Can a New SNP emerge which speaks a new story of Scotland?
Gerry Hassan
Bella Caledonia, 17 July 2024
The scale of SNP defeat should not have taken anyone by surprise. It has been a long time coming, and is a long way down from Peak Nat. But it still shocked many, whilst others too sensitive have looked away from the resulting carnage.
This is what happens when parties experience defeat. Unity goes. The sense of shared purpose and direction diverges. And unless the SNP wake up, they could still fall much further. In particular, the 2026 Scottish elections now look as much a minefield to be negotiated and to survive than what was once seen as an opportunity.
Party defeats are by necessity painful for the faithful. But they are also an opportunity to learn, to reassess, to work out what has gone wrong and to change. The SNP face such a moment now which they must embrace. They need to thoroughly interrogate why the support and enthusiasm they enjoyed just a few years ago has waned away, and then appropriately respond.
There has been much over-the-top comment. ‘The SNP is so deep in its bubble of self-hatred, it is incapable of ruling Scotland’ opined Neil Mackay, predicting ‘a Scottish nationalist civil war’ that will be ‘uglier’ than the Tory civil war. Jim Sillars in another wise prescient piece described Sturgeon as ‘Stalin’s wee sister’; while former Labour MP Tom Harris added a new dimension to hyperbole in the Daily Mail calling the contemporary SNP ‘Braveheart Bolsheviks.’ For such a centrist political project there are a lot of references to Russia and 1917.
Some want to wallow in the catastrophe of the SNP collapse from 48 to nine seats. Others want to emphasise that, considering all the problems the party faces, holding on to 30.0% of the vote can be viewed as something of an achievement. Another take seeks succour in the argument that Scotland, like the rest of the UK, desperately wanted rid of the Tories and hence shifted to Labour.
Others want to cling to continuity. The SNP still have a ‘mandate’ from 2021, are still in government in Holyrood and are the largest party. In this take the Westminster election was an inconvenience in the hegemony of the SNP with all roads now focused on 2026.
For all the talk of disunity and division, many folk are keeping silent and saying nothing. This is particularly true of the SNP Holyrood Group. Sometimes silence can be a virtue but maybe not after a major reverse with this seeming to indicate little debate or thought.
The contours of SNP defeat are worth repeating. The party’s vote fell from 1,242,380 in 2019 to 724,758 in 2024 (half the SNP peak in 2015 of 1,454,436). It won 30.0% of the vote compared to Labour’s 35.3%; and is the first national contest that the SNP has lost since the Westminster election of 2010.
The party has been eviscerated in most of Scotland especially within its post-2014 heartlands in the Central Belt and West of Scotland where Labour has asserted its dominance. It has no Westminster representation in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Fife or Ayrshire. Party finances have been massively hit. Whereas in the last Parliament the party got £1.3 million support per annum from Westminster via ‘Short money’ now with fewer MPs it will get £358,000 per year.
There have been the usual calls – Joanna Cherry criticising Sturgeon; Sturgeon responding defensively; Alex Neil calling on John Swinney to resign. The bigger picture is more complex. There is the cumulative cost of the Sturgeon leadership and a party which has forgotten how to debate, discuss and to practice internal democracy. Once forgotten, these things are difficult to reanimate and require conscious effort.
Any real debate must go past the usual blame game. While the Sturgeon leadership has to shoulder some of the blame, it is not solely responsible. The aftereffects of the Salmond leadership have taken a toll, as have the 17 years of incumbency which became too easy for too many years due to opposition weakness, and there is also the thin nature of what passes for social democracy in the SNP and the self-congratulatory nature of too much of Scottish nationalism.
Don’t Believe the Hype: The limits of talking to yourself
The SNP and independence over the past year has grown accustomed to talking to itself and thinking that it is a substitute for the nation. Post-2014 indyref, when Salmond announced his resignation the very next day he spoke not as the leader of the nation, but instead as the leader of Yes. He thanked the independence movement and had nothing to say to the majority who had voted to remain in the union. In short, he spoke as a factional leader, not a national leader.
