STRANGE things are said and done at party conferences, mostly but not always away from the public proceedings. When I bumped into Scottish Television’s Holyrood editor Colin Mackay on arrival at the SNP conference in Aberdeen, and he told me he was off to find his elephant, I thought little more about it.
Such is the surreal nature of the scale of SNP gatherings nowadays, anything seems possible. Maybe there really was an elephant, which had temporarily forgotten which room it was supposed to be in. Sadly — or, from an animal welfare perspective, happily — there wasn’t. The elephant was merely the prop Colin was using when asking people when they thought there should be a second independence referendum then sticking their prediction on a graphic.
However. even as all this was taking place, the world or at least the SNP, and therefore Scottish politics, had moved on.
Not only was there no actual elephant in Aberdeen’s impressive exhibition and conference centre — which is certainly large enough to contain a whole herd — there wasn’t even a metaphorical Jumbo in any of its rooms.
In her remarks to open the conference, Nicola Sturgeon changed the script, at least for the party. The first priority isn’t “indyref 2”, it’s “Holyrood 3”. That is, achieving an unprecedented third term in office for the SNP in next year’s election, and another overall majority.
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Her announcement of a substantial policy to have 50,000 more affordable homes built in the course of the next parliament put the focus strictly on conventional, rather than constitutional, politics.
To some extent, the narrative as played out in the Scottish and UK media makes it easier for Nicola by happening to be wrong, or at least overly simplistic.
The conventional wisdom is that the SNP is comprised of 25,000 pragmatic souls who were members before the referendum and are happy to bide their time before there is another one, and the near 90,000 post-indyref members who are champing at the bit to have another go before you can say Braveheart.
In my view, while there may be differences of opinion, or at least of priority, between members old and new on some policy matters, such as fracking, there is essential unity on the question of a second referendum. No one wants to have it unless and until it is going to be won. The stronger your passion for independence, and Nicola would be at the head of the queue on that score, the less inclined you would be to take a punt on another referendum without the strongest possible basis for believing that it would result in a yes.
Putting in place a requirement for independence to have a sustained level of majority support before there could or should be a second referendum marries pragmatic politics with principle. If most people wanted Scotland to be an independent country, there would be a democratic imperative to give expression and substance to that desire.
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My opinion is that the return of yet another Tory government at Westminster in the 2020 general election, which looks more than likely given Labour’s divisions and disarray, would shift a large chunk of opinion from no to yes.
The experience in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Tory government had more than 20 MPs in Scotland until 1987 and never fewer than 10, solidified support for a Scottish parliament. The democratic deficit is far more extreme now than it was then, with just one Scottish Tory MP, and the same process would be likely to occur with regard to independence.
For me, that is the beginning of the timescale for the next referendum, and a “yes” vote. But much can change between now and then, and a big unknown is what will happen in the EU in/out referendum.
The European question has loomed large in the discussion about indyref 2, not least because Nicola has made the scenario of a UK-wide vote to leave while Scotland opts to stay as an explicit trigger for a future referendum.
She is correct to do so, because that would undoubtedly represent a material change from the position last September. I have no doubt that support for independence would grow in these circumstances, at least short-term.
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For that reason, some in the SNP may pay lip service to wanting a positive referendum result to stay in the EU, while secretly hoping for the opposite. Nevertheless, I think that these circumstances would not be so good as those of 2014.
Links that Scotland will continue to have with the rest of the UK are an important part of the case for independence, even though the main focus will always be on the many areas of policy that we could and should do differently from Westminster, such as reversing austerity.
The reality is that these links, such as an open border for trade and investment, are all reinforced and underpinned by our common European membership.
Seeking to become an independent country in the EU from the rest of the UK that was in the process of quitting Europe would be a harder sell for a host of practical, cross-border reasons.
The scope to scaremonger would be correspondingly even greater than it was last year. There would be an added layer of complexity to sharing a currency with a non-EU country, even as an option for a limited period of time.
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For the sake of Britain’s European future, and Scotland’s independent future, it is in the SNP’s overwhelming interests to commit head and heart to help to deliver a UK stay.