WHAT happened to the SNP? Devolution happened.

In 1999, 35 elected SNP members joined the political establishment and became a party machine.

Gradually, party conferences – which once provided a platform for lively and innovative debate – were reduced to a litany of bland trivia and Big Brother demanded a congregation of “heid nodders”.

The machine worked well producing many more MPs and MSPs but not independence for Scotland.

The machine effectively de-activates party activists for the period of the event.

Delegates will turn up at the spring conference in April to a professionally choreographed paean of praise for the 285-page Growth Report on sustainable independence.

The reality is that this weighty document is a catalogue of misery economics and a list of recommendations designed expressly to kick independence into the long grass.

It is a 2018 update on the white paper adopted by Alex Salmond in 2013 – the one recommending sharing sterling, loading ourselves up with debt and chaining any future government to the morals of the City of London and Wall Street.

At least one of the members of this commission should be ashamed at having put his name to it.

Five years ago, the referendum was lost due to the fiasco over the currency and pensions.

Well, this version is no different – anyone who knows anything about public finances knows that no country can successfully be independent without financial independence.

Although I disagree with much of what George Soros says, his opinion proved a lot more valid than the SNP’s council of economic advisers when he said that Alex Salmond’s proposal to share sterling was “impossible”.

He also outlined his belief – in the Telegraph, March 12, 2014 – that an independent Scottish currency would be attacked by speculators.

The SNP hierarchy is actually more conservative than the Conservatives.

For them there is only one kind of expert – an academic orthodox economist or a self-interested banker all putting on long faces at any prospect of change.

There are plenty of other expert advisers who despair at the status quo, promote sunshine economics and monetary policies which are proof against speculators and vested interests.

They perceive an independent Scotland is a unique and never-to-be-repeated opportunity to learn from past mistakes and start with a clean slate.

But they don’t even get a hearing, let alone a voice in the debate.

Whatever it is that’s going on in the heads of the SNP hierarchy it’s not a strategy to win independence in the foreseeable future. Fifty years ago we joined the SNP because we wanted Scotland to be different from England and I think that’s a view shared by most activists.

So why does the SNP persistently portray independence as a seamless transition?

Of course there will be ups and downs and difficulties and potholes – no-one is expecting Utopia – but at least they will be our mistakes – not Thatcher’s, Blair’s or Cameron’s.

Indeed, if it is going to be just the same mixture as before why bother?

Perhaps I’m just a grumpy old man looking down the wrong end of a telescope but I write this in the hope that some delegates will turn up in Edinburgh this Spring and demand an end to filtered resolutions and a return to the open policy debates which are still the beating heart of the independence movement.

RF Morrison
Helensburgh