With weeks to go to the best and probably only chance the SNP has to get its act together before it loses major ground (at best) at the 2026 election, is there any sign that anyone has a plan? Sort of yes – and it’s ridiculous. Yet unless someone does something, that ridiculous plan is going to be the party’s ‘strategy’. And when I write ‘someone’ I mean the party membership.
To fill in for any cogent communication from the SNP leadership and to assess whether there is a path forward I’m looking at two things in particular. One is the draft agenda for the party conference at the end of August (which someone leaked to me who had had it leaked to them from someone else). Another is the formal process established by the SNP to begin to assess party members’ views on why the election campaign went so badly.
Meanwhile to get an idea of the shape of the underlying problem between the Scottish Government and the public we now have the Scottish Social Attitude Survey too. The short version of all of this is that the SNP seems paralysed and the public is drifting away pretty decisively. There really isn’t a lot of wriggle room here. The SNP is in real trouble.
Let’s start with the SNP’s official election postmortem approach. As far as I can tell you can have a shot at it here if they don’t put it behind some kind of password protect. It is a survey that has come round in an email from John Swinney.
It is cynical, insulting, useless and bluntly and absolute joke which treats party members with contempt. It is an online survey that says things like ‘after only nine weeks John Swinney has been so good that in a few more weeks we’ll win independence. Do you think that John Swinney is (a) brilliant (b) amazing or (c) brilliantly amazing’.
I’m only just kidding here. The bulk of the survey is based around putting forward each of the SNP’s positive talking points, asking how important they were in the campaign and then letting you chose ‘quite important’ or ‘very important’. It kicks of with abolishing tuition fees, then abolishing prescription charge and winds its way towards ‘record investment in the NHS’. This last one really bugs me – the NHS virtually never gets below inflation settlements so literally every single year is a record investment.
But I digress. Because from there the survey… does exactly the same again but this time asking how important these same issues were ‘in your community’. There are a couple of text boxes here and there to offer some comments, but that is basically it.
This really is insulting. All this does is provide meaningless data for the SNP leadership to let them say ‘100 per cent of members thought our offer was either quite or very important to them and their community’. Presumably they will then say ‘the rank and file of the party are 100 per cent behind us and all the griping is just coming from an out-of-touch elite and the hated media’.
The party is falling apart yet discussion of Sexually Transmitted Infections is granted more agenda time at the conference than considering the recent General Election campaign and result
I filled it in and tried to squeeze in my own critique of the campaign but it is basically impossible and can only be done by cramming material into text boxes which, by nature, can be made to disappear completely. I think we can assume negative comments will not be published.
So ‘here are our talking points – how brilliant are they?’ is the response to a devastating election result. There is no balancing section that goes ‘OK, here are some things you may think we got wrong – which of these do you think is significant?’. Like ‘backing a man who lied to the Presiding Officer after taking £13k in expenses to watch football on holiday’ or ‘poor governmental performance’.
I’m guessing the results of this survey will be unveiled at the party conference, which will only heighten the farce that it is already. I can give some leeway here since it was designed as a pre-election rally. While any party would do that, it is hard not to feel that was designed by Team Humza (who set the timing) to prevent growing discontent in the party getting any kind of public airing.
But even if this was a pre-election conference it would be a poor show. Almost all the resolutions come from two branches (six between them), MPs and MSPs and affiliated organisations. I know for certain there were a host of well-drafted, significant motions from other branches simply prevented from getting on the agenda.
The result (it is hard to get my head round this…) is that about 80 per cent of the motions can be summarised as ‘can we have a round of applause for the Scottish Government for being brilliant’ or ‘could the Scottish Government be even more brilliant by doing this thing it was quite likely to do anyway’. Hence the party is falling apart yet discussion of Sexually Transmitted Infections is granted more agenda time than considering the recent General Election campaign and result.
You can draw various conclusions from this, and many will settle on the view that the SNP establishment (you’re lucky if there are 30 people in that group) is arrogant and complacent. I suspect that’s not correct. I think they’re just entirely lost, facing a challenge that is miles beyond their capability and simply not equipped to do what they need to.
I’d be tempted to write ‘it seems that they think they can talk themselves out of this crisis without changing anything’ but I think it’s much more likely that the accurate story is ‘they are going to try and talk themselves out of this crisis on the basis that they have no idea what else to do other than resign’. And that’s the one thing this group of people simply never countenance.
The SNP has five or six weeks to rescue itself or it is going into a state of paralysis which will last at least seven years
Can they talk their way out of it? Inside the party, who knows. The SNP is now so harmed as a vibrant democratic organisation that no-one I talk to can tell me what others in the party are thinking. It has become an emaciated, fragmented and disarticulated organisation where members talking to each other was viewed as a danger to the leader.
Outside the party? Dear god no, they most certainly can’t talk their way out of this. It’s not just that this election risks setting in voters’ minds the idea that the SNP needs to be punished and to take a period out of power, it is that it really doesn’t like what it sees.
The Scottish Social Attitude Survey results are out today and they make grim reading for the SNP. Trust in the Scottish Government is at the lowest level on record. The Jack McConnell government which ceded power to the SNP in 2007 was never this poorly trusted. There isn’t a single bright spot in this survey. Everything points to massive problems for the SNP.
So that’s where we are. Even senior and formerly loyal SNP politicians like Alyn Smith now publicly state that the leadership team isn’t fit for purpose, yet they seem to be going to furious lengths to make sure there is no discussion of them or their performance and that there is zero opportunity for the party to get any role in discussing the election just passed.
Those involved seem to prioritise maintaining their salaries over the party. They can’t possibly believe they can talk their way out of this but they have no other ideas and are resorting to what they know – more than a decade of responding to every problem by cracking down on dissent and reducing party democracy further. They have no plan and I don’t believe they’re capable of producing one.
Let me repeat this situation; the public is walking away from this party but the response of those who run the party is to ignore the public and try and control its own members through abject, cynical manipulation designed to prevent any criticism being levelled at them from the only people capable of saving the party – those members. Meanwhile every day things in government get worse.
It is an utterly disgraceful position to take. If you’re generous you could say ‘they’re accepting managed decline’. If you’re not you’d conclude they are willing to let the whole thing burn to the ground rather than change or move aside. SNP history will most certainly not remember this lot fondly.
The SNP has five or six weeks to rescue itself or it is going into a state of paralysis which will last at least seven years. If the members don’t use party conference to make a very, very major change, it’s almost certainly over for now. The stakes are now that high.