Last week a strange thing happened.

High-ranking SNP figures have started spontaneously speaking, seemingly out-of-turn, in what appears to be a very truthful and matter-of-fact way. There's a creeping realism about what independence really means and even a splash of contrition about why the Yes campaign failed in 2014.

Personally, I've found it both disarming and refreshing.

Former Cabinet minister Kenny MacAskill, as well as possible future depute leaders like Tommy Sheppard and Angus Robertson, have all made uncharacteristically autonomous noises about the mistakes of the past. It's so unusual to hear senior SNP figures expressing ideas independently that I genuinely lay in bed the other night quite moved by it all; welling up at the idea that maybe I have been too quick to turn my back on the SNP. I reminisced about the days when I still believed they were a completely different political animal that represented a more frank and less cynical way of doing business.

With these new signals emanating from the party of government I genuinely wondered: Could the SNP be about to fulfil that early promise of a new politics? An SNP I could think about getting behind again? Or is this just another mechanical, impersonal, political strategy being rolled out?

Clearly not satisfied that Alan Cumming's "Stupid English People" pitch on the front page of the Sunday Herald was culturally sophisticated enough to excite anyone but Pete Wishart, it seems the shrewdest political minds of our time have a bold new approach: Shock us into a state of submission by officially sanctioning the telling of truth.

Yes, my friends, honesty. A process in which we are treated like adults in a discussion about the future of our society. This may well be the SNP's first truly radical moment and one which leaves me, a former voter turned friendly critic, feeling very intrigued.

Of course now I am faced with a dilemma. I've been here before. In 2006 a similar strategy saw me quietly withdraw my support for socialism and instead vote SNP -- which was taboo in my neck of the woods at the time. Since then I've seen many of the flagship policies that attracted my vote fall to the bottom of the to-do list as the votes of more affluent sections of society became more important. The thing is I understand these political dilemmas. What turned me off the SNP was the shoddy reasoning cited for such policy pivots.

So why should I trust anything they say now given how jovially they've skipped over legitimate questions and criticisms about their ever-shifting political trajectory?

For example: Why have we stopped talking about abolishing the "hated Tory council tax"? In 2007 the SNP pledged to scrap it because it was "unjust" but since then have scrapped the idea of scrapping it because somewhere along the way it became un-unjust. In 2007 scrapping council tax was a red-line moral issue. So what happened?

Every day I feel a twinge of empathy for the many principled, intelligent and good-humoured SNP folk who are often wedged in that impossible place between instinctively defending their party's record and blatantly talking shite. For those of us on the outside of the Nationalist monolith this has become a feature of our daily lives.

In the upper echelons of the party we see an unending tendency to posture and moralise around the issues they are not responsible for while deflecting moral arguments about the things they actually have the power to change -- see nuclear weapons and local taxation for examples of this.

When the SNP backtrack or renege on a pledge, like the top-rate income tax increase, they do so in full knowledge that their members will give them the benefit of the doubt. For it is always assumed by the party faithful -- many just taking their first political steps -- that when the SNP flip-flops, even on issues once considered to be of great moral import, that there must be a good reason to justify the inconsistency.

Because it can never be the case that the SNP would attempt to conceal the truth or obscure their true intentions.

Sadly this good-faith rationale is rarely extended to anyone but themselves.

When the SNP gets coy with the facts it's justified as part of the "long game" by supporters who aren't yet ready to concede their party can be just as hypocritical and underhanded as any other. When the SNP blatantly steals manifesto ideas from Labour in the run up to the election while simultaneously talking down their policy platform publicly it's swept under the rug or explained away, conveniently, as a necessary evil in their grand political strategy.

The "strategy" is what people increasingly cite as justification for lapses in political integrity, double-dealing, half-truths and hypocrisy. Nobody knows what the strategy actually is beyond independence but everyone is positive it exists. The "strategy" is always so vaguely articulated that it is never restricted by the earthly constraints of rationality, consistency or any burden of proof and therefore can never be pinned down or held to account by anyone. All we know is that this grand intelligence is incorruptible.

In reality, since the No vote, they've been making their strategy up as they go along. But unlike most parties this actually suits the SNP because they are not bound by core principles. The only thing they actually believe in is Scottish independence and everything else is always being recalibrated around that central aim. Not to say they have no values but simply that those values are interchangeable dependent on the political issues of the day -- see NATO, the Queen and the creation of a Scottish Parliament for examples of this.

It means the SNP can operate with an unprecedented level of political elasticity and people who vote for them rarely feel compromised.

When the SNP signals that it's business as usual to the nation's affluent, whose interests are hard to reconcile with the very hard-up Yes-voting communities that gave the SNP so much political capital in the first place, it's not seen as hypocrisy but hard-nosed "pragmatism" skilfully steering the ship home. When Labour proposes raising taxes by a tiny amount the SNP are quick to reframe it as austerity-by-stealth. I get that politics is a bit of a game but what I don't get is how the SNP makes such a virtue out of playing it more ruthlessly than anybody else.

It boils down to this: When a party selling itself as morally superior deploys the same underhanded, amoral tactics as morally inferior parties, while still claiming the moral high-ground, then one can only assume such a party is being cynical or foolish.

Within the SNP there is a growing pragmatism among members who now know it'll be impossible to retain all of their principles on the road to independence. Voters who are relatively new to politics could be forgiven for falling for the slick political messaging that deals in false moral dichotomies and a vague sense of shared identity. But politicians who manipulate naivety to manufacture perpetual outrage at their opponents' shortcomings, as a means of obscuring their own, cannot be so easily forgiven.

At least not by me. Not when they are always claiming the moral high-ground.

If the SNP is adopting a more straight-talking strategy, after years of obfuscation, then they should understand the depth of scepticism, anger and grievance their previous strategies have created beyond the confines of their own membership.

And I'm not just talking about hard-line "Yoons".

For every affluent Remain voter absorbed since Brexit there's a working class Yes voter who wanted to leave, scratching their head, wondering why they've been written out of the "strategy". For every soft No voter anxious about perpetual Tory government, sizing up independence, there's a Yes voter who feels totally marginalised by the flags, The National and anyone who uses the phrase "talking down Scotland" wi th a straight face.

While many in the Yes movement will call me a shill for daring to write such a thing the truth is there are thousands of Yes voters out there who feel like I do. Sadly the issue more and more people have been uniting around is their distrust of the SNP on a number of key issues.

It will take more than a public relations strategy to reverse this trend.

Comment by Darren McGarvey. Darren is a writer and broadcaster and, under the name Loki, a rapper and hip hop artist. His music can be found here and his crowdfunding page at indiegogo.