From Jim Sillars: Open Letter to SNP Members
Reflection? No. It should be repentance, because 4th. July was inevitable given how the Sturgeon/Swinney era misled the movement.
Fellow Members,
Someone must tell the truth
You will not like what I have to say. But someone has to tell you the truth. What makes me so arrogant in claiming I am able to do so? Well, I am at the end of my political life. My ambitions are behind me. Also, I have been proved right in my critique of the leadership over the past decade, and saw last Thursday coming. A week before polling day, I told journalist Alan Cochrane, off the record, that the SNP would only win 12 seats or fewer. There is also my experience of catastrophe and recovery. It took 8 years from the defeat in 1979 before the people were willing to listen to us again. If you don’t fancy a repeat, please read on.
How we got here
I see in reaction to the catastrophe of last Thursday that there is much talk of “reflection” by our leadership, the National, and a fair number of members of the party. Reflection? No. It should be repentance, because 4th. July was inevitable given how the Sturgeon/Swinney era misled the movement, lost its common sense in government, promoted marginal issues as national priorities while the real priorities of the people such as education, housing, NHS, infrastructure, were notable only for the staggering level of incompetence with which they were dealt with.
Whether the leadership has the grace to repent is of no matter. It is a busted flush. The people have no regard for them. Last Thursday wasn’t about who the Scots sent to Westminster, it was a referendum on the Scottish Government, and a condemnatory verdict was delivered. Few of the people, and it is they who matter, have any faith that the ones who have run a failed government can, by discovering some hitherto unknown ability, take its governance performance to a better level.
If the SNP is to recover, as it must if the independence movement is to have any hope of achieving its aim, the party’s members should also realise that they have cause to repent. You acquiesced in changes to the constitution which shifted all power to a leadership cult, with the party then run by Stalin’s wee sister: imposing a politburo of two exercising an iron grip on the organisation, and the annual conference. When you had doubts, you hid behind the mantra of “Wheesht for Indy”, letting error build on error. You made the mistake of believing that if you openly criticised the ineptitude of the Scottish Government, you were damaging the idea of independence, when in fact by not calling them out that is exactly what you were doing.
You got so used to not thinking for yourselves that you allowed the party to be hollowed out intellectually. Intellectual rigour, an indispensable tool for policymaking disappeared when you clapped Nicola’s repeated claims for another referendum, seemingly unaware that the SNP had become just the referendum party committed to the suicidal policy of putting the cart before the horse. Be grateful Westminster refused to give her one. A mistake they will come to regret. You kept quiet too when Nicola made it explicit that the last Holyrood election was not about independence, but about her.
No sane party or politician wants a referendum when support is only around 45%. The political challenge is to campaign to get to 54-55%, a level which enables you to set the agenda and demand, get, and win the referendum. What if they still refuse? At that level of support you could bring Scotland to a standstill every day of the week, and generate a power that could not be ignored.
Time to take back the power of the party – Steps that should be taken for recovery
We can put away the sackcloth and ashes if the members face up to their responsibility for what has happened and recognise the need to re-assert their power and importance. Only you can reconstruct the party to take back power from the leadership, and rebalance the relationship when it is in government. Only you can restore the party as the prime policymaking part of the movement. Only you can demand that our government concentrates on the real problems that face our people.
The party
Branches should demand an emergency conference. Change the constitution to make the NEC no larger in number than 25, with all of them to be directly elected by annual conference. Make up: 20 from the membership, the Leader, deputy Leader, one youth wing, one MP and one MSP. General Secretary to attend.
NEC to be chaired by the Leader. Vice Conveners drawn from the NEC: Policy, Finance, Youth.
Responsibility for SNP policy in setting out the case, as it develops, for independence to rest with the NEC after getting directions from conference, whether the party is in government or not. There is talent for that purpose in the membership, and the NEC should re-establish Academics for Independence as a source of specialist advice. In government the SNP Cabinet should concentrate on delivery of the devolved services.
Abolish the post of Chief Executive and replace with a General Secretary elected for a four year period, responsible for the organisation, campaigns, and full-time staff, thus providing an authoritative voice for the membership able to speak as an elected equal to the leader.
