Nicola Sturgeon’s stance pleases everyone… for now

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/17/snp-conference-nicola-sturgeon-speech

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When you are 35 points ahead of your rivals after being in government for eight years, your party has quadrupled in size in the past year and you are the only party leader with consistently massive positive poll ratings, you aren’t doing much wrong. The SNP is still setting new records for electoral success, Nicola Sturgeon is its unchallenged champion and the focus of her speech to her party conference today was entirely on the Holyrood election next May that the SNP is expected to win.

Yet there were big conference divisions at Aberdeen on issues such as fracking and land reform. And an unscientific poll in the Herald yesterday suggested most delegates want a second independence referendum before 2020. As the party’s head of policy wrote this month: “The party are split between left and right.” One of these days, the disjunction between the radical rhetoric and the modest reforming achievement is going to begin to grate with voters.

None of that matters at the moment because Sturgeon has perfected the art of sounding both social democratic and nationalist at the same time, while winning elections. Her speech repeated that trick with enormous confidence and was rapturously received. But it had some tacky moments. There was a complete absence of social democratic internationalism in Sturgeon’s focus on Scotland’s steel industry job losses while ignoring those in England. And while it was understandable to start with good wishes for the recovery from Ebola of the Scottish nurse Pauline Cafferkey, it was narrow-minded not to acknowledge that the medics who are fighting for her life are NHS doctors in Tory-governed England.

Nevertheless, the SNP is set for a third Holyrood triumph in 2016. Yet for all the pro-independence content of the speech, Sturgeon is rightly wary of a second referendum she might lose, to the frustration of many of the SNP’s new enthusiasts. And her social democratic record is much less striking than she pretends. Her big new announcement on childcare was almost identical to the pledge on which the Conservatives won in May. But few in the hall in Aberdeen will worry unduly about that while the SNP keeps winning.