This failing was reinforced in subsequent days with Sturgeon following the same pattern: playing up to and thanking the contribution of Yes and treating those who had not as invisible. Deliberately missing was an acknowledgement of ALL Scotland and its many different political shades. This absence of political leadership from the moment of the 2014 decision disastrously set the tone for the next few years.
From the Sturgeon coronation in Glasgow Hydro in November 2014 onward a shift occurred in the SNP. Political power was seen as flowing from the top down – with wisdom, decisions and what passed for strategy concentrated in increasingly few hands.
The post-2014 leadership was aided by the context after the indyref. People wanted to have their assumptions and beliefs about independence validated, and to have comforting truths told them that independence was on the road to inevitable victory.
Activists and supporters enjoyed the intoxication of nearly achieving success and the communal nature of the 2014 campaign, followed by the 2015 tsunami and the 2016 Scottish elections followed a month later by the Brexit vote where Scotland voted to Remain.
SNPers and many independence supporters were content then to not ask any questions and reduced politics to ‘trusting Nicola’. In retrospect, this fatal embrace and collusion needs addressing. Sturgeon told people what they wanted to hear and people interpreted her words how they wanted, omitting inconvenient facts and truths and tuning out difficult stuff – all of which amounted to a collective complicity in believing what you wanted to.
The inner world of the SNP
A major factor is the DNA and ethos of the SNP and wider independence. For many, criticising the SNP and independence has been seen as equivalent to disloyally attacking a member of the family. Cumulatively this has led to a detrimental culture which was happy to cheer and affirm in the upbeat good times, but which had nothing to say but silence in the downbeat, difficult times of retreat.
One veteran member said to me: ‘I guess we have grown used to not talking about the difficult stuff. Pretending Nicola had a secret plan. That Labour were just the same as the Tories. That it would all turn out alright.’
This has reinforced an attitude in the SNP and independence which has little to say on detail and nuance, and hence becomes slowly more detached from reality – whether about the SNP, its record in government or independence. Such cultures exist in all parties. Yet there is something deep in the specific DNA and ethos of the SNP and independence which has contributed to the current predicament.
First, until recently a major factor within the SNP was that it was very much an underdog party. It had to compete against the UK parties, the Scottish and British political establishments, and large swathes of Scottish society. This gave it a modus operandi but left it with a suspicion of external forces and realities.
Thus, the SNP has become an insider party of the political class, although this is not accepted by many members who draw from long memories of being outsiders. A senior activist told me that: ‘The experience for decades of being underdogs has meant too many in the party will excuse anything the party does in office, because they still see the SNP as this small force battling against the big beasts.’ Another activist reflected: ‘The SNP was forged in a time when they were unwelcome and despised. You grow a mantle. Then the indyref – such camaraderie and feeling of injustice when we fell short.’
Second, the cause of independence was once marginal in Scottish society. The psychology of going from the margins to the mainstream has left true believers uninterested on detail and in making difficult choices.
Third, Scottish nationalism continually tells us it is civic, benign and progressive. But it still a nationalism informed by ‘them’ and ‘us’, and a sense of who is in and not in, within the political community of Scotland. It is informed by having a degree of self-congratulation about the self-evident virtue of its cause which means it does not fully understand those resistant to its charms, namely Scottish unionism and unionists (while often not recognising not everyone who voted No can be described as unionist).
One SNP member told me: ‘We have always been a tribe with the strengths that flows from that. Belonging, being part of something bigger. But it has its drawbacks. Thinking that we are the good guys and that we stand for is self-evidently right.’
Finally, the above has been reinforced by a culture of SNP leadership that navigated the long road from the margins to the mainstream, both as a party and on independence. It is not an accident that as SNP popularity rose, Salmond and then Sturgeon were the objects of blind, unquestioning loyalty. Under both this eventually snapped, for many after they had left office, when their leadership was revealed as having long promoted apparition and pretence.
What is the future of the SNP?
Since 2007, the SNP has enjoyed unprecedented electoral success, and it is worth remembering the party had never won a national election until then. It has subsequently since won four Scottish elections in a row, been in government for seventeen years, remade the Scottish political landscape, and narrowly lost an independence referendum – and in doing so, transformed independence into one of the defining issues of Scotland.
