Our Right to Decide Has Been Won in Principle. Now We Must Win It in Practice.

Thank you very much, and good afternoon.

And I’m just thinking that I’m so glad I wore my Ukrainian badge.

It saved me from it saved me from the wrath of Rosanna.

I was also struck both in that debate we’ve just had about some of the contributions that we made on that issue, and it has taken a very dark turn over the last 48 hours, and we should be aware of that.

I had the privilege of hosting a Ukrainian family in my house for about six months, and they’ve all gone on to jobs and houses elsewhere in Scotland.

I do think about them looking back on TV and seeing what’s happening in their homeland now.

And I’m also reminded around ten days ago, myself and Ellen Ferguson, who’s here, attended a group in Stirling called Forth Valley Welcome.

And these were a group of volunteers who set themselves up to welcome Syrian refugees and then subsequently Ukrainian refugees.

And it was a really inspiring night that we spent listening to some of the stories.

And it just is a real antidote to some of the nonsense that we hear in our Parliament from some of the bad actors here in Scotland.

So well done to those activists and those volunteers.

It’s been a year since we gathered here in Aberdeen.

That was many of you here.

Many of you are not here, myself and the First Minister as well, and we since then have achieved a huge amount.

I was doing a BBC interview just now and I was saying to them they were saying, what’s the feeling at the conference?

They said, well, we’ve just recorded our fifth successive election victory.

If you look around Europe and around the world, there are very few parties in a democracy which can get five consecutive victories.

And that was really down to the people who walked the streets.

Some of the activists not here today, who chapped the doors, who had the conversations that mattered to people.

And in particular, it was because we were able to listen.

I think it’s so underrated in political campaigning, the ability to listen.

And because of the situation that we’re in, both here in Scotland and some of the stuff we’re hearing about in the world, I think people really want to be heard.

So sometimes you might not get somebody saying at the end of a conversation, yes, I’m voting SNP, but they will know they’ve been heard.

And I’ve certainly found that in the 30 years I’ve been elected representative people, I know that when I was first elected as a councillor, I won the election by four votes.

So obviously it was pretty divided in the ward, but many of the people had voted against me, came to my surgery in subsequent years looking for advice and the fact that they were heard, I know has turned them into SNP voters.

So the ability to listen to people, I think they call it active listening is so important.

And we also, in doing that, demonstrated why people can trust the SNP to deliver on the issues which are most important to them, and because of that, because of you, we won a landslide victory as the largest party in the Scottish Parliament for a historic fifth term.

We are now so far ahead of the next party, further ahead than any other party has been in the history of devolution.

And that’s because of the work that you did.

So before I say anything else, can I say thank you to everybody that was involved in that campaign.

You can see the fruits of your labours with an SNP government once again in Holyrood.

I can also see somebody that’s been there now for 20 years.

I’m of that vintage, apparently the group that we have now, I have to say, has been the most inspiring group we’ve had for some time.

It’s no detriment to my former colleagues, but the first speeches, I wouldn’t call them maiden speeches.

Christina would give me a rap across the knuckles if she was here, if I called it that.

But the first speeches by so many of our newly elected MSPs have been truly outstanding, and I want to thank them for what they’ve done.

I would also like to thank, and I know by mentioning 2 or 3 names, I’ll get in trouble for not mentioning others, but there are 2 or 3 people here today who didn’t win their seats, who were outstanding colleagues.

Kaukab Stewart for one, Alasdair Allan for another, and Emma Harper as well, who’s here in the hall.

They were fantastic MSPs for us.

And on top of our victory, of course, the people of Scotland elected 73 MSPs who believe this country should be independent.

That’s 73 out of 129.

That’s the largest ever pro-independence majority our Parliament has seen.

So this is a country telling us they want to have the right to decide their own future, the chance to choose a better future as an independent nation.

And let’s just look at the last six weeks on the 14th of September in Cardiff, our First Minister stood with the First Minister of Wales and the First Minister of Northern Ireland.

Three of the four nations of this union, and together they signed an agreement that puts words to the thing that we all know.

Friends, Westminster’s time is coming to an end.

And I had some indication that meeting was going to happen.

And many of us who are involved in politics would have been very pleased to see that.

But what I’ve been really surprised with since then is the impact it had on young people, the number of young people that saw that and have been really impressed by it.

And of course, it made news globally as well.

02:10:14 [.] It was genuinely interesting to people.

It’s a fantastic initiative taken by the First Minister, and it shows the strength of feeling.

People like to know they’re accompanied by others when they’re on a journey.

And I think that was very important for the first time, every devolved government on these islands is led by a party that believes its people should be free to choose a different future.

And eight days later, in our own parliament, MSPs declared, Scotland is a nation with the right to decide its own future and conference.

Even Scottish Labour voted for it.

Their new leader said the people of Scotland have that right and I welcome that conference.

