Ellie Koepplinger, an activist who also works for a digital start-up, was just 16 when she joined the advisory board for Yes Scotland. It was the campaign group for the pro-independence side in the 2014 referendum vote on whether to leave the UK, which took place 10 years ago this month.
“It was my first foray into politics in any meaningful way,” says Koepplinger during a fringe meeting at the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) annual conference in Edinburgh last weekend.
“Suddenly I was having monthly meetings with [then SNP deputy leader] Nicola Sturgeon. To have a little black girl from Mary Hill [in Glasgow] do that ... It spoke volumes to me of what the campaign’s priorities were.”
Steven Campbell, a convener for Young Scots for Independence (YSI), an SNP-affiliated campaign group, was still in school for the 2014 referendum, which No won by 55 to 45 per cent, although the Yes side had been briefly ahead as polling day approached.
Anyone aged 16 and upwards was allowed vote in the independence referendum, which spurred engagement with young people.
“I had never been interested in politics and suddenly people were interested in what we wanted to say. I remember the Big, Big Debate in Glasgow,” says Campbell, recalling a one-off BBC political event that was aimed at young voters and held one week before the referendum.
It was filmed in front of a live audience of about 7,500 16- and 17-year-olds: “Every high school in Scotland was invited. It was incredible. We were spoken to like adults, like people whose opinion mattered. Not like it was in school, where you were talked over by adults.”
Emma Roddick, from the small town of Alness in the Scottish highlands, was 17 at the time of the independence vote. “I took it seriously, learning as much as I could. I was learning about politics from young people, from the disabled, racial minorities, people of different backgrounds,” she says. “I loved that and identified with it. I think I kind of expected politics, whenever I got into it, to still be like that.”
Seven years later, she was elected to the Scottish parliament. “I was pretty disappointed. Even in the SNP, there’s a lot of work to get [back] to what we were as a movement in 2014.”
After its failure to secure a new independence referendum from the British government and the hammering it took in July’s UK general election, when it lost 39 of its 48 Westminster seats under a Labour surge, the SNP’s independence dream appears to be slipping away.
The SNP has lost much of its verve from the years after the 2014 independence vote, when it was driven to greater heights by an enthusiastic base of young activists, many of them motivated not just by independence, but also by issues such as greater rights for transgender people.
The SNP’s conference last weekend in Edinburgh was attended by an estimated 1,500 party members, a fraction of the turnout in its heyday under Sturgeon, the former first minister. There was a smattering of younger activists, but little of the youthful swagger of years past.
The majority of conference delegates were from the older, more traditional party base, whose views sometimes diverged from the more radical younger members . Some of the old guard still retain hope for independence, if little real expectation of it happening in the near future.
“I used to be a Tory,” says a smiling James Grant, an older SNP activist from its Nairnshire branch in Moray. “So there is always a chance. There could still be a referendum in my lifetime. Maybe even in the next two or three years.”
As facetious evidence for his belief that there is no such thing as a lost cause, Grant recalled how Scotland famously lost an international football match 9-3 to England in Wembley in 1961. The result spawned an English joke about bad Scottish goalkeepers: “What time is it? It’s almost 10 past Haffey”, a reference to Scotland’s keeper on that fateful day, the hapless Frank Haffey.
Yet the next time the sides met in Wembley, two years later, Scottish icon Jim Baxter dazzled the English as his team, down to 10 men, battled to a 2-1 win, thus entering Scottish footballing lore.
“You see, there can always be a turnaround,” says Grant, still smiling. Still dreaming.
On a more serious note, he wonders if the party’s past emphasis on so-called “culture war” issues popular with its younger activists, such as transgender rights, had damaged it. “I actually fully believe in trans rights. But I think that whole debate might have turned some people off the SNP,” he suggests.
Support for the SNP in Scotland has slipped markedly in the polls over the last 18 months, down below 30 per cent in some recent surveys, well below its heyday peak in the 40s.
Support for independence, however, has stayed constant throughout the turmoil that rocked the SNP over the past year, as it grappled with financial scandal, leadership tussles, electoral defeat and now a looming fiscal crisis – the SNP-led devolved Scottish government may have to make £600 million (€712 million) of cuts to balance its next budget.
Most polls show support for independence holding reasonably steady at 47 or 48 per cent of voters, which most SNP activists in Edinburgh last weekend were happy to round up to a 50-50 “eeksie-peeksie” chance.
“It’s absolutely not dead,” says Seamus Logan of the party’s core dream of independence. The newly-elected SNP Westminster MP originally hails from Dunloy in Co Antrim.
“We’ve still got 50 per cent of the electorate who support independence. But we’ve also got to deal with reality. In our faces now is this £22 billion black hole that the UK government says it has to fill,” says Logan, referring to a gap in the UK’s finances that Labour has suggested it could address with cuts.
That would have significant knock-on effects for Scotland’s budget, although the SNP’s critics also accuse it of overspending – Scottish healthcare workers, for example, are the best paid in the UK.
But even if the idea of independence remains popular with almost half of Scottish voters, polls also show that the economy and public services currently are higher priorities.
Former SNP MP Richard Thomson, who lost his seat in the northeast of Scotland in July’s Westminster election, says there is a perception that the SNP had become overly focused on the process of how to achieve independence – whether to have a referendum, a court battle with the UK government, a “de facto referendum” via an election, or some other mechanism to leave the UK.
Independence campaigners, he suggests, should return to a focus on the “why” of independence, rather than the “how”. The SNP hierarchy seemed to agree it needs to return to persuasion mode. “If you get the support, then like water, it will find a way,” says Thomson.
Meanwhile, the SNP-linked independence movement’s younger members feel abandoned by the older members of the party. YSI, for example, said it receives no financial support from the SNP.
Roddick sounds sceptical about the degree to which she is listened to by older SNP parliamentarians at Holyrood: “Your ideas are treated like: ‘Oh that’s nice. Now, moving on…’.”
Roddick, Koepplinger and Campbell all identify a lack of “hope” among younger independence-minded Scots over a range of social and economic issues. Roddick and Campbell both cite housing as an issue that should be the top priority for the Scottish government, instead of independence.
The movement’s youth wing appears to have lost its mojo, they argue.
“For many young people, independence is positioned as something that the SNP never shuts up about, but will never happen,” says Roddick. “We need to inject some new passion.”
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