Project: The Next SNP. Deadline: Post-2026 Election
Gerry Hassan
Sunday National, 25 August 2024
The SNP meets next weekend in Edinburgh in a state of transition which marks the end of one political era – that of SNP dominance – and the beginning of a new era.
The SNP is experiencing a mix of emotions in having to navigate a very different political environment from the one that it has become used to since 2007. It has experienced election defeat, political turbulence – and a crisis of party, government and independence. The SNP used to have a positive narrative and is now unsure of itself, of the way forward, and in how it tells a story of its achievements and the future to hich it aspires.
There is still some traction in the “business as usual” brigade; the party continues in devolved government; some party members still sing the same old songs, but in private many tell a different story – of doubt and worry.
What happens when a rising tide goes out?
The SNP were once on a rising tide and wave. That momentum took them into office in 2007, aided them winning big in 2011, contributed to the surge for independence in 2014, and the 2015 Westminster tsunami. This was a politics of elemental energy and enthusiasm where the SNP swept all before it, but where, at the same time, increasingly difficult questions were cast aside. The dominant feeling was that history was on the side of the SNP and independence – and that momentum and that rising tide would carry both to ultimate victory.
This contributed to a pervasive culture post-2014 in the SNP of avoiding discussing detail, having democratic discussions, or asking problematic questions. Rather people were encouraged to believe they were on the right side of history and to “trust in Nicola” and a leadership which was popular and knew how to win – as clearly evidenced by the popularity of the SNP in elections and Nicola Sturgeon’s national popularity.
Post-2014 there was no real discussion in the SNP about democracy, priorities in government and choices in independence. This inevitably contributed to an unhealthy atmosphere in the party; a leadership which sapped energy and enthusiasm, and which ultimately embraced a politics of control and of mistrusting others. This undoubtedly contributed to the present state of the SNP.
The challenge to the SNP is not just about the major defeat it experienced in the recent Westminster election. Rather it is about a host of problems which influenced that, and which still exist today. Its momentum has gone, and in retreat exposed the shortcomings and failings of seventeen years in office which has become more pronounced with independence being off the current political agenda.
The party’s membership has fallen by half since its post-2014 peak of 125,691 in 2019 to 64,525. Activist levels have declined more. The party’s Westminster vote has halved – from 1,454,436 in 2015 to 724,758 in July past. Individual donations to the party have collapsed; and membership fee income has fallen markedly as has the Short Westminster monies reflecting the collapse in SNP MPs. “We need to recognise that the tide has gone out before we can work out to change things”, one SNP veteran told me.
Some of these negatives reflect the inevitable wear and tear of a party in office for a long time. Much can be pinned on the Sturgeon era: a leadership which burned through political capital and creativity accruing power to itself and leaving the SNP exposed in the aftermath. Whatever the merits or not of Humza Yousaf and John Swinney the party and government they have headed is one shaped for good and bad by Nicola Sturgeon.
A strand of the SNP and independence still want to deny the above but are dwindling. Instead, in the party and wider currents is a growing awareness of crisis and the cul-de-sac the party is now in. This extends in many places to a growing anger and resentment at the cumulative direction of the SNP leadership.
In the aftermath of the 2024 defeat this sentiment has become increasingly pronounced. There is a widespread feeling that the way the party and government has been run became increasingly problematic over the Sturgeon era. Party members were taken for granted, government ministers had little capacity, and even supporters and the public not respected.
Some SNP members want to argue that this was aided by the challenges of COVID and pressures on government, but more widespread is a mixture of sadness and anger. “I feel that the hubris of Sturgeon as leader is also about us as party members. We went along with it. We did not ask questions. We bear a responsibility for things going wrong” commented one SNP member.
There is a desire in sections of the SNP for open debate and discussion about where the party is and its future. Realistically that feeling will not be encouraged by the current Swinney leadership. The party’s higher echelons have since 2014, and if not before, resisted debate, regarding it as an inconvenience which they can do without. Despite this, a sizeable part of the active membership want to debate how the party has been governed in recent years, how the SNP government has run Scotland, and how the party does politics.
A good place to start would be addressing why the SNP lost so badly in recent elections. This would be a difficult process to manage after years of suffocating leadership but there is a need for catharsis in the party and members to feel they matter. “2024 was a punishment election towards us and the Tories” said one former SNP MP to me, and “we deserved to be punished – unless we change course 2026 will be more of the same.”
This could be called the Next SNP; the deadline for it coming into fruition being realistically post-2026 Scottish election and any setback that these might entail; with the work starting on a future politics of the SNP now by putting the first building blocks in place.
Can the SNP have an honest debate about its record in government?
The party faces numerous challenges; its record in government, how it thinks about and understands Scotland and the age we live in; and how it does politics as a party and as part of a wider movement. There is the party’s cumulative record in office. The SNP has numerous good stories – such as resisting Tory and now Labour austerity to maintaining and expanding where possible a social contract in Scotland seen in such innovations as the Scottish Child Payment and baby boxes.
