Politics: Election: 2021 is shaping up to be the most important year in the recent history of the SNP

In due course political philosophers will soon come to be writing about the SNP’s legacy. And unless the Labour Party in Scotland can re-connect with its core working-class communities the SNP’s dominion will stretch still further.

The party had better hope that Scottish independence is delivered before then, thus enabling it to claim self-determination as its eternal gift to Scotland. Close scrutiny of its political bequest beyond the constitutional question does not yet tell of significant improvements to the lives of most of its citizens.

Certainly, Scotland feels like a warmer and more humane place to be than the current reality of life in England. The politics of Brexit and the darker cultural forces unleashed in its wake has seen our great southern neighbour reduced to a pariah state, still clinging to the frayed threads of empire.

Set against this Scotland must seem like a cultural Xanadu: welcoming immigrants; providing a haven for refugees and seeking to enable them to live and work here.

Meanwhile, Nicola Sturgeon is flirting outrageously with the European Union as England accuses it of unreasonable behaviour throughout a stormy 47-year marriage and a messy divorce.

Yet the SNP still has work to do if it wants its legacy to be regarded as a positive one for the majority of Scotland’s citizens. Baby boxes and the free tuition grift cannot disguise the reality of working-class communities in Scotland’s densely populated west Central Belt experiencing similar levels of deprivation to those they had to endure for decades before the SNP took office.

Only a set of gentle breezes blowing in the SNP’s favour has prevented harsher scrutiny of its failure to improve the lives of its poorest citizens. The party has come into its majority at a time when Scottish Labour now resemble little more than a badly-run social work department. The people whom the Tories unearth in Scotland, meanwhile, are a warning to parents currently considering sending their children to a private school. With an opposition as feckless as this Scotland effectively has become a one-party state.

Latterly, the SNP has been blessed by Boris Johnson’s annexation of the UK Government. When the Union you wish to leave is run by a man who looks like Worzel Gummidge’s shady uncle – but without the dress sense – the odds against the expressed fulfilment of your dream begin to shift in your favour, as they’ve been doing consistently in the last 16 opinion polls.

Yet, in spite of such a benign political terrain 2021 is shaping to be the most important year in the recent history of the SNP. It’s the year when we’ll get to learn how serious the party’s leadership ever was about actual independence.

For several years it’s been virtually certain that the party will gain an overall majority in favour of independence at the next Scottish election. Now they must show their workings to its own supporters. It’s simply inconceivable that a party with its vast resources in finances, personnel and membership has no other strategy than one which they know must always fail: asking Worzel Gummidge’s uncle to grant a Section 30 order.

It will be interesting now to see how the party’s newly-constituted NEC, lately freed from the grip of its designer radicals, aims to use its powers. Its immediate task is to force the party leadership actively to pursue an alternative to Section 30 featuring a determined and well-planned battle in the courts.

With the identity extremists in the party now having been isolated and routed, the SNP now must ensure that they are never permitted to infect the party with their misogynistic poison again. It was only a matter of time before the true nature of these people would be exposed to communities with far more pressing concerns around life and death than gender reform. The damage they risked causing to SNP support in these places could have been grievous.

Of much wider concern for the SNP is how they dismantle a growing suspicion in the wider radical Yes movement that they harbour an insidious neo-liberal strain in their leadership. These instincts could be observed once more yesterday as it was revealed it will face a legal challenge for its failure to implement a recovery programme in the Firth of Clyde, now ravaged by the activities of big industrial trawling concerns. The same dark forces were present in its failure to curtail driven grouse shooting on Scotland’s vast landed estates. It pays these days for lobbying firms to meet the stiff costs of having a presence at SNP conferences.

If only the SNP could have found the same sense of purpose they deploy to cosy up to major landed and industrial concerns when trying to protect working-class jobs in Fife and Lewis which depended on the success of the BiFab manufacturing firm. Their abandonment of these communities to the fate of geo-political capitalism was the inevitable consequence of an incoherent renewables strategy, despite enjoying an abundance of natural advantages. A much more competent opposition would have damaged the SNP over this.

The party must also use 2021 to free itself from the influence of its pet lobbying firms and reveal the shady nexus of relationships that permit a few very rich and powerful people to influence economic and cultural policy in Scotland. In 1997 the election of a Labour Government with three terms at its disposal held the beguiling promise of a game-changing, economic shift in favour of working-class communities. This was blown in the desire to placate the money-changers of global capitalism.

The SNP has a few more years yet to ensure they don’t stand accused at the end of their reign of wasting the opportunity to rule in favour of the many and not the few. Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.