate for a second independence referendum. But party activists aren’t happyabout the state of the SNP: both its independence stance and the way the party has conducted itself more generally over the last few years. Mr S can hardly blame them…
The crowd sat up when veteran Graeme McCormack – of ‘flatulence in a trance‘ fame – took to the stage for a punchy three-minute amendment speech urging the membership and candidates to go further than the party leadership on secession. In a rather bizarre introduction, the activist assured his audience that one of the people behind his amendment – which calls for the creation of a provisional pro-indy parliament – was involved in ‘facilitating the dialogue between the warring factions in Ireland during the Troubles’. Er, right.
He went on to blast the Scottish government’s lawyers: ‘I was a lawyer for 40 odd years. When I did decide to go into litigation, I never lost a case. Now that, with all due respect, is a wee bit of a better record than the Scottish government lawyers have.’ Ouch. Then he took aim at the SNP’s campaign catchphrase:
One of these cases that I won was about proving that a donkey in Dunoon wasn’t of merchantable quality. Talking of donkeys, the recent ‘right to choose’, the ‘fresh start’ [campaign slogan], that is not of merchantable quality.
He can say that again! The activist continued:
We know that this party is hollowing out. There isn’t a branch that hasn’t suffered significant reductions, so people are not renewing their membership and they’re walking away [to other parties]… We’ve got to respect these other parties because a whole lot of mistrust went on in the last few years.
Talk about tough love, eh? Watch the clip here:
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