However, the SNP’s defence of its years is not helped by a mindset of a section of the party which denies growing problems and ends up in the dead-end of defending the status quo in modern Scotland. In this outlook everything is either fine in the garden of Potemkin Village Scotland; and if not, is the fault of Westminster Labour or Tories and unionism per se – allegedly intent on “power grabs” and ‘talking Scotland down”.
Acknowledging the accumulation of problems, shortcomings and failures of the past seventeen years would be a first step in renewal. Take the state of public services. Education and health are over-stretched, under-funded and demoralised. The SNP’s story on the NHS, education and public services is that they have protected them from Westminster cuts as much as possible. But this increasingly flies in the face of the evidence.
First, public spending in Scotland, devolved and reserved together, is 51% of GDP, significantly higher than across the UK where it is 45%. There are limits to public spending in Scotland as in elsewhere as the “emergency spending controls” announced by Shona Robison show; increased spending for now is not an option. Second, the lived experience of staff, patients, pupils and other users of public services at breaking point.
A major sore for the SNP record is local government. Years of successive council tax freezes and cuts by the Scottish Government to local councils has left them strapped for cash, struggling to provide services, with capacity and resourced stretched.
Scotland’s main city, Glasgow, has been under SNP control since 2017 and in this period the city’s problems have visibly increased. The reasons are many – Glasgow’s tax base, deindustrialisation, social problems, and bias of the Scottish Office pre-devolution and Scottish Government post-devolution against Glasgow and to recognise its need for funding.
The record of the SNP in Glasgow however is poor – stifled by the Scottish Government, multiplied by lack of SNP vision for the city, divisions in the SNP group and the quality of leadership provided by leader Susan Aitken. A SNP senior Glasgow activist commented “the SNP council leadership is out of its depth and needs changing”.
Another tragic problem is Scotland’s drug deaths that have grown exponentially under SNP Government. The decision of the SNP to cut counselling and support services for drugs under Sturgeon was one many in the field said at the time would be disastrous. James Docherty, formerly of the Violence Reduction Unit, said this week that: “We have been hurtling towards this disaster, eyes wide open – more catastrophe, far too many willing to bet it all on wishful thinking.”
Yet another area – arts and culture – is about to face significant cuts which will see major bodies face retrenchment and some close as Creative Scotland’s budget is stretched to breaking point. Early last year Angus Robertson promised £100 million extra funding for Creative Scotland, none of which has appeared so far.
“The eternal mystery is why the SNP are strangers in their own country’s culture making” said the head of a national cultural agency to me. If people think that too hard, remember Creative Scotland was a New Labour inspired idea brought north by then Labour Culture minister Mike Watson and implemented by the SNP. “The SNP think culture is about promoting Scotland and the minister attending the occasional glitzy event, not creativity, imagination and certainly not new ideas” said a prominent cultural figure whose patience with the SNP has snapped.
Speaking of Angus Robertson, who has as many jobs as Douglas Ross, covering culture, external affairs and independence, he scored a recent own goal meeting Israel’s deputy ambassador to the UK. Initially he and his office presented it as discussing “areas of mutual interest” before he belatedly issued a non-apology apology. The anger his actions released seemed indicative of the pent-up emotions many now feel about the SNP inside and outside the party.
Adding to this is a newfound confidence from Labour in Scotland showing that it is prepared to stand on the SNP’s toes and embrace a more assertive unionism. This has driven some independence supporters into apoplexy, but Labour are seen as different undertaking such interventions compared to the Tories. The propensity of some in the SNP to suggest an equivalence between Labour and Tories dismissing the former as “Red Tories” carries little weight with voters.
A more nuanced approach to Labour by-passing the Scottish Government in Scotland with public funds is available: the “Labour manifesto promised restoration of decision-making over the allocation of structural funds to ‘the representatives of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland’” notes Professor Aileen McHarg of Durham University, asking “which representatives did it mean?” and commenting that “the Scottish Office is not a policy department” or one skilled in delivery.
Where are Scotland’s Big Ideas?
This brings us to the wider terrain of ideas and thinking. The SNP in the period of minority government under Salmond from 2007-11 had a decent record. It promoted the ideas of shared, pooled sovereignty from academic and SNP MEP Neil MacCormick which helped reframe independence. It invited the late intellectual Tom Nairn to think about the future of Scotland; and thought about broadcasting in a major Scottish Commission which led to a new BBC Scotland channel.
Post-2011, and even more after 2014, this well has run dry with the SNP mostly silent on the big issues defining Scotland and our times. Take the economy. It is fine raising “the lack of economic levers” in Scotland but where is the thinking on the kind of economy Scotland needs, the dynamics of capitalism – and how to aid business, wealth and prosperity?
