ON a cloudy day in June on the outskirts of Edinburgh, close to the airport, the SNP launched its election manifesto.
Outside the venue was an avant-garde stone sculpture depicting a disfigured face. It is entitled “Ozymandias, King of Kings”. The piece is inspired by the Percy Bysshe Shelly poem:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains.
There could have hardly been a more fitting omen for the electoral battering the SNP would take just over three weeks later.
Candidates shuffled into the building. Party bods who gathered outside to chuff vapes remarked that the setting, a featureless new development on brownfield land, was reminiscent of the dystopian sci-fi show Black Mirror.
John Swinney (above) unveiled the document that was supposed to take the SNP back into Westminster, a fighting force on the left of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
He wanted SNP MPs to hold Starmer’s feet to the fire, to be Scotland’s voice in Westminster.
In the end, the party were reduced from 48, the third largest party in the UK, to just nine members.
Their defeat has undoubtedly been magnified by the unfair first-past-the-post system. But party figures believe it is time for serious soul-searching.
In the famous words of the bellboy who delivered a bottle of champagne to George Best’s hotel room only to find the United legend getting his jollies with Miss World said: “Where did it all go wrong?”
A looming defeat
One former MP, ousted by Labour, said he had made his peace with defeat months ago. “I saw the writing on the wall,” he said.
He said that the campaign lacked focus and that past triumphs showed the SNP’s vote could be motivated to come out when the party had a “clear and strong message”.
Swinney and Stephen Flynn (below), who has kept his seat despite the routing, delivered a dizzying array of messages to voters: They were the champion of the oil and gas sector; they were the left-wing conscience of a Labour Party flirting with the right; they would get a renewed mandate for independence.
But in the view of most candidates – and it appears voters – this election boiled down to giving the Tories a “kicking”, in the words of the former MP.
Another said: “People collectively across the UK decided the Tories had to go and I think the people of Scotland decided that the most effective means to do that was to vote Labour.”
It’s hard to get around the fact that the SNP conducted their campaign in possibly the worst circumstances of any party in Scotland.
Their former chief executive, husband to Nicola Sturgeon (below), has been charged by police with embezzlement. They are on their third leader in just over a year. Humza Yousaf sent his own premiership tumbling down in a failed show of strength.
One MP, who kept their seat, said that in light of these difficulties, people did not see them as “a vehicle to achieve” the overall project of booting out the Tories.
It remains the case, according to the pre-election polls, that Scots are warmer on independence than just about ever.
Yessers backing Labour?
The MP said: “The one thing that we as a party are going to have to address and look at seriously is the absolute fact that support for independence is kicking around 50%, support for the SNP is at 30%.
“There’s huge questions about that. As a priority, we have to deal with that.
“We have to know why that’s the case, why some independence supporters sat at home, some were tempted to vote for Labour and we can never allow that to happen again.”
They added: “If people aren’t prioritising independence to the extent they’ll vote Labour, that’s a challenge to us.”
Exactly how the SNP hope to achieve this post-mortem remains vague. One former MP who stood down at the election said that “any big electoral defeat like this should trigger a proper analysis”.
But they were coy on what this would involve. “There will be people right now, I’m sure, who’ve got their personal pet reasons for why it happened – not helpful, doesn’t get us anywhere, probably wrong, knee-jerk reaction,” they said.
The independence factor
One issue in play is whether the SNP did enough to push the constitutional question during the election.
Sturgeon said that while the party had put independence “page one, line one” of its manifesto, there had been little follow through on that.
But a former MP noted that with most voters viewing the election purely as a chance to get the Tories out “every other issue was just steamrollered out the way”.
“Sometimes when there’s a swing like that, there’s nothing you can do,” they added.
Independence was not mentioned in the readout of the First Minister’s call with the new PM issued on Friday evening.
It appears unlikely he will demand a second referendum when they meet in Scotland today as part of Starmer’s inaugural “four nations” tour.
One MP said: “We’re not in a position to be asking for anything.”
Post-mortem
The party needs better data, and it will come, on what exactly went wrong and what they can do to fix things. This will require time and money. With the next Scottish Parliament elections looming, the SNP are not blessed in either department.
It took Starmer around three years to get Labour to a point where they were consistently polling above the Tories.
Thankfully for them, the SNP have less of a task on their hands. One MP highlighted that the party was around six points behind Labour in Scotland and would benefit from Holyrood’s more representative electoral system.
The SNP have weathered storms before, even if much of their current crop of parliamentarians – or ex-parliamentarians as so many of them now are – are only used to winning.
There is still a substantial appetite for independence and by taking just under 30% of the vote they can remain confident that they will cling on far better in Holyrood than they did at this election.
But the prevailing view appears to be that the party has soul-searching to do. Many are of the view the race for Holyrood has already begun.
