Independence is over – killed by illiberal SNP virtue signallers

Their primary purpose – achieving independence – is now beyond reach. And so, they have become pointless, a political chimera. There is no longer any reason to vote for them. Three days after the by-election, you’re tempted to say they’re in denial, but that would be to presume that they honestly believed what they were saying.

READ MORE: Voters have lost faith in politicians

First, they attempted to take refuge in the relatively low turn-out, as if that explained why Labour gained more than twice as many votes as the SNP. Who is to say that if more people had voted, they’d have voted for the SNP? What I heard repeatedly from early on in the contest was that a significant number of SNP supporters – for a number of reasons – were refusing to vote for the party.

Some of them had been sickened by the party’s needlessly cruel treatment of their former MP Margaret Ferrier. Nor had they appreciated being reviled and gas-lighted by leadership glove-puppets for believing that there can only ever be two sexes and that a transwoman is, well … a transwoman. And some voters hadn’t forgotten that Mr Yousaf still has questions to answer about his own integrity when he chose to miss a crucial vote on equal marriage.

Of course, once you’ve been persuaded of the case for independence there’s no going back to the Unionist cause. Not really. Just over 10 years ago, along with many others from Labour-supporting backgrounds, I made the journey from No to Yes. We’d felt that independence offered a historic opportunity to decouple from an entity that seemed to have been annexed lock, stock and PPE gowns by the greed and profiteering of unfettered capitalism.

Before long though, it became clear that the SNP’s pledges to deliver something better were worth about as much as their commitment to independence. The party was being hollowed out by a malevolent coterie who targeted gender-critical feminists.

They began to gather under ‘progressiveness’ – a meaningless and shape-shifting label indicating radicalism. It was anything but. Rather than devise and shape policies that might have improved the lives of those living in the poorest neighbourhoods they opted for elitist self-indulgence: the smacking ban; the absurd Named Persons legislation; the plain daft Offensive Behaviour at Football legislation and the Stasi-influenced Hate Crime bill. All of them betrayed a profound disdain for working-class people.

Niclola Sturgeon received a £300,000 advance for her memoirs (Image: free)

Their late affiliation to the Scottish Greens merely rubbed these communities’ noses in it. These impostors have cost the Scottish people millions of pounds pursuing policies that disregarded the economic distress they would yield for working families.

By now, some of us were reduced to justifying a vote for the SNP by saying that once independence was achieved we could be rid of them. But that didn’t really wash either. That sound you hear in the distance is a stampede of well-shod hoofs belonging to the SNP’s Westminster contingent seeking a nice Holyrood list placement or a job with the party’s favourite lobbying forms.

Expect a glut of political podcasts from these political desperadoes. But you’d get better political insight from re-runs of the Teletubbies.

It was reported by several news outlets last week that Mhairi Black, who has graced Westminster for the last eight years, had forced party officials to endorse her parliamentary aide’s bid to succeed her as MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South. Even if true, she’s done little more than follow the recruitment template favoured by the party leadership in the Sturgeon era: don’t promote the best and most able; only party apparatchiks need apply: the more supine and acquiescent the better.

The first opinion poll following last Thursday’s by-election humiliation for the SNP indicates that Scottish Labour are now narrow favourites to win the 2026 Holyrood election. Even if they don’t win outright though, they will gain enough seats to sink independence for at least another decade.

READ MORE: Can Scottish Labour offer a vision for nation?

So, what now? The SNP’s professional wing have begun to tiptoe away from independence, knowing that their best hope of maintaining their lifestyles is to self-identify as common-or-garden social democrats. Good luck with that. Anas Sarwar has a five-year start on that dissimulation.

What a waste the last 16 years have been. The SNP have left nothing other than an ugly stain on Scottish public life: intolerant, illiberal and regressive. They have inverted what it means to be truly progressive and reduced the struggle to combat inequality to an identity parade.

They have failed to reduce the education attainment gap and failed to devise an industrial strategy that would boost employment in sectors where conditions are favourable: oil and gas; tourism and renewables. Our attempts to make a handful of boats seem to have been influenced by Laurel and Hardy.

Their only success has been in making Scotland European champions in lethal addiction. That and enriching a wretched suite of arms-length NGOs with the proviso that they bend the knee to the cult of Nicola and her chosen successor.

Those of us who can never now vote for this party are left in a quandary. Can we vote once more for Labour, even though they continue to resist the very thought of independence and are about as radical as Jeremy Clarkson? And then hope that while the cause of independence sleeps for the next decade or two, that at least – in the meantime – the SNP will be shot of Humza Yousaf and those indolent lickspittles who betrayed this movement?

Mind you, those chiefly responsible for destroying this generation’s hope for independence have done not too badly. Nicola Sturgeon has secured a £300k book deal and her successor, though his reign may be short-lived, has got his picture on Time magazine.

A parade of highly-paid former advisors have found employment as lobbyists or with global strategic communications firms. Others pretend to be journalists.

They all said they wanted Scotland to be the best wee nation in the world, but they made us something else: the best wee country in the world at rewarding abject failure. They sicken me.