The past ten years has seen scant action with the only offerings being Andrew Wilson’s Growth Commission and the occasional pronouncement from Kate Forbes. Both have gone with the grain of the economic orthodoxies of the past 40 years: the need for light-touch regulation, low taxes and encouraging finance capitalism. Nowhere have the difficult questions about the nature of capitalism, power of finance capital, asset-rich capitalist class, and UK broken economic model, which Wilson and Forbes want to produce a Scottish version of, been addressed.
Related to this is the health of democracy. Scotland engaged in an intense democratic exercise in 2014’s indyref, but that watershed experience has had no formal consequences for how democracy and government is organised. In a world where democracy is under threat and in retreat there have been no substantial SNP or Scottish Government interventions on how to nurture democracy. No initiatives on decentralisation, genuine local government, or wider participation, as if the current Scottish Parliament is the final statement on democratic participation.
Add to this the absence of SNP thinking on independence. There has been no serious attempt by the party to rethink independence whether economically; how it engages with the rest of the UK; the challenges of Brexit, or that the world in 2024 is a more hostile environment than 2014. Besides, there has been a remarkable lack of reaching out and listening to the Scotland that voted No. Some of this has been driven by a belief post-2014 that independence was “inevitable” due to the tides of history; the smugness of this encapsulated in the “Are You Yes Yet?” as if all No voters were future Yes voters waiting to see the light.
The Next SNP, Junking “the Official Story” and the Power of Joy
The Next SNP needs to encourage debate and discussion, nurture new ideas, do leadership and politics differently, and be clear about its values. The current mix of soft centrist social democracy and benign, bourgeois nationalism is an inadequate compass. The SNP needs to reassess its philosophical anchors – something many parties do when they rethink what they stand for, and which the SNP itself did in 2006-7 when it shifted a positive account about the possibilities of a self-governing Scotland.
The SNP have come to represent “the official story” of Scotland. This is the account of insider, institutional Scotland that believes that the vested interests and bodies which currently administer Scotland know what is good for everyone else. This is the story which Labour embodied when it ran Scotland.
Labour articulated “the official story” of Scotland with its insularity, complacency, self-congratulation and insider class status – ultimately contributing to Labour’s atrophying and decline. These qualities can now be seen in SNP’s version, and there is no advantage in the party becoming synonymous with such an account. Unless dramatic action is taken the SNP will suffer the same fate as Labour before them.
The party’s inner culture has atrophied over the years in office. A common feeling among members is that “warm, welcoming family atmosphere” which defined the party has been lost with the surge post-2014: one member noting that the party never really adjusted to its new membership with “some long-standing members put out by the arrival of new faces.”
Others feel that something more has shifted negatively over the years in power. “There is a dysfunctional feeling to meetings, with senior people jockeying for position and remembering who did what to who in the past” said one member. Another commented that “the feel of the party was similar to what it must have felt in Scottish Labour – a party obsessing about its inner machinations and forgetting about its public face.”
Seventeen years in, the time is right for the SNP to embark on a new phase of evolution and direction. The status quo leadership of Humza Yousaf and then John Swinney will not on existing trends cut it. This is still a party in the shadows of Nicola Sturgeon’s legacy, living in that space and afraid to come out into the light.
The Next SNP and project of independence will only get into gear post-2026. It will require new leadership, a new party culture, a different attitude towards others, and a more pluralist way of understanding politics and of doing power. It could, if the current leadership had the courage to do so, begin now with John Swinney and senior figures starting next weekend by planting the first seeds.
Central to this is abandoning the denial of a section of the SNP and independence about the shortcomings in how the party has done politics – and its record. The continual deflection of Scottish failings onto Westminster is immature, dishonest and demeaning; and lets Westminster off the hook for when it genuinely has a case to answer in Scotland.
Navigating this needs honesty, humility and reflection, a sense of the limits of miserabilism and not presenting the world as one where every act of non-SNP politicians is trying to “do Scotland down”. Rather, there needs to be a full tapestry of emotional responses including the power of telling stories of hope, positivity and joy.
The possibilities of this approach can be seen in the Presidential campaign of Kamala Harris and the US Democrats. She is deliberately standing for the power of light versus the darkness of Trump. Not only that she is positioning herself in a very different place to Joe Biden as President. It may still not be enough to defeat Trump, but it has galvinised the Democratic Party and its wider constituency of support.
Joy should be a pivotal part of the story and tapestry of Scotland and independence, reflecting the prospect of a country and future in which people are empowered, represented and see themselves as the authors and makers of their own destiny – what the late writer Barbara Ehrenreich called “the politics of collective joy.”
The SNP and independence have come far. But now is the time to start telling a new story and to begin again. The SNP must transform, or it will wither. The sooner this process begins the better. Edinburgh next week is an opportunity to begin that much needed, long overdue, change.
