The People

I don't like the SNP - why would I vote for independence?

Q: I don't like the SNP - why would I vote for independence?

You don't have to like the SNP - support for independence consistently polls ahead of them, so a large slice of Yes never votes SNP anyway. Independence isn't a party; it's the power to hire and fire whoever governs. Ireland's independence movement dissolved into normal politics within four years. And it's the constitutional stalemate, not independence, that keeps the SNP hardest to remove.

The short answer

Then this page is for you, because you may be the most important voter in Scotland. Support for independence consistently polls ahead of support for the SNP (YouGov's Scottish political snapshots; What Scotland Thinks) - which means a large slice of Yes already doesn't vote SNP, and the decisive slice of any future Yes majority won't either.

The confusion this page exists to untangle is between a party and a constitutional state. Independence is not the SNP's manifesto; it's the arrangement under which whoever governs Scotland - SNP, Labour, Conservative, someone not yet founded - is hired and fired by the people who live here. A vote for independence hires nobody. If anything, as we'll see, it's the current arrangement that makes the SNP hardest to sack.

A country is not a party

Start with the basic mechanics. A referendum is not an election: it wouldn't appoint a government, and the government that negotiated independence would face an election under a new constitution soon enough, like any other. The SNP could win it or lose it. That's not a bug in the plan - it is the entire point of the plan. Independence is precisely the state of affairs in which the SNP becomes an ordinary, beatable political party.

This site practises what it's preaching, incidentally. Its pages have documented the ferries fiasco in full (and called it indefensible), the HPMA affair that enraged coastal Scotland (Scotland's own ledger, owned), and Grangemouth on both governments' watch (apportioned by powers held). Auditing the SNP government harshly and supporting independence aren't in tension. They're the same position: governments should answer for their records - which requires, first, that your government actually answers to you.

What happened in Ireland

There's a precedent for what happens to an independence movement after independence, and it's a hundred years old. Within four years of the Irish Free State's founding, the independence coalition had come apart - Sinn Féin split, and out of the fragments came the ancestors of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the parties that went on to dominate a century of Irish politics fighting about tax, land, jobs and health, not about whether Ireland should exist (History of Parliament; The Irish Story). The cause completed; the coalition dispersed; normal politics began.

The SNP is a coalition of exactly that kind - left and right, urban and rural, held together by one shared objective. Independence achieved is the SNP's organising purpose finished. What follows, on every precedent, is realignment: politicians and voters sorting themselves by the questions normal countries argue about. If you dislike the SNP, note the irony carefully - independence is the one outcome guaranteed to break it open.

The stalemate is the incumbent's friend

Now the sharpest version of the argument, stated with the site's usual care about records rather than motives.

While the constitutional question hangs over Scotland, every Holyrood election is partly a proxy referendum. Unionist voters lend votes to whoever best blocks the SNP; independence voters stick with the SNP through failures they'd punish in any normal country, because a vote against them reads as a vote against the cause. The result is documented on page after page of this site as the accountability gap: a government in Edinburgh that can blame London, a government in London that answers to a different electorate, and voters whose verdict on ferries or schools is drowned out by the flag question every single time.

Ending the constitutional question - either way, permanently - is the only exit from that machine. And since the union's version of "ending it" has no mechanism and no offer (our devolution and route pages set out why), independence is the available exit. You want to punish the SNP for its record? So does this site, where the record deserves it. The ballot that finally makes that possible - cleanly, without your vote being read as a verdict on Scotland's existence - is the one after Yes.

What a Yes vote doesn't do

Honesty, as always. Independence does not remove the SNP from office - the government on day one is the government Scotland last elected, and the SNP would contest the first elections of an independent Scotland with an obvious tailwind. Scottish Labour and Scottish Conservative parties, freed from defending the union, would need time to find their post-union voices - though notice that's an argument for their voters wanting the question settled, not against. And nothing about independence makes any government wise, as this site has said on every page where a Scottish government earned criticism.

What a Yes vote does is narrower, and permanent: it moves the hiring and firing of Scotland's government inside Scotland, for good. Everything else - including the SNP's future - becomes what it should always have been: your call, at elections that are finally about what governments do.

So what's the real question?

Not whether you like the SNP. Plenty of people who will vote Yes don't, and the polling has always said so.

The real question is whether disliking a political party is a reason to leave the constitution - the rules about who hires and fires governments - permanently in the hands of electorates that mostly aren't you. Parties pass; the SNP will someday go the way of every party, faster after independence than before it. Constitutions endure. Voting on Scotland's constitution because of a party you dislike is letting a tenant decide whether you buy the house. Buy the house. Then evict whoever you like.

Take it with you

Facts for sharing - each button copies the line, with its source and a link back to this page.

Support for independence consistently polls ahead of support for the SNP. A large slice of Yes doesn't vote SNP, and never has (YouGov; What Scotland Thinks)
Within four years of Irish independence, the independence movement itself had split into the ancestors of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, and Irish politics moved on to normal questions. The cause completed, the coalition dispersed (History of Parliament)
The constitutional stalemate is the incumbent's best friend: while every Scottish election is a proxy referendum, no government in Edinburgh or London can be cleanly punished for how it actually governs
A vote for independence hires nobody. It decides where governments are hired and fired - including the government you'd like to sack