Conferences can energise parties as campaign for indyref2 truly begins

Conversely, party managers will be ­striving for ubiquitous goodwill since that way they get to survive the following 72 hours without picking up the wounded from a blood spattered debate.

Virtual conferences are self evidently easier to control, and, frankly, much less fun. It’s the fringe meetings and the gossip infested watering holes that add flavour to what can be a pretty anodyne menu.

Over the years what tends to linger in the memory banks are not the worthy speeches and earnest appeals for more motherhood and lots of apple pie but the moments of genuine drama.

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The speech Neil Kinnock made in Bournemouth all these years ago simply electrified his party conference taking on the Militant Tendency in an address which half his audience cheered to the echo, and others considered a sellout.

People remember it not just because he was a considerable orator, but because he lanced a boil which for a while had ­threatened the very existence of a party which had tumbled to humiliating defeat just two years before.

The passage folks remember most was when he talked of the “grotesque ­spectacle” of Labour councillors taxi-ing round ­Liverpool with redundancy notices for their own workforce.

But if today’s indy supporters want a ­lesson to be learned from that speech it came when he urged members to speak to real people and not “dogmatise and browbeat”. One of the huge contemporary fault lines is over GRA reform, and there’s no shortage of dogmatic browbeating around that topic.

Another blast from the past which has new relevance today was the SNP motion to move to one member one vote. When ­Labour’s John Smith finally got this through on a knife-edge vote he did so by deploying the nuclear option of having John Prescott give the closing speech in the debate.

It was rousing and largely incomprehensible! One commentator insisted it would have sounded much the same played backwards. Anyway it worked. According to Smith, adopting OMOV was “vital for ­internal democracy”.

It always makes me nervous when ­parties fret about trusting their own ­membership, though in Labour’s case it was aimed at dismantling the power of the union block votes.

Today the SNP’s virtual gathering brings us to another major fork in the road – the when of another referendum campaign. The news that the civil ­service was at last to be mobilised on drawing up plans for a poll before the end of 2023 was music to the ears of those of us who have long worried delaying too long would give more opportunity to dismantle devolution never mind anything more ambitious.

Yet one of today’s motions keeps the cautious approach alive speaking about not compromising the nation’s health, wellbeing and economic potential by ­staging indyref2 “before it safe to do so”. It goes on to talk about waiting until the data indicates a “clear end to the public health crisis”.

Given the recent Covid surge, many people argue that a clear end to this ­hideous pandemic will never arrive and that the future will be how to manage it.

There’s also what I would suggest is ­unnecessary weight given to polling ­suggesting that the public wouldn’t wear a referendum “too soon”. That polling shouldn’t be too surprising given that the public are told day and daily by people who are desperate to stop a referendum that “now is not the time”.

Witness the recycled, reheated faux outrage from Douglas Ross who seems to have concluded that the louder he shouts the more people will get the message.

For his camp there will never be a now that’s the right time. Still, if they go into a new independence referendum campaign with unchanged minds and yesterday’s slogans it’ll save them having to find the cash to fund new billboards. They’re just the guys who can only say no.

In contrast, the growing army of pro independence voters, once more in the majority according to the latest sampling, have many new tales to tell. There’s a fair bit of work going on backstage to ­contact the converted and supply them with the material they need to disseminate to friends, families and workmates.

It’s beyond debate that we have to ­persuade the soft No’s and wobbly ­Yessers, but let’s do that by talking up the very real prospects available to an independent Scotland, not forgetting to ­mention the arid landscape in which we will dwell if we plight our troth by default to the hapless crew running the ­Westminster show.

Changing minds, enthusing campaigners afresh is not an easy task but it is one imbued with no little urgency. The ­cautious motion talks of “a full normal and energetic referendum campaign”. Well it may just have to be not normal. Arguably neither should it be.

Let’s not rely on an analogue campaign in a digital world. We may not be able to chap on as many doors, but we can ­certainly use every available social media tool to get the message across.

We have a positive message, and ­positivity is always more attractive than fearmongering though there’s no shortage of frightening prospects if we stay in the UK.

With every day that passes more and more Scots are feeling personal pain from Tory policies, from the upcoming cutting of the uplift in universal credit, to the post Brexit decimating of core industries, rising prices and emptying shelves.

THE other motion on the same theme seems to grasp both more of the urgency required and the sense that recovering from the horrors of Covid and economic carnage need essential powers beyond the scope of a devolved government with ever diminishing leeway.

The text in part reads that “recovery from Covid will require powers that are not available within the devolved powers of the Scottish Government and believes that independence is therefore essential to our recovery”.

That recovery should not depend on the right data coming through but be front and centre of the next campaign it suggests. I’m hoping that’s the one that gets the conference nod.

Hoping too that when the First ­Minister makes her setpiece speech she’ll not spend too much time looking in the rearview mirror at the devastation so many people have encountered since the ­pandemic washed over the globe.

She and her team have been in the eye of an appalling storm. And it has to be conceded that the health statistics over the last week suggest that the storm has neither abated nor gone away.

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If there is any upside at all to the ­horrors of the last 18 months it has been the proof positive noted by all the devolved ­administrations that a) Johnson would be pushed to run a piss up in a brewery and b) that any talk of co-operation and ­partnerships were just so much cynical mouth music.

The bottom line here is that we are very much on our own in the sense that we have been excluded from any of the macro decision making, yet simultaneously very much joined at the hip to our tormentors.

Realistically this must be the conference which will lay the groundwork for ­indyRef2. By this time next year the people on whom the campaign will rely should be off and running, and the parties on a proper war ­footing.

It has been seven years since the disappointment of 2014. Let’s recapture that vibrancy we remember. Or as the blond bombaster might say: Let’s get Indy done.