I genuinely do.

We all should, but let’s be clear a right that you’re never allowed to use is not a right at all.

So the lesson is that Andy Burnham’s words don’t win us independence.

Persuasion wins independence, and the settled will of this nation is not something that’s going to be handed to us.

It’s something that we build conversation by conversation.

And I want every branch in this party to start to treat it as the start, not the finish of a campaign, because the best campaign tool that we have, it’s a better campaign tool than any other party has.

It’s not a billboard.

It is you, our activists.

No other party has a number of activists that we have.

No other party has the passion and determination that we have.

And those are not just words.

I think one of the major problems for our opponents is they have no defining ideal, no defining aspiration.

In the past, you would have said the Labour Party had an aspiration for social justice, something that bound them together.

We are the party with the idea.

We have the passion and determination, and that is a large part of why we are so successful.

Over the last 20 years and conference, the SNP is the party of independence and we all know that the campaign for the referendum in 2014 didn’t catch fire because of a political party.

It caught fire because of the conversations that happened in community halls and around kitchen tables.

I remember somebody telling me there was a discussion about the independence referendum on a primary school bus, primary school children talking about independence.

Of course, we had groups like women for independence, NHS for yes and the National Collective.

We had the trade unions and the workplaces and then the pop up shops.

Yes, shops on our high streets, places that had not seen a political conversation in decades, and places that they felt invested in something that matters, something that had the potential to make a huge and genuine difference to their lives.

And that movement is still out there.

It never went away.

And our job is not to command that movement.

Our job is to serve it, to resource it, and to work alongside it.

Now, some folks say that we don’t want to discuss independence.

I think there was a comment in one of our newspapers.

I’ll let you guess which one, saying that John Swinney and I had issued an instruction that we weren’t to discuss independence in the party.

Well, if you’ve seen the agenda this morning, presumably when there’s lots of discussion independence.

But I’ll just remind you, of course, we stood here last year and a full, wide ranging discussion with everybody included, when we discussed the motion that John Swinney and I put forward, if our National Assembly designed specifically for the independence strategy, I’ve committed to another National Assembly on the same subject, but including other parts of the yes movement.

First time ever that we’ll have a National Assembly without just SNP members at that.

So the idea that we shouldn’t discuss independence is nonsense.

And it’s worth bearing in mind who is saying this and why they might be saying it.

So today I would like to make a commitment to every yes group, every independent supporting organisation and every pro-independence party in Scotland.

We are your partner in the shared belief that we will be an independent nation.

Every member of this party, I would ask this independence will not be won by the SNP alone.

It will be won by a nation that decides together that we are ready and conference.

People sometimes ask what independence is for, and we should never be too proud to answer it.

I would also say that it’s become fairly regularly uttered cliché when people say I don’t want independence for its own sake.

I want it to do this and that.

Quite legitimately.

I want independence for its own sake as well.

I think it improves us as a nation.

It tells people we can take our own decisions.

It gives us back that confidence.

And having just visited the Republic of Ireland for a meeting, you can see what that confidence does to people.

So the first thing that we want to use independence for, of course, is fairness.

Fairness is having a government, of course, that introduces the Scottish Child Payment, putting money directly into the pockets of families who need it most.

We had a debate in the Parliament recently when we talked about Brexit.

Now it was demonstrated that it’s costing each individual £3,000 a year per exit.

Can you imagine what that would do, what that would do for the families who are finding it so hard to heat their homes, to feed their children?

If that £3,000 wasn’t squandered in the way it has been, has been by Brexit, but given that circumstance, it is so important that our government takes action to help people in that situation.

And the biggest action they’ve taken by far is the Scottish Child Payment.

That fairness is also about delivering free prescriptions, free tuition, free bus travel for young and older people.

It’s a simple idea that what you can achieve in life should not depend on what your parents earn or the circumstances that you happen to be born into.

So the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government have done what they can with the powers that they hold.

But we all know that we could do it with one.

We are doing it with one hand tied behind our backs, fending off the worst of Westminster decisions instead of making our own.

If you want any example of that, look at the commitment by Labour to reduce by £300 the energy costs of every household in the UK and instead we are paying 4 or £500 more in energy payments under Labour.

So fairness is crucial.

Also, Equality Scotland is at its best when we say to everyone who lives here, you belong here, and we should say to everybody who lives here, you belong here, even when other people are telling them no.

And if you saw the coverage last night on ITV of some of the Reform Party activists and the things that they were saying, that is why it’s so important, important to say this to people.

And if you also if you speak to people who are refugees or newcomers to this country, they need it.

They want to hear it.

They really need to hear that they are wanted, given what they see on their TV, and hear from some politicians.

So whoever you love, wherever you’re born, whatever faith you may have, or if you have no faith whatever, whether you’ve lived here for 60 years or six months, equality means, for example, women and girls are safe in our society.

