THE penny seems to have dropped for Neil Mackay as he has identified that the SNP’s commitment to independence is a declining asset in today’s politics, if it is indeed not already a liability (“SNP’s indy obsession will hand victory to Labour”, The Herald April 18). The fact is that the SNP resembles nothing more than Wile E Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons: the momentum generated by the 2014 referendum has allowed it to artificially defy the laws of political gravity, but now the only way is down.
Moreover, it is clear is that the cause of the party’s decline is its lack of intellectual and philosophical substance. By comparison, we can learn about Labour’s social democracy from reading the works of Tonys Crosland and Benn, and its political application from the memoirs of the likes of Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Robin Cook; for contemporary political debate, as an active Fabian, I would recommend that Society and its publications. Likewise, the Conservatives have an intellectual background which pits the One Nation ideas of Disraeli with the Hayek-inspired Thatcher-Joseph ideas of the 1970s.
You do not have to agree with their ideas, but no-one can claim that they have had none – which is very much in contrast to the SNP: it has no Fabian-style policy hinterland; it has had no Benn or Cook or Disraeli or Hayek. Instead it relies on vacuous nonsense like “independence is normal” (when in fact nation states comprising unions are at least as frequent) and “why should Scotland not be like Denmark?” (er, because it is not Denmark?) or claims exceptionalist “Scottish values” (while at the same time telling us that Scots are responsible for such a rising tide of hatred that we need a special new law to tackle it).
It is notable that when Labour and the Tories have had leaderships which have been interested in slogans and not ideas (for example, Corbyn and Johnson and Truss respectively), their standing has fallen disastrously. It looks like the same fate now awaits the rather dim Humza Yousaf, and the ideas-free zone which is the SNP.
Peter A Russell, Glasgow.
Planet Pedro! 