The Scottish National party has been through difficult times in the past, but can anything compare with this week? Nicola Sturgeon arrested ‘as a suspect’ by Police Scotland in the investigation into party finances. The ignominious collapse of the deposit return scheme; the deepening scandal of the Ferguson Marine ferries. This must be the nadir, surely, of SNP fortunes. Or is it?
As the week progressed, SNP figures became visibly more relaxed and even started sounding rather bullish. Nothing to see here…Nicola hasn’t been charged with anything…voters are focussed on Boris’s crimes. The SNP MSP, James Dornan, even accused the police and the media of ‘collusion’ and complained that officers had raided Sturgeon’s Uddingston home as if it were ‘Fred West’s house’.
The independence cause is blocked and the party of independence is in disarray
Humza Yousaf wisely distanced himself from Mr Dornan’s hyperbole. However, he also called on SNP MSPs to back Nicola Sturgeon or quit. The nationalist blogger James Kelly said this was like Nicola Sturgeon calling on MSPs to back Alex Salmond after he was accused of misconduct in 2018. Could you imagine her sending him flowers then, as the SNP group just have?
The SNP leadership is relaxed because they can’t detect any obvious electoral damaged from Operation Branchform, the police probe into what happened to £660,000 raised for an independence referendum that never happened. Professor John Curtice pointed out that the five opinion polls since the arrest of Peter Murrell show the SNP at 38 per cent in voting intentions for Westminster, the same as in four polls conducted after Humza Yousaf was elected in April.
However, the SNP’s complacency is misplaced. The SNP and the independence movement has been damaged by recent events. As Alex Salmond, the former FM put it, this is looking like an ‘extinction event’ for the SNP.
The fact that there hasn’t been a poll collapse since the arrests is mainly because it had already happened. The SNP dropped 8-10 percentage points after Yousaf became leader in April, and it hasn’t recovered. There has been no post-election ‘honeymoon’ period for the new FM. The voters seem to have made up their minds.
In Friday’s Bellshill council byelection the SNP support fell 14 per cent and Labour’s rose by a similar amount. Bellshill is in the same part of the world as Rutherglen, where there is likely to be a hotly contested by-election following the suspension of the former SNP MP Margaret Ferrier for breaking lockdown rules. Labour is supremely confidence of overturning the SNP’s 5,000 majority in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, and of winning 10-20 seats at the next general election. An electoral nemesis is on the advance.
Yousaf’s authority has been weakened by a succession of policy failures and by his decision to back Nicola Sturgeon’s refusal to resign the party whip – something she required of every SNP politician in legal difficulties when she was leader. Yousaf insists that the former SNP leader is ‘innocent until proven guilty’, which is of course correct, but that was never the criterion in the past.
Nothing is going right. Circularity Scotland, the company set up to manage the shelved deposit return scheme, is on the brink of going bust and the Scottish government is braced for compensation claims from companies who spend millions preparing for the scheme. The NHS waiting lists remain at record levels. Rail fares have just risen by nearly 5 per cent. Public sector cuts will follow the latest billion pound black hole in the Scottish budget.
The Gender Recognition Reform Bill remains stalled under Section 35 of the Scotland Act. The Highlands of Scotland are up in arms over ferry cancellations, the failure to upgrade the A9 and the coming ‘highly protected marine areas’ which critics say could decimate the inshore fishing industry.
Moreover, the SNP and the independence movement is split. A rehabilitated Alex Salmond has been taking to the TV and radio studios to give a running commentary on the failings of the SNP government which he says ‘can’t run a tap’. The Alba party he leads is no electoral threat, but Salmond remains a highly influential figure in the independence movement. He is also, as it were, the last man standing from the SNP’s ‘golden age’ now Sturgeon, her husband Peter Murrell and the former leader John Swinney have all stood down.
The independence movement has stalled and there is a vacuum at the top of the Scottish National party. Salmond’s attempt to create a cross-party Independence Convention to revive the independence campaign is arousing some interest in the SNP, but Humza Yousaf has ruled out SNP participation in the body which is supposed to emulate the Scottish Constitutional Convention of the 1980s.
The reality is that the independence cause is blocked and the party of independence is in disarray. The measure of that is that some in the SNP leadership have started to talk once again about the great unmentionable of far-reaching devolution: Devo Max.
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