[Robin McAlpine Blog] A Coup for Scotland Part One: change means change

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A Coup for Scotland Part One: change means change

Time is running out for the cause of independence. If someone can’t shake the SNP and get it to make real, substantial change soon, its best hope is managed decline over the next five to seven years. The last chance to give it a shake may be the party conference at the end of August. That places an incredible burden on the movement to act in an incredibly short timeframe.

The urgency means that I am going to do in public what I’d usually do in private – give you a guide to how to organise inside the SNP (if you’re still a member) quickly and effectively to force change on the party and save he cause of independence. This will be a three-part series with the second part looking at how to shake the party out of its complacency and the third a guide to what sort of change is needed.

But first, why am I so confident that major change is needed and what does that mean in reality? Le me do this in chunks because there is much too much to cover and so grouping it thematically will save time.

The public isn’t satisfied. End of story.

I’ve heard all sorts of far-fetched explanations of why the SNP lost so badly on 4 July, all of which try to conceal a fundamental truth. But that fundamental truth is impossible to miss in the data, be it opinion polls or the authoritative Scottish Social Attitudes Survey – the public is deeply dissatisfied with the performance of the SNP in government.

There is no domestic policy area in which the Scottish Government records positive satisfaction ratings and there hasn’t been for a while. It is the government with the lowest satisfaction rating in the history of devolution. There is very good reason for this. Performance has been legitimately poor in a whole host of areas.

Forget the rest of the noise. Yes, the party is seen as arrogant, self-serving, secretive and stale. Yes its independence strategy is seen as unrealistic. Yes, it has police inquiries and other scandals floating around it. But the party’s own polling tells it that these are not the fundamental problems.

The fundamental problem is that public policy is poor and public services are declining at a moment when people need them in a cost of living crisis, a crisis over which they rightly or wrongly assess politicians as having been too passive. No government will ever outrun such negative perceptions of its performance. It is that simple.

There is no indy back door

But if there is a total mess outside the SNP’s front door, don’t believe there is a back door it can take instead. There are those who believe that the way to outrun the poor domestic performance is to make the 2026 election about independence instead.

Here’s the problem; you can’t. Every one of the SNP’s own polls tells it that it is the impact of cost of living and the state of public services that the public is prioritising. Ignore that and go and do something else instead and the party will be punished. No-one thinks the indy strategy is real so no-one is prioritising an issue without a delivery strategy.

I can do this all day; whatever theory you give on getting out of this mess I will respond the same. Unless you can see that this is about government performance, you need to get out of your political bubble and pay attention.

If you’re still looking for a back door, you remain in denial. If the public sees you trying to creep out the back door, you’re in trouble. Stop it. Really, if you’re not talking about regaining trust by greatly improving government delivery, you’re most certainly not helping.

I’ve been waiting for more than two weeks now to find out what the SNP’s response to the election drubbing would be – it is with some shock today that I realise that it has already happened

This is not in hand

The SNP has operated for at least 20 years on the doctrine of leadership infallibility. No matter how poor a decision or a strategy appeared to be, the SNP was led to believe that the leadership was always so good that this just meant you’d missed something or didn’t understand the endgame.

We’ll, we’re well past the endgame now and it turns out there wasn’t a strategy and events were not all in hand. Your earlier reservations turned out to be right. If you have them now, you’re right again. The leadership has absolutely no idea how to get out of this situation. It beggars belief that Swinney is calling the General Election a ‘setback’ but claiming the SNP is in a strong position because of its excellent track record in government.

But it’s the whole lot of them. I have it from a very reliable source that some of the most senior people in the party establishment are actually briefing that it might be better for the party to take a spell in opposition. That is coming from the people you think are busy digging you out of this. They’re not, they’re covering their own back.

I’ve been waiting for more than two weeks now to find out what the SNP’s response to the election drubbing would be. It is with some shock today that I realise that it has already happened. That bland statement about ‘soul searching’ seems to be it. They’re back gaslighting us, doing everything exactly the same as before and telling you thinks are on track. This leadership group has been in place for ten years and it has nothing left.

It can’t offer change because it represents the thing from which change is necessary. This is what the party must change from. Change means ‘from this lot’. This group of people can’t be allowed to run the party any further into the ground.

Change means change

There was more boilerplate chatter about going away and learning the lessons of this defeat. This is now a running joke; it was barely a few days later when a damning report on pandemic preparedness had them away absorbing more bad news and learning more lessons. After ten years, the rate at which the Scottish Government is learning lessons in failure is accelerating, not decreasing.

