Nicola Sturgeon builds case for second referendum

Mr Sillars said new members would have to realise that the current SNP leadership gives “judgements from on high” and that members were made to “swallow them”.

A senior Government source told the Sunday Telegraph: “We want to get this decision soon to stop the SNP turning the Scottish elections into a referendum on Trident”.

But despite their enormous support in Scotland the SNP have only around 10% of the seats in the Commons, they can’t make change like that on their own they know they have to win with their powers of persuasion.

So it seemed overwhelmingly likely that Labour would effectively sacrifice their Scottish branch, and instead make a pitch to the fabled “aspirational” voters of the south. The election of the most left-wing Labour leader since George Lansbury in 1935 was the absolute last thing the SNP could have anticipated, and has left Sturgeon scrambling to reconfigure her lines of attack against an opponent which she is no longer able to outflank on the left.

Announcing the policy at the opening of the SNP’s conference in Aberdeen on Thursday, Ms Sturgeon said that housing will be “one of the biggest issues in the campaign”.

Unlike many political get-togethers, tickets have been hard to come by – the Scottish nationalists now have more than 110,000 members, a more than fourfold increase since a 10-point defeat in last September’s independence referendum.

The first minister received a rapturous reception at the largest SNP conference yet, held in the Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre, which usually hosts events associated with the North Sea oil industry.

One billion ScotPounds would be created at its launch and 250 of them would be distributed to each person in Scotland.

Even the SNP’s usually belting introductory music had been toned down – all evidence of a newly expanded party that is as serious-minded and strategic as ever.

The SNP are in Aberdeen for their Party Conference.

Sturgeon’s party faces a re-election challenge in May next year as Scots go to the polls to vote for a new parliament. “I want them to vote SNP because we are the best party, with the best ideas and the best people to lead Scotland forward”.

“[Independence] remains very much on the agenda, but at the same time we have to respect that we had a democratic vote last time and we lost”, says McGarry. Only a handful of shadow cabinet members (Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, Jon Trickett, Ian Murray) share Corbyn’s unilateralist stance, with a majority, including shadow defence secretary Maria Eagle, opposed.

The SNP will be ” the strong, united and progressive opposition” to the Conservatives at Westminster that people across the UK “are crying out for, she will say.

She said: “And as Labour becomes ever more divided, the Tories – under the cloak of centrist rhetoric – threaten to even more deeply divide our society”. After Sturgeon’s address, party sources insisted that a vote to leave the European Union against Scotland’s wishes would not be an automatic trigger for another referendum and suggested that opinion polling would offer evidence of alterations in support for independence, although they understandably refused to predict the precise percentages that the first minister has in mind.

She added that the SNP could “c ounter this shift” by opposing the Conservatives at Westminster and by governing at Holyrood ” showing there is a better way, directly benefiting people in Scotland and providing a beacon of hope to people across the UK”.