Yes god forbid you actually fix the problems with the movement and win over the segment of the electorate that had intelligent objections. If something doesn't work the first time it's time to ignore all the naysayers.
That's not really what I said. We're trying to win over the 5-10% of the electorate that we actually
can win over. The swing voters, as it were. I've always maintained that Scottish opinion on this issue is divided into thirds - the emotional supporters of independence, the emotional supporters of the union and those that can be convinced. They need to be convinced "of independence" though - considering the Union is the status quo, they were already backing the Union in 2011.
This can actually be seen in early opinion polls (2011/2012 etc) where support for independence was clearly defined as being at a third - about 30%. We didn't need to convince that 30%, they were already backing us. However we were able to make enough inroads into the third-or-so of the electorate that could be classed as swing voters that we almost convinced half the electorate overall, reaching 45% of the vote, gaining about 15% over the campaign period. If we're going to win next time we need to convince the 5-10% of the swingvoters that, according to polls, seem to have been either backing us or at least open to backing us before the Vow and the corporate onslaught in the final week of the campaign.
In the same way you're probably not going to convince a working class white gun owning Baptist Iraq War veteran from Georgia to vote for Hilary Clinton in the next Presidential Election, we're going to find it very difficult to convince elderly people who grew up proud of Britain and its Welfare State, fearful of immigrants, fearful of the SNP (they were pretty crap/crazy back then), fearful of foreign forces (thus supportive of nuclear weapons) and skeptical of the EU (Scotland used to be the most Eurosceptic part of Britain in the 1970s) to vote for independence in 2020. We can try, I certainly did, and we convinced some of them, but we're not going to convince enough. At the moment people in my local campaign branches have been trying to set up drop-in workshops where elderly people can be taught how to use social media, turning their focus away from the TV and the newspapers where the Unionist line dominates. That's a start, and we'll hopefully build on it as time goes on.
Owlbread, historically the only way to get corporate support without adopting neoliberal economic policies is to have similarly powerful structures to replace their influence. If corporations are truly the keystone to Scotland's independence and you don't want SNP to become Labour-Tory Scotland then the solution is in powerful trade unions, cooperatives, and other socialist nightmare organizational structures.
Or so past experience would dictate, anyway. A wholly new independent parallel to market capitalism could also do the trick, but I wish you the best of luck if you try to take that path.
As much as some figures in the SNP would balk at the concept of trying to support all those Socialist nightmare organisational structures, we do need to win over the trade unions this time if we're going to make the kind of headway we need to in Scotland's working class districts. If we're going to get a decent Yes majority in traditionally working-class areas like Fife next time we'll need the backing of unions like Unite. We already won over most of the working class, routinely getting Yes majorities in towns, but not by enough.
Well, that's not entirely true. I think in this case it was mostly opposition to change: stability is good for business. If another referendum takes place following a Brexit, stability would be on Scotland's side.
Owlbread, will you campaign in favor of a Brexit? It is after all your best hope for an independent Scotland.
I am going to be perfectly honest in saying that I do hope Brexit will come for the reasons you pointed out, if I said otherwise I'd be lying. At the same time I do disagree with it, as do the SNP and other pro-independence organisations, and if we campaigned in favour of it at a UK level and against it in Scotland we'd have absolutely no credibility.
The same thing happened with the Smith Commission proposals on further devolution; I really, really hoped we'd get shafted over them because I knew that would cause the electorate to become disillusioned with the process. I kept my mouth shut though; the party line was that we needed to embrace it and take it as far as we could go. Guess what; we were shafted by Labour and support for independence is currently sitting at around 53% according to the last poll I saw.
It's dishonest in some ways, it feels unnatural not to be campaigning/arguing for something I want to happen, but if you've got principles you need to stick to them. It's just politics.
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