The Eclipse of the SNP

What the hell happened in Scotland? Nine years ago, the SNP carried all before it at the famous 2015 election. What it dubbed the "Westminster parties", Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, were reduced to a single seat each while everywhere else on the constituency map of Scotland turned SNP yellow. A partial uprising of these parties two years later was put down at the return match in 2019. The SNP not only ran the Scottish government, that election gave them 48 MPs. It was common sense getting back to where the Westminster parties were in 2010 would take a generation. And then, last Thursday, what was a peculiar result in England and Wales was nothing but disastrous for the SNP and the cause of independence. The party dropped to just nine seats and lost half a million voters. Labour's support increased by 350,000 votes and gave it an additional 36 seats. The Liberal Democrats increased their seats by two, despite dropping 30,000 votes and the Tories, in line with the disaster in the south, saw their support halve but with the loss of just one seat.

This only tells part of the story. Aggregating the independence parties (SNP + Greens + Alba) totals just shy of 830,000 votes. The unionist parties (the above, plus Reform) is 1.56m, almost double. Turnout was down to 59.2%, only 0.4 above the 2001 low point. In every constituency support for Labour grew and nationalist voters either stayed at home or defected directly. This does not bode well for the next round of Holyrood elections, unless Labour in office makes a spectacularly cack-handed job of governing. How was this catastrophe visited upon the SNP?

There's the conjunctural. The SNP haven't had the best time of it. The departure of Nicola Sturgeon was followed by the tawdry spectacle of her arrest and the overhanging police investigation into SNP finances. Humza Yousaf's brief tenure as party leader and First Minister didn't improve the SNP's standing. In fact, this more or less occasioned their slippage in opinion polls with more support flowing to Labour. His unilateral abandonment of the Bute House coalition agreement with the Greens contributed to the impression that he was not on top of his brief, so he had no choice but to cede power to the right leaning John Swinney/Kate Forbes duumvirate to avoid a humiliating confidence vote. This is against a background of decaying social infrastructure. The Scottish school system has posted declines in science, English, and maths. Poverty in Scotland has stubbornly persisted at around a fifth of the working age population since the SNP came to power. The same house price problems manifest north of the border - though in 2023 new build completions and new build starts went down. NHS waiting lists continue to increase. While these areas are within the SNP's gift to do something about, it would be unfair not to mention the fiscal straitjacket imposed on Holyrood by the Tories. They've borne the brunt of decisions made elsewhere.

The larger problem, however, is the collapse of the SNP's strategy to achieve independence. Having committed itself to the constitutional road to a second referendum, its battles with the Tories and the courts slammed the door on its possibility. And without the prospect of independence, what purpose does the SNP have? The radical nationalist reply, which amounts to campaigning harder on independence, found the extent of its support in the derisory vote Alex Salmond's Alba vehicle registered. Related to this, because another referendum is out of scope, where large numbers of the Scottish electorate are concerned it has receded in salience. It's become a second order issue. As YouGov polling showed, the national question was listed as an important concern for just 27% of 2019 SNP voters. It lagged behind the economy (35%), cost of living (54%), and the NHS (67%). Despite running a policy-lite manifesto, Labour's mantras of economic growth, action on the NHS, and the other fissiparous raft of pledges spoke to enough Scottish voters to draw them back from the SNP to give them a punt. That and, at least according to several post-election vox pops, making sure Labour got enough seats to turf the Tories out of government.

In these circumstances, and after a long period of running Scotland, it was a perfect storm for the SNP. With Keir Starmer now safely installed, the onus is on how the Scottish government now plays its cards. Another round of butting heads on independence doesn't seem a wise move, but there are openings on holding Downing Street to account re: its bread and butter pledges, and on its promises to devolve more powers to the nations and the regions. It's just the SNP's worst luck that in Swinney and Forbes they have two leaders singularly unsuited to capitalising on this centre left moment.

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