You thought this SNP leadership election couldn’t get any more bizarre. It just did. Two of the candidates have effectively accused the leadership of their party of suspected ballot-rigging. Kate Forbes and Ash Regan have called for an independent auditor to be brought in to ensure the conduct of the ballot is ‘transparent, fair and equitable’. They clearly do not trust the party’s chief executive, Peter Murrell, husband of Nicola Sturgeon, to conduct this election honestly. Ash Regan said straight out that having Murrell in charge of the election is like ‘Carrie counting the votes for Boris’s successor’.
I’ve covered countless SNP internal elections over the last 30 years but I’ve never heard the party executive being accused of conflict of interest – still less allowing ‘dead people’ to have a vote, which is another of the Ash Regan campaign claims.
‘Keep an eye out for past members, lapsed members having their votes cast for them,’ said the former SNP minister, Alex Neil, this week. ‘No more deceit.’
The independent vote counting organisation, MI Vote, has always been assumed to be above reproach. Indeed, it would have been seen as offering a gift to the opposition parties to suggest that the Scottish National party, which has been in government for sixteen years, cannot be trusted to handle a leadership election.
The very authority of the next First Minister of Scotland could be undermined by any suggestion that he or she only succeeded thanks to jiggery pokery.
No wonder the SNP deputy leader John Swinney sounded furious on BBC radio this morning insisting that he had ‘no idea whatever’ about what they were complaining about. Mind you, he didn’t help matters by saying that even he does not know the true membership of the Scottish National party. The party’s equivocation about this is the key to the mounting suspicion.
Yesterday, Ash Regan and Kate Forbes issued a public letter to Murrell, calling on him to disclose the latest membership count, the number of electronic ballot papers issued and the number of postal ballot papers. The national secretary, Lorna Finn, had earlier refused these requests, saying that candidates would learn the numbers after the election was over. That only added fuel to the fire. There has been further confusion about an NEC meeting to discuss the matter, which the BBC said was to happen this morning but appears not actually to be taking place. Regan has threatened to stage a public meeting outside the Scottish parliament by 3 o’clock today if her and Forbes didn’t get clarity. The numbers are expected to be published later today.
What the candidates are worried is about isn’t entirely clear. It is hard to believe that the SNP national executive would fraudulently assign the votes of deceased or departed SNP members to Yousaf to ensure his victory. It is suggested that the Yousaf camp may have been given privileged information about which areas of the country membership might have declined most, presumably as an aid to canvassing. Moreover, if newspaper reports at the weekend of the loss of 40,000 odd members are true, that would also in itself constitute an important issue in the campaign. It would be a sign, as Kate Forbes might put it, that ‘continuity won’t cut it’.
There is anyway widespread suspicion in the party that the entire election has been choreographed to propel Humza Yousaf into Bute House. Robin McAlpine, founder of the influential independence-supporting Common Weal think tank has been claiming for weeks that ‘the rigging of this election is so blatant not even a political ingenue could miss it’.
Many suspect that Yousaf got a head start in the campaign by having foreknowledge of Nicola Sturgeon’s shock resignation last month, though there is no firm evidence of this. The election was then fast-tracked before the rival candidates had a chance to get their respective acts together. Kate Forbes was still on maternity leave. After only a week, the candidates were sent off on an exhausting round of hustings from which the party leadership, initially, tried to bar the media.
The party executive would argue that this election had to be conducted speedily because it was not just the party leader who was being elected but the First Minister of Scotland. Nicola Sturgeon’s departure left a vacuum at the top of the Scottish government. But the SNP has a bit of a reputation for using the dark arts to promote leadership favourites.
It was widely alleged in 2021 that rules giving preference to candidates from minority groups were used to bump the feminist, Joan McAlpine MSP, down the South of Scotland regional candidates list because of her opposition to the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. She was replaced by Emma Harper whose diabetes classed her as disabled. Another feminist politician, Joanna Cherry KC MP, accused the SNP of making a secret rule change to discourage her from contesting the seat of Edinburgh Central.
These claims have been dismissed as sour grapes. But the latest allegations are of a different order entirely, coming as they do after the opening of a police investigation. Operation Branchform is probing alleged misuse of party funds by the party executive, specifically into what exactly has happened to £600,000 in donations for a referendum campaign that never took place.
This cloud of suspicion hanging over the party leadership is unprecedented. The very authority of the next First Minister of Scotland could be undermined by any suggestion that he or she only succeeded thanks to jiggery pokery. Someone needs to ring the Electoral Reform Commission and see if someone, anyone, can come to the aid of the party.
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