Irish rugby legend Paul O’Connell has a simple philosophy when he coaches: “Be the best at everything that requires no talent”. Not everyone can pass a ball like Finn Russell, but anyone can get fitter, get up off the ground faster, be in the right place more often.
This mindset perfectly captures my frustration with the state of the cause of independence. We are being handed yet another massive opportunity, we’re not ready to take it, and yet the things that would have made us ready would have taken no talent.
Unpicking the lock of the British state will take some wit, some guile, some smarts and some creativity. But the stuff that takes wit and guile always relies on solid preparation. That’s what we haven’t done.
It takes no talent to build the structure of a campaign organisation or to commission research into why we’re not winning over more voters, or to knuckle down and get on with answering the questions we have not answered.
It means that we’re back staring at another crisis of legitimacy in Westminster, and we’re not equipped to make anything of it. The Starmer project is melting down, and it is doing so faster than anyone predicted. This, lest we forget, was the alternative to chaos. Labour, we were told, were the last chance to put British politics back together.
I thought we had lost possibly our best opportunity when we made a mess of channeling the post-Brexit mood into a sustained increase in support for independence. I thought it again when, in the face of a Boris Johnson government, the SNP chose to seek to convert Scottish public opinion into opposition to Brexit rather than support for independence.
And frankly, I thought it with bells on when politicians largely sat and gawped at the Liz Truss collapse but said and did next to nothing to make use of it.
There are two primary reasons why this keeps happening.
By far the more significant is that the SNP have chosen again and again to convert these opportunities into further consolidation of their power and control over Scottish politics rather than to break up the UK.
But we were never ready to run an effective campaign off the back of them anyway. We had nothing to campaign with other than lacklustre party political press releases and old slogans.
We have no campaigning structure, no ground game, no co-ordinating method, very little meaningful research on our positioning, no coherent messaging structure (we’re still using those slogans from 2014) and no guiding strategy. Just parliamentary politics.
And yet even this isn’t the biggest problem. I know many of you will be tired of me repeating this point, but I’ll keep repeating it anyway – we have a pretty good idea of why we’re not making further progress because our target audience has repeatedly told us why we’re not winning them over.
There are three big barriers. The first is that we’re not talking to them, not engaging with them. We don’t even know where they are. We do not have a database sitting with an assessment of who is most susceptible to shifting position which would tell us who our audience is.
Mapping a voting base is not something that requires talent. You just need to prepare proper questions and knock doors. Until we know where our audience is, we can’t talk to them. (Shouting over TV and social media is exactly what they’re asking us not to do.)
The second is the overwhelming one – they keep telling us that they don’t think we’ve done the work on how to set up a new country. It’s not that they don’t think Scotland can be independent, it’s that they think we’ll make an arse of it, because we’ve not actually worked out how we’re going to do it. This matters a lot to the people who we need to vote for us, but we keep ignoring them.
(The third reason those voters give for not shifting position is that they don’t think we have the calibre of politician in the parliament to step up to the responsibility of running an independent country, but that is too big a question to address here.)
Answering questions also doesn’t take talent, or at least it doesn’t take talent on our part. I know because we did it. When Common Weal produced the book How To Start A New Country, we commissioned a lot of experts to answer the questions. They had talent, we just emailed a brief.
It’s a deficit of hard work and not a deficit of genius which is currently holding us back. That and a refusal on the part of the SNP to pay a blind bit of attention to anything anyone in the independence movement does. Many questions have been answered effectively by groups in the movement, at least in outline.
But the SNP will not engage with that and will not recognise any of the work. They remain wedded to the disastrous Growth Commission and refuse to accept that it was never a viable plan and most certainly isn’t any more.
THERE is hard work being done. Right now, the most effective work on independence is being done by the Scottish Currency Group, whose annual conference is approaching. But yet again the SNP leadership has refused to send anyone to speak.
There has never been an official SNP representation at this event, and while Kate Forbes engaged constructively with the group on a personal level, there has never been meaningful interaction between a cabinet member and the people who are doing all this work.
If you were to put your hand on your heart, you would admit that we wouldn’t be able to start a proper independence campaign tomorrow.
And if you think Scotland will be in a credible position to start negotiations with the UK on independence next year, you’re fooling yourself.
We’re not.
If, as a movement and as a cause, we keep shirking the tasks that do not take talent, how on earth are we ever supposed to make progress? If, as a voter, you see us sitting on our couch and asking for shortcuts without doing anything, why should you change your position? This is us doing it to ourselves.
I think it is now a foregone conclusion that we will waste this latest opportunity. Or rather, the SNP will use it to try and shore up their domestic dominance and they will do nothing to change the dial on independence. I don’t think we could really step up a gear quickly, even if we wanted to.
But it now looks like another opportunity is coming. It seems hard to come up with a circumstance where Nigel Farage is not leading the dominant force in Westminster in well under four years. That is a giant chance for us – if we use the three available years well and get ready. Sadly, recent history suggests we’ll blow that one too unless we change our ways.
Or, to extend the rugby metaphor, we’re five metres from their line and they’ve just spilled the ball in open play again. It is right there, lying on the ground, waiting for us to pick it up – and we’re lying on the ground in a completely different part of the pitch.
Paul O’Connell would be ashamed.
