IT was a good day for SNP members yesterday. With votes on land reform and fracking, they showed the party leadership that they are not here to be taken for granted. The members will not accept “close enough”or “better than what the others have proposed”.
The party now has over 114,000 members, four times as many as they had just after the referendum last year. Astonishingly, they now have nearly a third of Labour’s membership in the UK.
This is a membership who care deeply about their party. This is a membership with a huge amount of power – and yet it is incredibly disciplined.
There is a simple reason for this. It is because they have known defeat.
Many in the SNP are impatient for independence, although they believe they will see it in their lifetimes, they want it sooner rather than later.
But there will be no crazy demands for a referendum for the sake of it from the thousands of members crammed into Aberdeen’s conference centre.
These, for the most part, are people who had never been in politics before. They had never known what it was to lose an election.
Most SNP politicians and activists, and indeed most politicians and activists from all Scotland’s political parties know what it is to lose.
But on September 19 last year, a whole, massive swathe of society felt what it was to lose for the first time.
They responded by joining the SNP and the Greens. By signing up to community councils and local groups. They signed up by being active.
But that experience of losing has never gone away.
The next referendum will, as it should, only be when it can be won.
Today’s speech by Nicola Sturgeon is the start of the election campaign proper.
The SNP’s rivals accuse it of being singularly focused on the constitutional question. Yet it has governed for eight years.
Now it is about the state of our schools, our hospitals, our infrastructure and the quality of our life in Scotland.
Let the political parties competing for our votes be judged on their record and on their promises.
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