When the SNP is in government, a 5-person liaison group drawn from the NEC, which will include the General Secretary, to meet the Cabinet monthly to discuss government policy. Leader of the Westminster group to attend.
National Council to meet twice between annual conferences, with the leader, General Secretary, and Vice-Conveners to submit written reports on their work, with each to be open to a question session.
The Movement
The independence movement is split and splintered. It would be easy to brush aside ALBA as a party given their paltry vote. But what of the people who left the SNP to join it, and others who left it, many of them with long years as activists? Would it not be sensible to get them back in our ranks, able to believe in the SNP again because of the reconstruction suggested above – a party in which they can believe in again. We need their talent and energy.
Then there are others: twenty-one separate groups are now active in the movement. All of them doing good work on aspects of the case for independence (most former party members) but no co-ordination, and so no coherent message being transmitted to the people.
The SNP no longer stands alone in the independence landscape. But it remains the political wing of the movement, and its electoral successes and failures affects every other part of it, and its success in elections will in the end determine when independence is achieved. That is if it survives. Survival depends on learning the lessons of the past wasted decade.
The time is ripe for a reconstructed SNP to reach out to all others in the movement, and create a national Yes organisation, not as an SNP front, but with the party in partnership with the others.
The Scottish SNP Government
A good number of the present cabinet have to go, and be replaced with people of ability who have been consistently overlooked. Scottish Government ministers have been on a carousel: getting off from one office, only to get back on to another one, irrespective of how they performed in the first one. The members should demand a clear-out.
There is still time before 2026
The present situation, the one that caused the catastrophe, can be corrected by a reconstructed party and a “new” cabinet. Alex Neil has sent the present one two papers, one on financing a massive housebuilding programme with institutional investment funds, and the other on sorting out the immediate problems in the NHS. There are also ways to fill that financial black hole without asking Westminster’s help, or blaming it for a refusal. We can levy a land valuation tax. We can cut the number of education authorities, 32 since 1993, and shift money from 32 administrations to the classrooms, by creating Joint Boards. But those policies, and others, require ministers with willpower, a knowledge of how to govern effectively, imagination, and the competence to apply them. All of the qualities that are not there in most of the present government.
There is still a case for optimism. Support for independence remains high. The case for leaving Broken Britain is a strong one. But to make it, to anchor it in work that is incontestable because the homework has been done, the party must be reconstructed and the tarnished old guard has to step aside.
Whether that happens is up to you. It is a responsibility you cannot escape. Another 2024 beckons in 2026 if you dodge it. And if you dodge it, you will be dealing what could be a fatal blow to independence.
Yours hoping
Jim Sillars
Jim Sillars talks solid good sense on the matter of the internal reforms the SNP must undergo if it is to regain lost credibility. And lost members. What mechanisms for such internal reform remain available to members is questionable, however. Nicola Sturgeon did a very good job of insulating the leadership from the membership. But the members still own the party, even if they have lost control of it. Surely, they must have some power!
It is not enough for us to urge SNP members to use whatever power they have. We must also support them as they do so. Nobody - least of all Jim Sillars, I suspect - anticipates that an internal revolt will be easy or pleasant. Numerous noses will be put severely out of joint. It will get nasty. But it has to be done, or the SNP is finished as a force in Scottish politics. The concern must be what damage might be done to Scotland's cause as the party descends into political oblivion.
Jim Sillars is also correct to recognise that, whatever its failures and failings, the SNP remains the party political and parliamentary arm of the independence movement. It is an arm which is withered and paralysed, this is true. But it's what we've got! The SNP-haters calling for the destruction of the party are as much a problem for the independence movement as the SNP loyalists who want to exempt the SNP from normal scrutiny. Both these groups are obstacles to the kind of reforms that Jim Sillars suggests. Whether they are saying reform is not necessary or not possible, both are saying we should even consider the possibility of restoring the SNP to fitness as the 'party of independence'.
