After Sturgeon and ‘Sturgeonism’: Facing Up to the Undemocracy of Scotland
Bella Caledonia, 25 March 2025
Gerry Hassan
The past week has seen the end of a monumental era of Scottish politics: of Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP and of ‘Sturgeonism’. This has generated a welter of instant commentary as expected but with much of it focusing only on the immediate, the party’s prospects for 2026 and what Sturgeon might do post-politics, rather than look at the longer story in addressing how we got here and where this might take us.
There was lots of over-the-top commentary as there always has been about Sturgeon. Mike Small on Bella cited some of these examples – the tellingly inaccurate descriptions of Sturgeon as ‘unequivocally left-wing’ and ‘an avowed feminist’, and the lazy comparisons with Margaret Thatcher – all revealing a right-wing and sexist world unable to imagine wider reference points.
Some still fulminate against their predictable hate figures. Kevin McKenna railed yet again against Sturgeon’s deal with the Scottish Greens claiming the latter wanted to turn Scotland into ‘a cave-dwelling theme-park lit only by the stars and heated by the elves and sprites living in yonder Caledonian Forest.’ Mandy Rhodes, editor of Holyrood magazine, could not cope with the experience of Sturgeon barely acknowledging her in the street, making her recent column about herself and the toxicity of the trans debate and then declared ‘Building bridges across political divides is what I do.’ The most cursory examination of Holyrood would say otherwise.
The Longer Story of the Rise of the Modern SNP
Maybe none of the above matters too much, as such instant judgements and personal justifications will be washed away, and history and events will take a more nuanced assessment. But matter they do. For there is a bitterness and resentment in much of the commentary on Sturgeon’s era, a desire to condemn and portray as divisive, and a wilful refusal to address the bigger picture – for good and bad.
To start with the basic facts, Sturgeon and Salmond are the twin pillars of the modern SNP who led it through an era of unprecedented electoral success, ensuring that the cause of independence was a live one. They were leaders in different times and environments, requiring different skill sets.
Salmond led the SNP to office winning its first ever national election, and on an upward journey to near the peak of the mountain. By its nature, this was an exhilarating ride. Sturgeon inherited this position and in 2014-15 took the party to peak popularity. Having got there, she faced the challenge of managing that diverse and fragile coalition requiring a very different kind of leadership. She did not get it all right, but the pressures facing her were of maintaining rather than creating that popular alliance and managing expectations on Brexit and independence.
Putting the rise of Sturgeon and ‘Sturgeonism’ in a bigger and historical context helps understand what happened – and what the latter was and became. Sturgeon presided over a period of enduring electoral success for the party at Holyrood and Westminster, but such dominance always comes at a cost; one that it seems that Sturgeon and SNP senior figures did not want to acknowledge or address.
Namely, the SNP becoming the dominant party of Scotland meant it became the political establishment of this country. Some independence supporters still refuse to accept this, citing the party’s anti-establishment credentials in relation to Westminster and the British state. But this misses the point that in Scotland the party became about power and patronage and this altered how it did politics, saw itself and how it ran the Scottish Government and shaped public life.
This became the essence of ‘Sturgeonism.’ It was not left-wing in any real sense, but unashamedly progressive and contemporary, and tried in its early years to modernise on issues such as women’s representation in official Scotland. What it also became was, not surprisingly, defined by the desire to maintain that electoral dominance of the party. And in this ‘Sturgeonism’ became about the all-encompassing attitude to put this ahead of everything else with its progressive credentials being relegated beneath pragmatism.
In this ‘Sturgeonism’ had a distinct similarity with the ‘Wilsonism’ of Harold Wilson’s Labour – who won four out of five elections, but put pragmatism and keeping the show on the road above all else, at the cost of principle and strategy. It is worth noting the irony in this that the modern-day British politician Alex Salmond most admired was Harold Wilson, but it was Sturgeon who most embodied his strengths and weaknesses.
