Faced with a crisis in its direction and its fortunes, a political party can sometimes change. Labour has managed that since 2019. But parties do not change easily. Sometimes, indeed, they respond by doubling down on past error, as the Conservatives have done. But the choice between continuity and change cannot be ducked, and it is the one that now faces the Scottish National party after Humza Yousaf’s resignation this week.
Part of the crisis confronting the SNP is immediate and circumstantial. The SNP is easily the largest party in the Scottish parliament. Until the next Holyrood election, due in 2026, Scotland cannot be governed without it. But the SNP has lost popularity, is a divided party and, since the breach with the Greens last week, has no natural allies that it is able to call on. Its opposition rivals, moreover, have zero interest in coming to the SNP’s rescue.
Choosing a new leader is therefore only one part of the SNP’s problem. Continuing to govern under that new leader is part of it too, since a new first minister must win a parliamentary vote as well. Governing effectively is a third part. All of this is made far more difficult by calculations about the imminence of a UK general election that may upend the balance of power among the parties in Scotland as well as in the UK. It’s a rough road ahead, and there’s not much time.
But this only scratches the surface of the SNP’s deeper problems. The party’s fundamental difficulty is that the upheaval of Scottish politics around the party’s core demand of independence has both failed and faded. An era that began with the sensational ousting of Scottish Labour in 2007, and which peaked with the astonishing surge under Nicola Sturgeon in 2015, is finally losing its momentum.
This has happened for many reasons. The SNP’s failure to deliver the promised second independence referendum, let alone to win it, is fundamental. Seventeen continuous years in power, with not enough else to show for it during hard economic and social times, makes for difficulties too. No one, though, should be in any doubt that the tipping point in the SNP’s recent fortunes has been cultural. It failed, both as a party and a government, to read the public’s less doctrinaire mood over Scotland’s gender recognition reform bill, which would make it simpler to change legal gender. More recently, the Cass review on gender identity services reopened the same issues and arguments.
The crunch over gender had been coming a long time. Fifteen months ago, when Sturgeon was still at the helm, as many as half of Scots voters welcomed Rishi Sunak’s government’s decision to block the gender recognition reform bill. That ought to have been a sign, because the SNP once thrived on resisting overmighty moves from London. But both Sturgeon and then Yousaf ignored the new mood this time. An ambivalent response to the Cass review last month then reopened the argument; the Greens’ co-leader Patrick Harvie still refuses to accept the review’s conclusions. This has left both the SNP in general, and the Greens in particular, looking to too many eyes like activists rather than a government.
All of which leaves the independence cause with nowhere much to go anytime soon. There is strong minority support among Scots for leaving the UK – a YouGov poll this week put support on 46% with 54% opposed. But support has fluctuated at around these levels for years now, and not even Brexit, Boris Johnson or Liz Truss has succeeded in gifting the SNP the new surge of support that it coveted.
Perhaps, as the columnist Andrew Neil argued this week, Scottish independence is now “dead for a generation, if not longer”. Perhaps, with UK Labour facing a difficult inheritance in Westminster, the independence movement will start coming back to life rather sooner. Right now, however, after Yousaf’s hubristic fall, with Sturgeon’s husband facing embezzlement charges, and with Labour seemingly on the verge of winning a UK election, it is hard to see what sort of event could provide the SNP with a “one more heave” win that has been its aim since the referendum of 2014.
It could be a mistake, though, to write the SNP off quite as readily as its enemies and some commentators now seem ready to do. Anyone who remembers the SNP of the 1990s, when the party had a handful of MPs, with well-defined left and right factions, and still tended to hold its conferences in agreeable small towns and cities such as Ayr, Inverness and Perth, will be aware of how fast things changed in the party’s favour as political loyalties changed.
For this to happen, however, the SNP has to be willing to rethink. This is not easy. There is no guarantee that it will happen. Yet it was already clear from Yousaf’s narrow victory in the 2023 leadership contest, in which he failed to win on the first round of voting, that there was already a substantial constituency for change within the SNP. This is even clearer now. The 2024 contest and aftermath will be an immense test of its ability to address its problems honestly and openly.
The temptation not to rethink will be all the greater while the SNP remains in government. But whether it comes now or in opposition, the party has to be collectively humble enough to start admitting its own failings, and those of the Sturgeon era in particular. Sturgeon put talking and acting like the leader of an independent and idealistic country that did not exist above governing and delivering for the more complicated one she actually led. It ought to have been the other way around.
Whether either John Swinney or Kate Forbes, the two front-runners for Yousaf’s job, has the skills, the resilience and the strategy to move the SNP in a different direction in such difficult circumstances is not self-evident. Both would face serious difficulties. Swinney, a former SNP leader and Sturgeon’s deputy for a decade, would need to move out of his lifetime comfort zone. Forbes, former finance secretary and a social conservative, would need to overcome a hostile party machine and many of its secular members. Whoever wins, although there are rumours of a pact, there is no way back for the SNP by blaming fainthearts or by dumping all the time on Westminster or the English.
A new model SNP needs much less political campaigning and much more governmental doing. It can achieve this change of focus as a minority government, cooperating with other parties and with the UK government in Scotland’s interest, not browbeating them. A new SNP needs to concentrate on being a competent nationalist party fighting Scotland’s corner in a devolved UK, not a campaign-obsessed independence party. This may point to Forbes rather than Swinney. But whichever of them gets the job, the task is now to do things very differently from what was tried – and which failed – before.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