Having said so much that needed to be said and is such an emphatic but considered manner, it is doubly disappointing to find that Jim Sillars falls down when it comes to applying the "intellectual rigour" he speaks of to the matter of the process by which Scotland's independence might be restored. It is perplexing that someone who has demonstrated such clear thinking on other matters should remain wedded to the Section 30 process. The outer shell of radical rhetoric disguises but cannot conceal, the fact that Sillars is still prey to the old thinking that puts Westminster at the centre of the constitutional issue where the people should be.
Why the hell is he still thinking in terms of asking the British state's permission to have a referendum which, even if granted, could not stand as the exercise by the people of Scotland of our right of self-determination?
Referring to one of Nicola Sturgeon's 'demands' for a Section 30 order, Jim Sillars puts the following in bold for emphasis,
"Be grateful Westminster refused to give her one."
When I saw this, my heart lifted a little. Here at last, I thought, is someone with an influential voice recognising that a Section 30 referendum would be an unmitigated disaster for Scotland's cause. On top of the harm done merely by requesting one and thus compromising the sovereignty of the people of Scotland. But it turns out Jim Sillars is not celebrating Westminster's snub to Sturgeon because he's aware that a Section 30 referendum is a trap, but because he thinks there is not enough support to win it.
Apart from the nonsense of supposing that the polling for independence would be unchanged by calling and campaigning for a Yes vote, there is the fact that the Yes vote would be meaningless. A Section 30 referendum cannot be other than consultative and non-self-executing. A proper constitutional referendum has to be determinative and self-executing. Another Section 30 referendum would count as far as having referendums is concerned. But it would not count at all as far as restoring our independence is concerned. All a Yes vote would do would be to put the ball back in the British state's court. Where it would promptly be burst!
The very first step in any process that purports to be a credible route to independence is repudiation of the Section 30 trap.
I wanted to finish on a positive, and Jim Sillars provides one - almost! His suggestion regarding the creation of a "national Yes organisation" is excellent. But the notion that this should be done by the SNP - albeit a reformed SNP - is seriously wrong-headed. Sillars stresses that this organisation must not be an "SNP front". I would go further. I would say that it must not be seen as an SNP front. There must be no suspicion that it is and SNP front. That is not possible if the party is taking a lead role in the creation of the organisation.
There are three components acting for Scotland's cause. The movement; the party (or parties); and the campaign. While there should ideally be perfect coordination among these components, they have to be kept separate. The movement cannot access effective political power without the party. The party cannot acquire effective political power without the movement. Their roles are quite distinct. The movement cannot be limited by the constraints that apply to a party of government. The party cannot be directly associated with or responsible for the things said and done by members of the movement, because it has no authority over anyone other than party members.
The campaign is separate again. It must be a professional political campaigning operation taking its remit from the party but NOT its instructions. A national Yes organisation is necessary in order that the independence movement can speak with one voice and liaise with both the party and the campaign organisation.
This intervention for Jim Sillars has to be welcomed despite what I consider to be its flaws. Ignoring both the SNP loyalists and the SNP-haters, we should all be putting intense pressure on the SNP to implement - as a matter of the utmost urgency - the kind of reforms Jim Sillars proposes. This is surely the best time to do so, while the party leadership is still reeling from the electoral slapping it took last week.
After the most excruciating, mindless, visionless and finance-free campaign in my lifetime, the SNP membership has to ask serious questions of why it allowed the party’s high-heid-yins to press the self-destruct button. Branch meetings became ciphers for the head office and the well-remunerated ‘special advisers’ and unable to do anything other than what was instructed from the top. In any other organisation, a chief executive who managed to lose half the membership (60k+) - and the income therefrom - would be made to walk the plank. Not once was the talent resource available amongst 120k+ willing souls even considered an asset to be organised into policy think tanks that would do the heavy lifting needed to envision, deliver - and manage - life after independence. Instead the big picture was narrowed down to postage stamp size and the word ‘independence erased from its surface.
That was then and this is now: all the groups that formed then with ideas, experience and enthusiasm need to be reconstituted as quickly as possible and given autonomy to set out a believable, independent future. A decade of failure to address currency issues, pensions - even passports - et al needs to be picked up, shaken and distilled into a compelling package that nobody in Scotland will be able to say is a bad idea. With apologies to the Blues Brothers, it’s time to get the band back together!