[Robin McAlpine Blog] A Coup for Scotland Part Three: a new story

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A Coup for Scotland Part Three: a new story

If you take everything in this series and everything I’ve written since the SNP lost most of its MPs in the General Election and you try to sum it up in a single phrase, it’s that the SNP needs a new story. Here I want to explain how to make that possible.

Humans organise information into knowledge structures, and we tend to assemble those structures as stories, with beginnings, middles and endings, characters and mood. This helps us to make sense of the information and place it in contexts that explains why things change or why they stay the same. We all do this all the time with almost everything, creating heroes and villains, challenges and failures and victories, lessons learned and wisdom gained.

The SNP over-claimed and under-delivered then made a string of basic mistakes which it blamed others for, simply denied or kicked off into the long grass. That’s the long and short of it. The negative story people have about the SNP is an increasingly messy mix of arrogant overstatement and bleating self pity.

The modern SNP doesn’t do humility. It almost never puts its hand up and said ‘we got this wrong’. So people feel tricked by a party that promised a lot, delivered error after error and never had the humility to accept it or give the impression that it thought it had done anything wrong. Smug, self-interested, cloth-eared, incompetent, self-pitying, unchanging – the stories people tell themselves about the SNP are filled with peril for the party.

Here’s the thing; you are not in complete control of your own story. You can try and control it but your actions and the outcomes you produce may be telling a different story. You can’t just wake up in the morning and decide to tell a different story. You need to find a credible way to reset and head off on another path.

You can’t do that if you refuse to change. That has been the whole thrust of what I’ve ben writing. You can’t just stand up and say ‘look, I’m six inches taller and I can fly’ unless you look six inches taller and can fly. You may tell yourself that it’s not a lie if you’re standing on a box and you’ve been on an airplane before, but that just feeds in to the whole negative story.

So for those saying ‘we can’t change leader because we don’t have good options’ you have to stop and say ‘are those options worse than definitely losing?’. You may tell yourself that it isn’t convenient for you to change the story just at the moment, but you will pay a price.

For those saying ‘this is all risky’, then yes, sure it is. You don’t get a fresh start with a guaranteed result at the end. Taking that risk is the price of entry of being competitive in the 2026 Scottish Election.

I want to crush all your half-hopes that you have a pain-free option

Some will say ‘this will inflict pain on the party’. Well it is probably time to get your head round the fact that pain is coming so it would be better to accelerate and compress it than to draw it out. Just wait until you are sitting on the opposition benches watching Anas Sarwar running Scotland and come and talk to me about pain.

There is always a fear-based, risk-averse reason not to change and that always comes with vague hopes that things might sort themselves out. As in ‘but Labour will become unpopular quickly’. Perhaps, but not as quickly as you. You are bleeding bad new stories daily and they are almost all inextricably linked to your leader. It will take quite some time for Labour to overtake you.

Sorry if I’m labouring this but I want to crush all your half-hopes that you have a pain-free option here. There are no pain-free options for you at this stage. Whatever it is that you are telling yourself which helps you believe that it might be possible to just keep going as you are, you need to stop telling yourself it. It isn’t just going to be OK.

But at the same time, you absolutely can change the story. You can change it through a combination of show and tell. If you show people that you are making efforts to do things differently and then you articulate why your doing this and address your weaknesses, it really is possible to change a story quickly.

To do that you have to identify your weaknesses, the negative stories that surround you – and you need a way to reverse those stories. When people are angry you need to pay penance. People are more receptive if they think that you are suffering for your redemption. It can’t seem too easy.

If you’re seen as pig-headed you need to say your sorry. If you’re seen as arrogant you need to demonstrate humility. If you’re thought of as incompetent you need to frame carefully what you are doing to regain competence. If you are seen as uninterested in the priorities of voters, you need to show otherwise.

The balance of show and tell is an art. You can accurately identify negative perceptions of you from data analysis but what to do about it is a creative process and you need to get the balance right. Where the SNP is just now requires it to show a lot more than it tells (a result of having told so much that wasn’t then shown).

You can’t change a bad story if you are the bad story

The example I lead on when explaining this is control and centralisation. If you want to stop being seen as a control freak you need to be seen to let go. I can’t be clear enough here; setting up a speech to your favourite think tank where you talk at length about how you value communities and want everyone to realise their potential or whatever is pointless. The public has heard it.

You need to do things which demonstrate the confidence and willingness to release control over things. That’s why I keep promoting the idea of a decentralisation bill as the first big action. It would represent a fundamental reorientation of governmental attitude.

But there are things it takes time to show properly and so sometimes you need to signpost where you are going. If you’re seen as incompetent in government or simply making too many mistakes, it will take time for people to realise you’ve got your act together purely by watching results. So you need to find a way to set out a philosophy of governing.

What is crucial is that this must also show that humility. You need to be able to identify what features about the mode of governing in the last few years were causing the problem and explain what the alternative is. Of course, you then need to live up to that.

It is difficult to explain all of this here because this isn’t a silver bullet kind of problem. It’s not one thing that’s wrong that you can put straight, it is a load of things which have converged. You can only tackle one thing at a time. I have a full list of actions the Scottish Government could take to effect a rapid reset and story-change which I produced for something else. I genuinely think this is possible.

The reason I’ve gone through this here is because I want to close this three-part argument by returning to the main theme. Think about all the things I’ve written before. If someone who has a reputation for centralisation starts talking about decentralisation only once they have been punished at an election, how sincere does that look?

If you need to explain that you understand the factors that have led to poor government performance, how can you do that if you were a leading figure in that government? You can’t change a bad story if you are the bad story.

In technical terms it is still perfectly possible to get the SNP seriously competitive in time for May 2026. The conditions are all there to enable that. You could get the voters to look again and you can buy yourself a bit of time to demonstrate that you have turned a corner. Those counselling despair that all is doomed are just as wrong as those who think everything is actually fine.

The SNP needs to change its story. But there is an overwhelming condition to enable that; there must be sweeping change in the party. I have tried hard here to show that you have no option but to change leader or continue your decline. This isn’t personal, it’s politics. It’s a brutal business.

But John Swinney has been at the top of government for just shy of two decades. That makes him the problem. The SNP must be brave and move on. There is a pressing need, a coherent means and a reason for hope if you do. No more excuses SNP. If you choose managed decline then you have let every one of us down.

Source: A Coup for Scotland Part Three: a new story