This incredible story is worth re-emphasising. But success comes at a cost and all periods of ascendancy end for all political parties that achieve them. The era of high SNP – of imperious dominance and carrying all before it – is clearly over. The party cannot hope to continue as it has previously done and hope that success will follow. It will not because the political environment has changed, the SNP has changed, as have the nature of the challenges to be faced in the next few years.
The SNP must nurture a different kind of leadership, collective politics, style of government and version of Scotland’s future which moves on from the problem politics of recent times. This is easier said than done because while the party is still in government in Holyrood it now faces a resurgent Labour Party which is the majoritarian party in Scotland at Westminster and the UK.
One of the first aspects that the SNP needs to tackle is complacency and the propensity to not believe it needs to change. The party has a dwindling vote, membership and monies, but many of the old guard and senior members of the party believe that things were once tough and they eventually won in 2007 – and can do again. ‘In the 2007-2011 era, we had six MPs, but that didn’t stop our Scottish election victories in 2007 and 2011. Money is useful but it isn’t everything’ said Liz Lloyd in the FT, Sturgeon’s former chief of staff, in the aftermath of the SNP’s reverses.
Secondly, the wider party needs to take cognisance of what the modern SNP has become. Seventeen years of office have changed its parliamentary nature. It has created an insider class who developed a different take on power and politics. In short, SNP elites gave expression to post-democracy – the world of politics as one of managed, manipulated democracy by and for the interests of the elite.
Worse than this the inner core DNA and ethos of the SNP – that they were underdogs, outsiders, insurgents and challengers to the Scottish and British establishment – has aided the above by ignoring detail and reality.
Third, the timid social democracy and bourgeois nationalism of the SNP is inadequate and needs to be replaced by a new set of political values and perspectives. A long-term missing dimension in the SNP has been any critical understanding of power, self-government and self-determination.
A SNP informed by self-government and self-determination would be a party for whom independence was as much about shifting power within Scotland as well as to Scotland. It would not regard the transfer of formal powers from London to Edinburgh as an adequate prospectus. And related to this it would regard the future values and stories of Scotland as not waiting to be articulated only after independence, or solely about independence (more on which in the concluding essay in this series).
Talking about power within Scotland means understanding politics beyond the official story of Holyrood and progressive Scotland, and thinking about where the country has fallen short too many times. In the words of academic Chris Silver the SNP ‘will need to learn to walk alongside the dispossessed, the poor and the disaffected in order to offer them a future worth voting for.’
Addressing the shortcomings of the Scottish Government’s record and public perceptions is needed. The just published Scottish Social Attitudes Survey shows that satisfaction with the NHS in Scotland has hit an all-time low at 23% (down from 64% in 2019), and trust in the Scottish Government to defend Scotland’s interests fallen dramatically to a new low of 47% (from a recent high of 71% in 2015), leading Mark McGeoghegan to note ’twenty-two months to turn that around is likely an impossible task.’
A new SNP does not happen effortlessly, by continuity or by the present leadership continuing to do what they are already doing. Realistically it has little chance of happening while the SNP remain in office. Internal change only occurs when aided by external change, and this is most likely to come with the 2026 Scottish elections that will be characterised by ultra-competition, the challenge of Labour, and the prospect of closing this era of SNP dominance. To add to this mix, these elections will be a multi-party fight with SNP, Labour, Tories, Lib Dems, Greens and Reform UK all competing for votes and representation (the latter winning 167,979 votes and 7.0% in Scotland in the recent elections).
Thursday 4 July was a wake-up call and a long time coming. The SNP must stop talking to itself, cease its fairy tales and falsehoods, and start facing inconvenient truths about their party, government and independence. Doing so now could begin the path that will inevitably begin post-2026 and post-Swinney, as the party will have to then map out a new political agenda.
There is no traction in the continuity SNP of recent times. A new generation needs to take back their party, listen to Scotland, break with delusions and pretences, and challenge the post-democratic values which have atrophied the SNP and blunted its political antenna.
