Given declining membership, internal divisions and the failure to deliver a referendum, it’s hardly surprising that the coffers of the Scottish National party appear to be emptying rather rapidly. The Electoral Commisson records that the SNP received only £4,000 in donations in the first quarter of 2023, down from over £90,000 in the same period last year. The Scottish Labour party raised £100,000 in those months — as did the Scottish LibDems.
The last time a living person made a reportable donation to the party was in 2021.
The SNP has always relied disproportionately on individual donations rather than corporate money from business or wealthy trade unions. That £4,000 came from the will of one donor, Mr James Murdoch (no relation). Mind you, it has had the support of some very wealthy individuals in the past. There was the Stagecoach bus magnate Sir Brian Souter, property developer Dan MacDonald and the EuroMillions lottery winners, Colin and Christine Weir, who donated £500,000 to the SNP from their £161 million jackpot. In fact, the Weirs donated millions to the SNP.
But the donations dried up some time ago. Indeed, SNP accounts record that the party repaid £1 million in loans to the Weirs in recent years. Colin Weir, who died in 2019, reportedly fell out with the SNP and Christine Weir has not been an enthusiastic supporter of the former SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon’s policies.
This provides the backdrop to the row over the allegedly ‘missing’ £660,000 in donations raised since 2017 for a referendum campaign that never happened. This is of course the subject of a continuing criminal investigation, Operation Branchform, and subject to reporting restrictions under contempt laws. The SNP insist that the £660,000 was ‘woven through’ the general party expenditure and was not fraudulently misused.
However, it is clear that despite losing its big donors’ cash, the SNP continued to find the money for extraordinary purchases — such as that £100,000 motorhome, seized by police. Police are also investigating ‘high value gifts’ and an expensive upgrade to the SNP central office. SNP members are bewildered an angry at the financial imbroglio that has besmirched the party image. It even lost its long-standing accountants, Johnston Carmichael, who resigned last year, causing a scramble to find auditors to validate the SNP’s accounts before last month’s deadline.
The SNP’s former spin doctor Murray Foote has suggested the police investigation is a ‘wild goose chase’. No charges have emerged following the arrest, and subsequent release, of the SNP chief executive Peter Murrell (Sturgeon’s husband) and the party treasurer Colin Beattie earlier this year. But there is little doubt that Operation Branchform has been both a public relations and fundraising disaster for the SNP. It has lost 30,000 members since police started investigating party funds two years ago. Unbelievably, the worst is yet to come.
The reported collapse in donations mostly came before Nicola Sturgeon’s shock resignation, the departure of Murrell and Beattie and the revelations about motorhomes. The collapse this week of the Scottish government’s costly deposit return scheme for bottles and cans has also damaged the SNP’s financial credibility.
However, the Scottish National party is still not short of a bob or two. The accounts recorded £289,000 from the public purse, mostly from Short money paid to MPs to run their offices. As Humza Yousaf points out, SNP still has 75000 members paying around £5 a month. All elected members are also required to pay £250 a month into SNP coffers.
But as far as individual donations are concerned — and they have been a key source of campaign funding in the past decade — the SNP is facing a cliff edge, just as its electoral support is waning. Recent polls suggest that the SNP could lose around 20 seats at the next general election. The party is facing a hotly-contested by-election in Margaret Ferrier’s Rutherglen and Hamilton West seat after the MP was suspended by parliament for breaching lockdown laws. Humza Yousaf desperately needs to raise a fighting fund from donors who appear to be turning their backs.
The last time a living person made a reportable donation to the party was in 2021. Indeed, it is a salutary comment on the state of the supposedly youth-oriented SNP that it is now almost completely reliant on bequests from the wills of dead nationalists.
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