Sturgeon to Scotland – trust me

Nicola Sturgeon used her leader’s speech to make a very personal plea to Scotland’s voters to trust her with running the Scottish government. Playing on her extraordinary personal approval ratings, Scotland’s First Minister.

Many SNP senior figures came to this Conference not at all sure how the new members would behave. They descended in droves on a party where they now outnumber the old members.

The Party’s been doing what it can to find out who they are and what they think. The official line is that they are entirely representative of Scottish demography (and in the hall that seems right in terms of age profile). The line from MPs and MSPs is that they find them more radical, more left wing.

You got a flavour of that in the vote on land reform when the delegates told the leadership to go back and make its bill more radical – if you missed it Alex Thomson put this film out on the issue on Thursday’s programme.

But the fracking debate was instructive too. In the hall the vast majority of delegates cheered and clapped enthusiastically those speakers who wanted  a total ban on fracking but in the end the leadership’s moratorium on fracking  squeaked home. You sensed that new members were instinctively more radical but willing to give the leadership a bit of trust on the issue.

I can’t find evidence of huge work being done on the delegates to get them on-message. At  the height of New Labour the party operated an extraordinary training and surveillance operation which involved trying to work out the opinions of new delegates, shape and promote the compliant ones and marginalise the trickier customers.

Here the bond of the mission of independence seems, for now, to do all that work for the SNP. There has been some  management of this event which New Labour old hands would recognise, in particular the address the Second Referendum issue in order to move it to one side. But this remains a party where fundamentally discipline holds strong and does so because they feel they’re on the march.

That doesn’t mean they’re consistently joyful. At last night’s fringe meeting on the BBC you saw genuine anger which was again on display in the hall for today’s debate on broadcasting. The MP and former broadcaster John Nicolson tried to ride that that with a speech which empathised with the delegates but told them to be careful what they wished for – don’t smash public service broadcasting in the form of the BBC because you might get Fox News, was the message.

On that Second Referendum, MPs and MSPs I spoke to now expect the next referendum to be after 2020. They hope that the social reform work that Nicola Stugeon promised today, implemented by a majority SNP government, will have firmed up doubters and will get independence support up to 58/60% levels at which they can safely press the button.

All of this assumes that the UK votes to stay in the EU in the referendum that comes before the end of 2017. One SNP MP says he’s had to lecture a few members who say they secretly hope for Brexit to trigger a Second Referendum. He tells them that’s short-sighted, risks economic impact on Scotland and must be resisted. But you do wonder how many of these delegates will have one hand, fingers crossed, behind their back, as the EU Referendum results come out.

But they left Aberdeen, in their masses, both hands raw with clapping, all whistled out and pretty euphoric.