It means disabled people are treated with compassion and dignity and not with suspicion.

And honestly, if you think that there are some people that don’t treat disabled people with suspicion, you should listen to the Tories in the Scottish Parliament.

Absolutely appalling attacks on the social security system and those that it benefits on a regular basis.

Another value, of course, that’s crucial to our nation is ambition.

We are a nation of extraordinary energy resources here in the North East, but right across our coasts.

And look at Ireland, look at Denmark, look at Norway, look at Finland, independent nations of our size thriving.

I just had that BBC interview when I had to remind the person asking the question that the Irish government is currently struggling with what to do with its financial windfall in terms of its budget surplus.

When’s the last time you heard budget surplus in the UK?

None of them is asking.

None of those countries are asking to be governed by somebody else, not one.

And ambition is believing that Scotland can do the same.

And ambition is returning Scotland back home to the EU and building our nation a new building on the wealth of our resources.

I mentioned the far right and I’d like to use a bit of my time today to speak plainly about something that should concern every one of us.

In May, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK won 17 seats in the Scottish Parliament.

The politics of hatred and division now sits on the benches of Holyrood.

But the answer that Nigel Farage offers is a lie.

It’s the oldest trick in most sinister trick in the book, when people are struggling and people are struggling just now, find someone weaker to blame.

That’s what they do.

The refugee, the migrant worker, the Muslim family down the street, the trans teenager, anyone.

As long as nobody looks too closely at the people who actually hold all the power and wealth in our country, Scotland has seen that trick before and we’ve always been better than that.

We must not and we will not stand by.

While the language of hate is dressed up as common sense.

So let me be clear.

Just to be clear about where I and the parties stand, and in particular where the First Minister stands, because he has repeated this every time he’s had the chance to do so, the SNP will never do deals with the far right.

That won’t happen in Holyrood.

It won’t happen in our councils, it won’t happen anywhere and we will not use their language.

We will not chase their headlines and will not let them set the terms of the debate in Scotland.

If I’m honest, opposing them is not enough.

We have to outargue them and out-organise them and that can be difficult when they seem to be getting tranches of tens of millions of pounds from billionaires around the world, but it means showing up for the communities that they target and the communities that they court.

It means addressing the problems that they exploit, building more homes, protecting our NHS and helping people.

Of course, with the cost of living and ultimately means answering fear with hope.

It’s an old cliche, but it’s so important.

And there is a thing.

Conference one vision.

Our vision of independence is the strongest answer that we can give to the politics of division.

Our nationalism has never asked where you or your parents or your grandparents were born.

If you live in Scotland, if you choose to make your life here in Scotland, then you are one of us and your voice counts exactly the same as mine.

This is a Scotland that we are fighting for, and that is a fight that we will win.

And it’s inspiring.

As independents, the idea of being for equality, the idea of trying to put people at ease who come to this country.

So conference with that, I’ll finish where I started and that’s with everybody here in this hall.

Andy Burnham has told us our right to decide depends on the desire of our people.

Now, that’s something we’ve not seen from a British prime minister since 2014.

And there’s a lot of discussion going on just now about how we can actually articulate that, Andy Burnham said in terms that he didn’t see a demonstrable majority in support of a referendum here in Scotland.

It’s within our powers, within our abilities, to make sure that he can see that majority in support of a referendum.

I’m not talking about independence.

I’m talking about a referendum.

Scotland’s right to choose.

It’s within our abilities to do that, and that’s what we should focus on.

Take him at his word.

The moment of reasonableness, not one moment of reasonableness from Andy Burnham proved one thing that our right to decide has been won in principle, but it’s now up to us to make sure that we can put that into practice.

It’s on us to drive up those numbers, to knock those doors, to have those conversations.

And incidentally, when I talked about independence before, the idea that we’re not trying to promote independence seems at odds with the NEC decision to spend £100,000 on a two Scotland campaign.

Why would you do that if we weren’t for independence?

But I do say that Andy Burnham’s words are right.

So let’s get out there and do what the party of independence does best and drive those independence numbers through the roof.

In a state like the UK, where you have £3 trillion in debt, where the interest rate payments exceed many budget lines within the government.

When we’ve seen wages driven down, we’ve seen austerity for 17 years.

Again, the conversation I’ve just had with the BBC, I mentioned Ireland over Ireland’s this, that and the other.

They had a tough time during the recession.

Yeah, but they’ve got a budget surplus and they don’t have £3 trillion in debt.

And they’re looking after their people.

That’s what we can do.

And we have to demonstrate that to people.

Brexit Britain is broken and it is affecting everybody’s lives every day.

And we can change that.

And the means to change that is independence.

So let’s show Andy Burnham that while he may choose a union of the past, we choose an independent Scotland for our future friends.

We choose Scotland.

Thank you.