A FORMER Conservative spin doctor has said he believes that John Swinney and Kate Forbes “could actually pull off indy”.
Andy Maciver, the former head of communications for the Scottish Tories, hailed the duo as “gold dust” and said the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK could spell the end of the Union.
The podcast host said that the SNP chiefs could claim “credit” in reversing the fortunes of Anas Sarwar’s Scottish Labour who were “only six months ago, measuring the curtains in Bute House”.
In a column for The Herald, Maciver wrote: “Scottish Labour’s woes are, it is true, largely derived from events at Westminster.
“However we should not underestimate how much credit Mr Swinney and Ms Forbes can claim for the turnaround in the SNP’s fortunes at the expense of the rival which was, only six months ago, measuring the curtains in Bute House.
“This duo is proving to be gold dust. The competent, assured leader who has turned chaos into calm, inside the party and out in the country.
“And the deputy (well, actually, almost co-leader) who has a vision and determination much more akin to the conquering Scotland of centuries past than to the turgid, depressed, pedestrian era of devolution.”
The political veteran, who was the Scottish Tories’ top spinner from 2002 to 2007 as well as working on Murdo Fraser’s (above) ill-fated bid to create a separate Scottish Conservative party, said that in the aftermath of Labour’s landslide, he had believed that independence was “dead”.
He added: “Today, a little over six months later, I have changed my mind.”
Maciver said that he believed Farage would “kill the Conservative Party and eat its carcass” and that it was “by no means fanciful” to predict that at the next General Election, “he will have manoeuvred [Tory leader Kemi] Badenoch into a position where she is forced to agree to work together in some way, but that she and her Tory party end up on the junior end of the deal”.
He added: “That would go down like a double-skinned lead balloon here in Scotland. Yes, Reform UK is also polling relatively well here, but remains a minor rather than a major force.
“Ultimately, it is an English nationalist party, and one cannot expect an English nationalist party to prosper in a country in which two-thirds of the residents identify themselves as Scottish rather than British.”
Maciver predicted that the combination of Swinney and Forbes’s strategy and the ascendency of Farage (below) south of the Border made independence more likely.
He said: “Scotland has spent a long time as a supplicant whinger of a country, attempting to apply the politics of the student union to the big, bad world.
"It could, instead, enjoy a future as a central, strategic player in the North Atlantic, exploiting its natural and geographical advantages and chasing prosperity.
“Independence sentiment in Scotland grows when the Unionist alternative is seen to be repulsive. And independence sentiment throughout global history has grown when the future looks more optimistic, prosperous and wealthy than the status quo.”
In a tweet promoting the piece, which ran with the headline “I've changed my mind: Swinney and Forbes could pull off indy”, Maciver added: “The headline says it all.”
SNP MSP Stuart McMillan said: “Under John Swinney’s leadership, the SNP has listened to the people of Scotland and is delivering on their priorities – with a Budget delivering record funding for the NHS and protecting against the most damaging Westminster policies like the two-child cap and Labour’s decision to scrap Winter Fuel Payments for pensioners.
“After little over six months of Labour in power, and their leadership in Scotland evidently holding no influence over their London bosses, voters are seeing that nothing has changed from the same old Westminster status quo of broken promises and Scotland being treated as an afterthought.
“Only the SNP will put Scotland’s interests first and offer meaningful change for Scotland’s economy, households and businesses. Ultimately, it is only independence that will allow us to escape the Westminster status quo once and for all.”