The consequences of the era of SNP dominance
Alongside this is the corrosive effect on Scottish public life of the SNP’s long dominance. Sturgeon’s eight-year leadership saw a deliberate erosion and even open contempt for the wider SNP; an atrophying of democracy across every aspect of public life in Scotland; government reduced to decisions by a handful of people around Sturgeon, with the Scottish Parliament and wider forums marginalised and a lack of honesty and strategy around independence.
Some SNP faithful still rail against the description that Sturgeon and Peter Murrell ran the party ‘as their personal fiefdom for almost a decade’, but the evidence is all-around. The manipulation of party processes, the exclusion of any dissenting figures, the decline of the independence and vitality of party forums, paints a picture that is difficult for many to accept. It is hard however to deny the sight, caught on record and camera, of Sturgeon suppressing enquiries about party finances, and telling people everything was fine when it was far from that.
More than this there was an unwillingness to treat the Scottish public as adult and to engage with them in a grown-up conversation about the challenges of government in difficult times and choices inherent in independence. Eight years of Sturgeon government brought some small advances in policy, but overall the picture is one of trying to maintain the domestic status quo and in so doing making some profound and damaging choices such as the cutting of local government funding and the disastrous savaging of drug service monies.
Similarly on independence there was a lack of depth, heavy lifting and candour. Post-2014 independence never engaged in any serious post-mortem about why it lost. This is one of the basic rules of politics – understand why you lost and then change. The absence of this allowed the mythology and falsehood to arise that ‘the Vow’, Gordon Brown and BBC had ‘stolen’ the result, and as seriously, limited the prospects for a new reinvigorated independence offer to emerge and which, over a decade later, there is still no sign of. That is a direct legacy of the limited politics of control of ‘Sturgeonism’.
Understanding Scotland’s undemocracy
The above must be placed in a wider historical context about how political power is exercised in Scotland. That is the diminution of the SNP to resemble in different ways a mixture of New Labour and Scottish Labour – a top-down politics of discipline from the former and a court politics shaped by patronage and an insider class of entitlement from the latter.
Scotland’s lack of democracy and democratic traditions are central in this. The Scottish Parliament was established as an institution administered the old Scottish Office and nexus of institutions which had grown up pre-devolution. There was little thought or planning undertaken by Labour and home rule campaigners into how any of this democratised Scotland; even more some in Labour consciously saw it as about none of this but rather the maintenance of Labour one party rule in Scotland.
Besides this the Parliament was established as mainstream democracy was being corroded and hollowing out in the face of the whirlwind of neoliberalism. As the fanfare of the Parliament’s opening took place all around the Western world the democratic impulse was being weakened by the forces of inequality, wealth and privilege which have subsequently turned the world upside down.
In this environment, the devolution experiment of the past 25 years under Labour and the SNP centred around a politics of caution, management and administration, has been threadbare and inadequate. But that is sadly true of mainstream politics across the West.
Redoubtable campaigners such as Lesley Riddoch and Andy Wightman rightly make the charge against the excessive and continual centralisation of public life and the cutting down of what passed for local democracy and autonomy. In this they ignore the lack of democracy which has passed for civic life and the reality that any supposed ‘golden age’ of local government up to the 1974 reorganisation was nothing of the kind, but more about the elite, patrician, class rule of elders.
This is the bigger take from the story of Sturgeon and what made ‘Sturgeonism’ possible. We do not need to just revive democracy in Scotland and return to some mythical, idealised past. Rather we need to invent it in the first place along with the cultures, values and processes informing and underpinning it. ‘Sturgeonism’ and what the SNP became are direct products of the undemocracy which defines our politics and public life. A starting point must be an honest debate about what this means and how to challenge and change this state of affairs.
Without this, the conservative with a small ‘c’ politics which shape Scotland will continue, high on rhetoric, but low on substance, and the people and communities who most need active, interventionist government and public action, will be neglected and failed by a politics which was meant to put their interests and voice centrestage. That is the legacy of ‘Sturgeonism’ and the sooner we wake up the better.
