Scottish National party conference: the descant of political reality

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/18/snp-conference-political-reality-no

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The clock is ticking for the Scottish National party. Literally. Behind every rostrum speaker in the SNP conference hall in Perth, a large digital clock counts sleeplessly down. Yesterday, it was 334 days to go before the 18 September 2014 independence vote. Today, when Alex Salmond gives his leader's speech, the climax of the last SNP annual conference before the vote, it will be 333.

Polling day is concentrating the SNP's mind. Every reference to a yes vote next year wins the usual warm round of applause from the well-packed hall. But you get the sense in Perth that the immensity of what is at stake in 2014 is really sinking in. Salmond and the SNP have brilliantly surfed the wave of political popularity for six years now, winning the right in 2011 to put their belief in an independent Scotland to the voters. But the nearer they get to those still-distant dazzling lights, the clearer it is that the hard work is only just beginning.

The SNP is a fascinating political phenomenon. The only political party in Britain with a really popular leader. The only governing party in Britain with a clear poll lead. One of the few governing parties in Europe whose support has grown through the financial crisis. A party with an enviably energised and effective propaganda machine. And the SNP conference in Perth is the only one this autumn in which the leader's speech seems to have nothing to prove.

And yet there's a descant in Perth to the major-key optimism that has marked every SNP conference in the last few years. That descant is political reality. Try as the SNP machine might to spin a more favourable story, the opinion polls continue to point solidly towards a no vote next year. Increasingly, you can discern a more minor-key debate among some Nats. How well can we do to keep the independence issue alive after 2014? What would be an honourable defeat? Or even, given the consistency of the polls, a moral victory?

Imagine how you would feel on 19 September if Scotland votes no, the SNP's deputy leader, Nicola Sturgeon, warned in a high-octane speech yesterday. "Will it be knowing that nothing has changed?" she suggested. "That we had a precious opportunity to do things differently but, with the eyes of the world upon us, we opted to leave them as they are?"

The very fact that Sturgeon even posed the possibility of defeat was a sign of the mood here. Sturgeon is practically everyone's choice to succeed Salmond if the vote is a disaster, but she doesn't need to position herself to inherit. Hers was a speech about the here and now – and that means boosting the yes campaign's appeal to floating voters and the don't-knows whom the SNP is targeting.

Significantly, Sturgeon's speech, and the SNP's pitch, is less and less about romantic nationalism and sovereignty. Tartan, Rabbie Burns, and biscuit-tin nationalism are all on the fringes in the modern SNP. Today's nationalist focus is all about defending the sense – and to some extent the reality – that Scotland is the last bastion of the 1945 welfare state nation, which England is perceived to have abandoned, and which the UK parties seem powerless or downright unwilling to protect.

Sturgeon's speech sang a siren song to the working-class Labour voters in the west of central Scotland who, in SNP eyes, hold the key to a shock yes vote win. An SNP government of an independent Scotland would keep the Royal Mail public, abolish the bedroom tax, protect the state pension and social security, and kick out Trident, she said. All she and the SNP need now is for David Cameron to soar ahead in the UK polls and to look a likely general election winner. Or so, clutching at something more than straws, they hope. And still the clock ticks.

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