One of the lines that is being thrown around is that John Swinney only had nine weeks to turn the party round. Except all the rest of us think he’s had a solid 15 years at it. John Swinney has been right at the very, very heart of the thing everyone wants change from. He was no bystander, he is no fresh face. He public doesn’t need time to assess John Swinney.

In fact I say this with some affection; the whole point of John Swinney is that he doesn’t change, that he’s not a volatile spin-with-the-wind kind of character. He’s the solid, dependable accountant – that is his strength and his great limitation. The public decided about Swinney a long time ago.

It isn’t about his personality one way or the other; the point is that the public is losing faith in the government and the government and John Swinney are all-but the same thing in the minds of the public. For a second imagine what this looks like if you’re not in a bubble. Pick an institution with which you are not in love. Think of all your criticism.

Now imagine that institution says ‘we’ve heard your verdict and we’re going to change – by keeping all the same staff, the same leader and all the same policies’. How would you react? Exactly. That is what the SNP is offering. That’s how the disillusioned voters are feeling in response.

It’s not really a good legacy

Which would all be fundamentally problematic if Swinney was not also tied to a pretty flaky political legacy. There is no fresh start for Swinney. In the two weeks since the election result we’ve had his education minister seeming to miss the fact that the whole Scottish education system was about to lose its access to word processing and there’s been a damning Covid inquiry report which fingers Swinney personally as the person responsible for a failure to prepare properly.

There is no recovery which doesn’t involved clear, identifiable, believable change at the top of government

There is nothing now which goes wrong in government where Swinney can credibly say ‘look, that was from a different time and I’m trying to fix things’. It wasn’t; it was him. There is no ‘clear blue water’ between you and yourself. It all leads back to Swinney.

The Branchform trials will eventually come and Swinney will have been the Deputy Leader throughout the period. That makes him culpable for any failures in government. The Salmond affair rumbles on relentlessly and when that reaches court, John Swinney has his fingerprints all over it (mostly the cover-up, but that’s a lot).

There isn’t a ‘look at all the good things I implemented successfully’ position to take here. Swinney is tied to a lot of failures. He owns the previous three (or whatever it is) strategies for independence. He owns all of it. He embodies the legacy the public is dissatisfied with.

Which means…

We can go round the houses as much as you want with this and the result will keep coming back as the same. First, the SNP is in trouble for reasons 100 per cent to do with its own performance. There is no ‘it’s someone else’s fault’. There is no ‘it was just the fates colliding’. There is no ‘this was a temporary setback’. There is no spinning your way out of poor performance.

There is no secret way out of this. There is no recovery which doesn’t involved clear, identifiable, believable change at the top of government. There is no muddling on and refining the language. There is no core votes strategy. There is no way to simply bypass all the history and turn this into an election about something else.

And there is no rebranding exactly what is there and pretending it is a fresh start or something new. That is genuinely contemptuous. Saying to the public ‘this thing that looks identical to the last thing is actually a new thing’ is not sustainable.

Which means that like it or not, the SNP cannot fight 2026 with John Swinney as leader if it wants a fighting chance of continuing as the dominant political party in Scotland. I cannot promise you that changing Swinney will fix things. I cannot promise you that it won’t look messy. I don’t know that there is a brilliant new leader waiting to take over. I don’t even know for sure that this is all saveable.

What I can tell you is this, really, really clearly; as things stand the SNP is not going to achieve a strong enough working majority in parliament and so will either stagger through the five years from 2026 to 2031 as a lame duck administration or languish on the opposition benches without the internal personnel with which to rebuild.

I can promise you without engineering the theatre of a major break with the Sturgeon/Swinney past and a real and credible change to government and alter the way it goes about its business it will be unable to escape the trajectory of managed decline (at best). And if anyone really thinks that you can take the public’s concerns seriously, promise change and yet press ahead with the same team and the same agenda, you need to stop and think more clearly.

Too many in the SNP have been living in a bubble where the Scottish Government was one of the best in Europe which was delivering first-rate policymaking but was beset by the problems imposed from an out-of-touch Tory administration in London which was actually to blame for everything. They seem to struggle to leave this framing behind.

They must. You must. It is simply wrong. The Scottish Government has not only earned its poor approval ratings, it has got away with a lot in the last decade and should really have faced a reckoning for its performance in government earlier than it has.

Source: A Coup for Scotland Part One: change means change