I don’t wake up every morning with the desire to be negative. I don’t do what I do to stand at the side and throw criticisms. I don’t seek out anger or annoyance (another reason I don’t do social media). But I’m stuck in the reality in which I’m stuck and can’t get things done because of that reality. Explaining why this reality counts against improvement is as much as I can do.
I don’t wake up in the morning with the desire to kick the SNP. I spent 2015-2018 trying to engage positively with the party and the government (impossible). I then spent a chunk of 2018-2019 supporting and advising a group of people who were trying to reform the party (which was blocked through manipulative corruption by the leadership).
During the 2023 leadership election I met anyone who would meet me to talk about reform. The candidate who impressed me most was Kate Forbes and I’ve stayed in touch and supported her in the more recent leadership non-election. I have tried so, so hard to find ways to engage constructively and positively with the party.
The only thing I could think of that I didn’t try was joining and trying to change things from the inside. I got plenty people encouraging me to do so, but in the end I wasn’t totally convinced that I wouldn’t just waste a lot more of my time and still face being blocked through more manipulative corruption. This is a matter of fairly heated debate between me and a close confidante.
Thus it is that I greet the leak of the SNP’s proposed ‘governance review’ proposals with a weary sigh. But it is worse than that; I think it is now over for the SNP as a vehicle for anything, for the foreseeable future at least.
Let me recap how we got here. Murrell lies to the media about the membership, which is one lie too many so he has to go. His role is sort of taken over by Mike Russell for an interim period who sees the scale of the mess left behind and accurately calls it the biggest crisis the party has faced in 50 years. This doesn’t stop them manipulating the election to make sure Humza Yousef got elected.
He promises change. They set up a governance review to look at party democracy and the oversight of the executive of the party. It is supposed to report last spring but disappears. Why? Because some people joined that review who actually wanted to reform the governance of the SNP. They are gradually forced out of the review altogether through underhand means. From there, no-one could prize any information from them on any of this.
Well I now have a leak of the proposals and it is not a governance review, it is a power grab. To my eyes there is only one substantial change and it is to make it almost impossible for a sitting leader to be challenged and almost impossible for any outsider candidate to ever have any hope of being able to stand. This is the SNP oligarchy ending the last avenue for change in the SNP.
It is now clear that there is no way to reform the SNP under a leader who doesn’t want it reformed
How are they doing this? At the moment anyone who wants to run as leader has to gain 100 nominations from party members and they must be spread across 20 branches. This is hard enough because no-one is allowed the contact details for the branches or for the wider membership. Hell, they weren’t even allowed to be told how many members there were.
This rule is being changed. If these new procedures are accepted by the membership then in effect anyone who wants to stand for leader of the SNP needs to get nearly 1,500 signatures. That is more people than the SNP leadership can get to come to a conference – including the payroll vote. I doubt there are 1,500 SNP members you could describe as being currently active.
This threshold (2.5 per cent of all party membership) combined with the lack of any right to contact the membership for anyone outside the leadership is very clearly pulling the ladders up behind a clique who can no longer keep control of the party through any other means. They will never, ever let another Ash Regan challenge them again. They will certainly not allow a paper candidate like Graham McCormick who was strong-armed out of standing against John Swinney just to enable a member debate.
But here’s a more pertinent question – could John Swinney get 1,500 nominees? He made clear to everyone that he wanted to be crowned leader without a contest or he was walking away (so ‘committed’ to the cause of independence is he). In fact the whole point of the existence of the John Swinney leadership was to disempower members.
No-one wanted a Swinney First Ministership. In as far as anyone did it was as a brief caretaker until a new generation came through. Of course he’s reneged on that now and plans the usual ‘me or the highway forever’ attitude of every leader in power. So could he get 1,500 nominees? I’m not at all sure, but he’s written the rules so he doesn’t have to. Incumbents are exempt, handily.
This is all cribbed from the worse behaviour of Starmer, and its consequences are major. It is now clear that there is no way to reform the SNP under a leader who doesn’t want it reformed. We’ve been round this a dozen times and the result is the same every time.
People leaving the party would tell me that there was no point staying because it couldn’t be reformed. I had one window of hope for them – because no, it doesn’t seem to be possible to reform the SNP under a hostile leader but the flip side is that so much power has been accrued in the office of the leader that if a reform-minded leader came along they could change the party almost overnight.
And now the party hierarchy wants to close that possibility down. It is the last hope for the SNP. The only remaining options are nuclear – votes of no confidence, rejecting conference agendas at the conference and so on. These won’t happen because the payroll is as cynical as it ever was and there are still a bunch of loyalist members who are more than capable of thinking six impossible things before breakfast.
If the SNP waves through this Oligarch’s Charter and grants this failing clique perpetual control of the party, I see no path left but failure
So it seems to me to be over. Swinney moves the party further to the right, sucks up harder and harder to every lobbyist going, makes sure nothing is meaningfully interesting or exciting, spews adjectives to the TV that mean nothing and recycles the least consequential ideas of others (dear god, he wants Jack McConnell’s fresh talent scheme back now). That’s it. Like the last time.
He has hired Stephen Noon as his ‘strategist’, a nice guy whose every strategy sounds like an elderly Hobbit explaining to a youngling ‘one day many years from now, the grandchildren of your grandchildren will see a light rise in the east…’. The clearly not competent Colin McAllister remains as Swinney’s chief of staff.
Swinney still responds to everything on the basis of ‘how can nothing change?’. Let me be unequivocal; there are people who believe aliens have landed on earth, there are people who believe the world is flat, I even met someone once who didn’t think Michael Matheson watched the football on his iPad along with his kids – but no-one on the planet believes Neil Gray was at a load of football matches featuring his favourite team to further the interests of health policy.
Yet in he can stroll, tell the parliament patent lies, get caught, say ‘oops’ and Swinney considers that done. It is line-for-line like the Matheson affair, precisely because nothing was learned from the Matheson affair except ‘there is no end of the contempt we can show the public so long as Starmer is that bad’.
I quite literally cannot remember the last time I had a conversation with anyone who works anywhere near government professionally that didn’t revolve around how utterly awful they are. From conservative farmers to radical land reformers, from isolated island communities to young people looking for housing, from people worried about climate change to the leaders of medium-sized businesses, there is unanimity.
This lot are not fit to do their job. Right now they continue to make things worse (it’d take me about six articles this size to fill you in on all the things they’re doing hopelessly wrong today, but if you hold on a little bit the consequences will be all over the newspapers).
And for the first time in a long time I find myself in agreement with Nicola Sturgeon – independence really is off the radar, at least for as long as Swinney-Noonism is running the show. They will continue to say things with no meaning like ‘I’m building the case for independence by running the least popular government in the history of devolution while making sure that nothing changes’.
But stop and ask yourself this; when the future history of Scotland is written and we chart the path that led us to independence, do any of you imagine that John Swinney will feature? Like in any way other than footnotes? You think he has the drive or the vision or the smarts to crack this issue open? Really, do you?
So if you’re an indy supporter we need to resign ourselves to the fact that there will be no meaningful progress (and probably a lot of further harm) until Swinney is replaced. I think most of you knew that. Swinney clearly does – so he’s trying to prevent that possibility. If the SNP waves through this Oligarch’s Charter and grants this failing clique perpetual control of the party, I see no path left but failure.
On the upside, the amendments also replace the semicolon in Paragraph 2(a) with a long dash, so there’s that to cling on to.