Tom Gordon: SNP conference applause can't hide the tensions within

NICOLA Sturgeon’s warm-up act at the SNP conference this week said a lot about the state of the party.

Angus Robertson remains depute leader even after losing his Moray seat to the Tories. He looks pretty relaxed these days. He has a “sod-it” beard for one thing. A media recluse, he no longer has to worry about his appearance at Prime Minister’s Questions or work the political TV beat on Sundays.

But while, like his boss, he tries to evince an air of casual calm, the truth keeps leaking out of him.His speech to the main hall in Glasgow was a list of reasons to be cheerful. “Can I begin by being totally unapologetic in recognising that the last decade has been truly amazing for the Scottish National Party and truly groundbreaking for Scottish democratic life,” he said.

Did I mention he was modest as well? He went on: “We shouldn’t forget the SNP has the most members in the Scottish Parliament, the most [Scottish MPs] in Westminster, and the most councillors. The SNP has won the last seven elections in a row, at all levels, local government, Scottish Parliament, Westminster and the European Parliament. Forgive me, I’d like to say that again …” And he did, to great applause.

It’s all true. The SNP’s upside statistics remain remarkable for a party a decade in power. But you don’t need to remind your party why it should be cheerful if it’s cheerful already. Something’s not right.

The embodiment of the SNP’s angst, the 21 MPs it lost in June, got a brief, euphemistic nod. They were colleagues “who were not returned” because “politics is a tough business”. And that was that.

As to why they were gubbed – Ms Sturgeon’s premature dash for a second referendum – that wasn’t mentioned at all. In his next breath, Mr Robertson said one and all were “committed to delivering Scottish independence as soon as we can”. That the same “as soon as we can” mentality had just set the party backwards was skated around.

The reluctance to say what most of the hall knew, that the party’s core policy had hurt them, was understandable but unsustainable.

There seemed to be an uneasy tension at conference between confronting it and wishing it away. Hence lots of displacement activity involving Catalonia, the referendum everyone could agree on.

At one point, Mr Robertson asked his audience how many had joined the SNP after the 2014 referendum. Almost every hand went up.

This is not a membership with patience on its mind. It wants another vote – and sooner than the leadership seems to want one.

The signs of this urgency gap weren’t hard to spot. You just had to wait for the most riotous applause.

For Deputy First Minister John Swinney, it wasn’t when he talked about education, it was when he said: “We re-dedicate ourselves to the cause of independence.”

For Mr Robertson it was when he said: “There are 1,300 and some days until the next Scottish Parliamentary election – and there will also be a referendum on Scottish independence.”

And for Mhairi Black it was a pretty much a whole speech in which she warned her party not not to put independence “on the back burner” and told activists: chin up. But there was little substance behind the splashy rhetoric.

As Ms Sturgeon admitted in her speech, she doesn’t know when there will be another referendum; just that it will come at some point. That’s no doubt true, given a long enough time scale. But how anyone is meant to be inspired is a mystery.

It feels as if the independence referendum has become the zombie referendum, shuffling along without a plan, kept going by crumbs of hope and Brexit dread.

A cabinet secretary told me: “We just have to be patient, get the timing right.” But that takes voter patience for granted. The SNP’s mandate for a referendum expires at the 2021 election and recent polls suggest it will not be renewed, with a Unionist majority in Holyrood. The patience of SNP members is also finite. As they see the next election looming, tensions in the party will become public. Another worrying sign is the SNP’s mid-life kleptomania. Many of its recent policy annoucements struck its rivals as eerily familiar.

Labour recognised measures on teacher training bursaries, public sector pay and tackling period poverty. The Liberal Democrats clocked drug policy reform and mental health.

The Tories reckoned some of their ideas on the NHS, education and Scottish Enterprise had also been lifted while the Greens pointed to a universal basic income, land value tax, a publicly owned energy company and the frackingban.

The parties aren’t grumbling too hard as they want their ideas turned into reality. But this indicates that the SNP, despite talk of another decade in power, is running out of puff. It may say it’s still vigorous and radical (watch out, Jeremy Corbyn!) but, with its big idea stalled, it’s finding it hard to conceal a beige managerialism, and so has stolen some colour. Rather than working out in the intellectual gym, it’s been rifling through the locker room.