After pressure applied by Ash Regan and Kate Forbes, and belatedly Humza Yousaf, the Scottish National party’s national executive committee has been told that the party’s membership has decreased by a third: from 103,884 members in 2021 to 72,186 members now.
Kate Forbes’s campaign team says that these ‘plummeting membership figures shows continuity won’t cut it’, while Ash Regan’s team has heralded the announcement as a triumph and noted ‘there has been a significant reduction in membership numbers since October 2022 following the Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) fiasco’.
This follows allegations of election rigging after Ash Regan, with the support of Kate Forbes’s campaign, looked to be declaring all out war on the SNP establishment. Yesterday afternoon, she released an open letter addressed to Peter Murrell, the party’s CEO.
In it, Ms Regan asks Murrell to ‘provide essential information pertaining to the current membership status and voting procedures within the SNP, which is necessary for ensuring a fair and transparent leadership election’. Can Mr Murrell reveal first the total number of paid-up members currently in the SNP, second the number of digital voting papers that have been sent out to members and third the amount of physical voting papers that have been issued? According to the leadership candidate, her team had previously reached out to national secretary Lorna Finn – but hadn’t heard back.
The SNP initially looked like it wouldn’t budge on the issue, with a spokesperson saying that ‘candidates have already been made aware that responsibility for the leadership election does not rest with any member of staff’.
But just after 3pm this afternoon, the national executive committee were informed of the party membership numbers — which have depleted substantially. It has been thought that members left the party in 2021 to jump ship to Salmond’s Alba party, and more recently members were thought to have defected as a result of the gender bill.
In the last day, concerns about the integrity of the leadership contest have escalated, including fears that the independent third party company, Mi-Voice, used in the election process may not be reliable. Questioned today in Edinburgh on whether his colleagues were acting in a ‘Trumpian’ manner, Humza Yousaf said that ‘most membership figures should be published’. Yousaf defended the Mi-Voice process as one that ‘has been tried and tested for many years’, and ‘a well-known company’.
Kate Forbes has called for an independent invigilator to oversee the contest. Would Yousaf oppose this? ‘If they’re going to call into question the process, then produce some evidence,’ the health secretary replied.
‘If they have the evidence and they believe that a third party or additional auditor would help with that? Of course, I’ve got no objection. I just think that we shouldn’t be casting doubt on a process that’s been used for many years.’
It has been suggested that Humza Yousaf has been shown some of the membership data already, which is why Ash Regan and Kate Forbes are adamant that it be released to them too. These allegations remain hearsay, with Yousaf flat-out denying he’d had access to any membership information.
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