{"id":810,"date":"2014-04-11T07:37:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-11T07:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/?p=810"},"modified":"2018-07-06T14:37:22","modified_gmt":"2018-07-06T14:37:22","slug":"reflections-on-the-snp-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/reflections-on-the-snp-conference\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on the SNP conference"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Professor<\/a>

Professor James Mitchell, University of Edinburgh<\/p><\/div>\n

James Mitchell discusses this weekend’s SNP conference in Aberdeen, reflecting on the party’s 80 year history and its future.<\/em><\/p>\n

The SNP meets in Aberdeen this weekend almost exactly 80 years after its foundation. \u00a0There will be many references to the long journey, the many friends lost along the way – no doubt Margo MacDonald will rate a few mentions – and insistence that repaying the debt requires current members to work hard up to the referendum.<\/p>\n

\n

Parties are like other institutions (and people) – they love anniversaries. \u00a0They adopt a Whiggish view of their history, viewing the past through the lens of today. \u00a0The referendum is seen as the inevitable climax of a long struggle for independence that started eight decades earlier.<\/p>\n

Its opponents charge it with proposing ‘independence lite’ unaware that in so doing they are assisting the SNP in projecting an image that might be more palatable to Scotland’s rather (small ‘c’) conservative electorate.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/p>\n

There are continuities, not least evident amongst activists who kept the idea alive through generations. \u00a0But the SNP’s history has been marked as much by discontinuities. \u00a0The SNP of 1934 was on the fringe of the fringe. \u00a0Political history is littered with parties that fought to survive and survival invariably involved change. \u00a0The most enduring feature of the SNP has been its name. \u00a0Even that was questioned at various points.<\/p>\n

Douglas Crawford (SNP for Perth and East Perthshire 1974-79) once suggested changing the party’s name but that suggestion found few supporters. \u00a0Even Alex Salmond once thought that the party ought to change its name. \u00a0His preference was for Scottish Independence Party to ensure its core objective was in its name but he soon abandoned the idea. \u00a0Instead, when he was a vice chair of the party in the 1980s he altered the party symbol in minor ways, each time irritating many members.<\/p>\n

But even independence has not been the term for the core objective of the party throughout its history. \u00a0The party in 1934 compromised on ‘self-government’ and referred to ‘sovereignty’, in an ambiguous effort to draw in wide support. \u00a0But ‘independence’ became the common term used. \u00a0The party only formally changed its objective in its constitution in 2004 under an important review under John Swinney leadership. \u00a0There was a paradox in this change. \u00a0The party had shifted its view from Euroscepticism to Euroenthusiasm over the previous decade. \u00a0It was moving towards a more sophisticated understanding of the position of states in international politics yet the change appeared to signal a step backwards, towards a more hardline position.<\/p>\n

The paradox is easily explained. \u00a0Independence operated more as a slogan, a means of mobilizing activists and offering a clear objective than as a fully developed constitutional option. That journey towards a more nuanced understanding combined with attachment to a symbolically sharper term has served the SNP well. \u00a0And it was a journey that continued.<\/p>\n

The SNP White Paper on independence, issued after it first came to power in 2007, may have used the term independence but there were many references to interdependence. Even a casual reading of the document suggests a rejection of old-style notions of state sovereignty however much ‘sovereignty’ remains a favoured term amongst party activists. \u00a0The journey continued with the publication of last November’s White Paper. \u00a0Finding anyone in the SNP willing to concede that the prospectus was anything other than independence is a challenge. \u00a0Its opponents charge it with proposing ‘independence lite’ unaware that in so doing they are assisting the SNP in projecting an image that might be more palatable to Scotland’s rather (small ‘c’) conservative electorate.<\/p>\n

But careful reading suggests that what the SNP proposes might be termed confederal. \u00a0In the final analysis the term adopted is less important, though not for activists. What is understood by independence has always been at issue. \u00a0How this is interpreted by the electorate will determine whether the SNP’s next conference will involve a massive celebration amidst the hard work involved in negotiations (old-style independence would require far fewer negotiations) or whether it needs to review not only its strategy but also how it conceives of Scotland\u2019s constitutional future.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Mitchell discusses this weekend’s SNP conference in Aberdeen, reflecting on the party’s 80 year history and its future. The SNP meets in Aberdeen this weekend almost exactly 80 years after its foundation. \u00a0There will be many references to the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=810"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":812,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810\/revisions\/812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}