Don't mention the election ...; SNP: John Swinney might have roused

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Mar 9, 2003 | by Iain Macwhirter

"Not in our name!" John Swinney is getting a taste for radical populism. At the Loch Lomond Shores complex in Balloch on Friday, the first day of the SNP's pre-election conference, he ramped up the rhetoric on Iraq. No longer the mild-mannered Bradford and Bingley nationalist we know and love, the SNP leader seems to have been taking a crash course in rabble-rousing. He's even beginning to sound a little like Tommy Sheridan, growling with indignation at the Bush- Blair axis's "illegal" war.

I don't wish to detract from what was certainly one of Swinney's best conference performances. There is nothing wrong with passion sincerely expressed. He is sounding much more confident in himself, and his party is beginning to believe in him as well. Former leader Alex Salmond was kept firmly under wraps at Loch Lomond, presumably in case he tried to hijack the Iraq war like he did Kosovo in 1999 - but with every appearance Swinney sounds less like the understudy and more like a star in his own right.

He has every reason to sound confident. The SNP are going into this election neck and neck with Labour in the latest Herald/System Three opinion poll. And with war looming ever closer, anything could happen before May 1.

In the Lomond Shore bars, people were beginning to add up the numbers and wonder if there might even be a possibility of power. What if Labour get a bloody nose and the SNP and LibDems make sufficient gains to form a ruling coalition? It is not impossible. Nothing in the Scotland Act says Labour have to be in government. Right now the SNP don't seem in any mind to make concessions to the LibDems over the referendum on independence, so this scenario remains in the realm of fantasy politics. But it might not seem so fantastical in a few weeks' time.

America and Britain are threatening to go to war on March 17, with or without the backing of the UN. At Labour's Scottish conference, which begins just four days after that in Dundee, there could be open revolt. Will Tony Blair even dare to appear? There will certainly be a mass demonstration outside the conference hall; inside, delegates might well be cutting up their party cards in disgust.

Jack McConnell has supported Blair to the hilt throughout the Iraq crisis. It is too late for him to resile - and it is patently absurd that he has again told his troops not to mention the war. They won't listen. Swinney, meanwhile, is likely to be out there among the peace marchers again, talking about little else.

Mind you, the fighting could be over by Easter. Cheering crowds in Baghdad could have replaced the massed peace marchers on TV. The Chancellor will deliver his Budget on April 9 and will no doubt applaud his own management of the economy - lowest interest rates, unemployment rates, mortgage rates etc. Labour hope that Swinney has made a fatal mistake by risking all on the war, and that Scottish voters, moist-eyed, will gratefully troop into the polling booths on May 1 to return a McConnell mini-landslide.

In their dreams. There is an ugly mood abroad among the voters right now, and a short, sharp war might not be enough to appease it. A quick kill in Iraq could just confirm people's sense of injustice: their feeling that this war was fought not because Iraq posed a real and present danger to the security of the West but because America wanted to flaunt its power and Tony Blair wanted to get a piece of the post-war action.

Even the Budget could be counter-productive. It will remind voters first that they have just had a tax increase in the NI hike; second that the Chancellor's numbers are wrong on revenues and spending; and third that taxes will almost certainly have to rise again as a result. There could also be a residue of suspicion that the Budget was timed not just to avoid the war but to influence the Scottish elections.

Labour also seem curiously reluctant to challenge the SNP over Swinney's war-centric campaign. In the middle of his speech on Friday a message arrived on selected political correspondents' pagers. It didn't attack Swinney on his stance on Iraq, though, but on his disparaging of the Dog Fouling Bill, which SNP MSPs supported. Maybe Labour fear that making too much of a fuss about war might eventually lead to some unpleasant repercussions.

And the SNP leader is actually rather vulnerable. Last month he said he would support force in Iraq if there were a second resolution explicitly endorsing it and clear evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But on Friday he changed his emphasis, announcing that even if the second UN resolution were to be passed this week there would still be no mandate for war. He would oppose it as "illegal".

But who, it might be asked, is Swinney to second-guess the United Nations? Has he the right to decide which UN resolutions should be supported and which should be opposed? He says he upholds the will of the international community - but not, apparently, when it says something he doesn't like.

There is more than a hint of sophistry here, and it looks as if Swinney is playing an opportunist game. He is waiting to find which way public opinion is going and then adapting his principles to fit in order to harvest votes. Still, politics is all about seizing opportunities, and it is up to Labour to deconstruct the SNP's position. I may have missed something, but they do not seem to be terribly interested in doing so just yet.