We were very pleased to discover this morning that Johnny Ball is still alive.
But even the man who managed to make maths fun for generations of children would be hard pushed to make sense of the SNP’s membership figures.
The party’s 2023 accounts, published late last night, claim that as of 1 June this year there were 64,525 people still in the party. (It’s a bit weird for figures made up to 31 December 2023 to be talking about June 2024, but we’ll let that slide.)
It’s still remarkably difficult, though, to plot an accurate chart of SNP membership. As recently as two years ago (August 2022), we were still being told by the party that it looked something like this:
Indeed, in March 2021 its elected representatives were claiming that the number was still surging, and had reached over 137,000.
Last February the party hotly denied a story in the Sunday Mail that it had lost 30,000 members over gender reform and inaction on independence.
But just two days later Nicola Sturgeon suddenly resigned, triggering a leadership contest which forced them to embarrassingly reveal the truth: the Mail’s story had been exactly and entirely correct. The party’s then head of communications, Murray Foote, was forced to quit in shame over his indignant and sarcastic denials.
(Although so zany is the world of Scottish politics that just five months later he was back, as the SNP’s new CEO.)
But things were even weirder than they seemed. Because as well as admitting that membership had fallen to (they said) 72,186 the party also briefed journalists that over 10,000 of those losses had come since the end of December 2022, when the Gender Recognition Reform Act was forced through Parliament in a series of extraordinary late-night sittings, and that in fact at the end of 2022 the figure had been 82,598.
(The figure was affirmed in the published 2022 accounts a few months later.)
That would be broadly consistent with the 87,000 that Wings had told its readers the real membership was way back in October 2020, having calculated it based on numbers in the SNP’s accounts for the previous year.
This tells us that in a year and a half since the end of 2022, the party has shed almost 20,000 members, although if you were only reading their accounts you’d come away with the impression it was far fewer, since the 2022 accounts only mention a figure of “over 70,000”, suggesting a drop for the year of just 6,000 or so.
But of course, 1 June is almost three months ago now, and three months is an eternity in the SNP these days. Since the spring the party has lost another leader, replaced him uncontested with a failure from 20 years ago, been thrashed in a general election and most recently enraged its surviving members with a spectacularly ill-advised meeting with an Israeli ambassador. We’d be amazed if there were still more than 60,000 in the party’s tattered ranks.
So this is probably a more accurate graph:
The reality, though, is that there’s simply no way of knowing. We don’t have a clue when the party started lying about its membership, and the numbers aren’t verified in any way. There might NEVER have been 125,000 people in the SNP. Maybe they haven’t lost any at all.
That number comes from the 2018 accounts, but the income derived from those 125,000 members – £2.25m – was only slightly lower than the £2.1m supposedly raised last year from half as many, and that figure (the green line below) has barely shifted for the last seven years despite the supposed loss of 60,000 members and a pandemic and a cost-of-living crisis that you would have expected to put the squeeze on people’s pockets for non-essentials like doubling their monthly payments to a political party.
To be honest, readers, we miss the days – not ALL that long ago – when it was Scottish Labour’s opaque membership figures we used to mock with pictures of Johnny Ball. But it’s just another example in the long list of ways in which the SNP has mimicked the collapse of the party which once dominated Scottish politics.
It seems nothing will stop their determination to replicate Labour’s plunge into a ditch of bleak irrelevance that it took the North British branch office 17 years and a whole raft of increasingly-hopeless leaders to tentatively clamber back out of. (Almost entirely by default and luck rather than through any efforts or talent of their own.)
And right now, if you want to guess how many years it might be until the SNP can recover to the point where they might credibly threaten to deliver independence again, you’d be as well plucking a number out of thin air than believing any that they might tell you.
