With little over a month away the SNP conference is set to elect Nicola Sturgeon as party leader. Conference attendees will also be electing the Deputy Leader from the current nominees; Keith Brown, Stewart Hosie and Angela Constance.
The seats of the conference hall will be packed. You’d assume a party which lost out on its raison d’etre by 10% points would be in the gutter. The opposite is the case though.
Since September 18th SNP membership has soared from around 25,000 members to now over 77,000 members-making the SNP (by membership figures) the third biggest political party in the UK. Not bad for a party which only stands in seats that make up just under 10% of the country’s population.
This has been greeted with jubilation in the party ranks as one MSP and MP after another take to social media to gloat at Labour and the other unionist parties. Other activists like Johnathan Mackie have detailed what this means for the party’s finances as they look ahead to May’s UK general election.
So the mood of the party is buoyant plus the finances are Roman Abramovichesque. What’s the issue?
Nicola Sturgeon now needs to balance good governance, keeping those new (and non-Yes voting) SNP voters in 2011 happy and a party now made up of predominately fundamentalist independence activists. This is ‘The Sturgeon Dilemma.’
Sturgeon knows, and I assume most SNP staffers with their heads screwed on as well, that a second referendum on a manifesto in the near future would strip party down to its core vote. The SNP’s strength between 2003 and 2011 was a vote for the SNP did not mean an endorsement of independence. By backing then a second referendum so soon you would kill the support the party has conjured up over the last decade.
There’s also another good reason for not backing a second snap referendum: the Yes campaign would lose again.
Sturgeon has to convince ‘the 45 percent’ clique of this. Good luck with that.
