To be honest, folks, we’re not quite sure what to do with ourselves at the moment.
Everyone and his wee dug is writing election-aftermath columns and offering the SNP advice of varying intelligence and solemnity about how to recover from the shattering blow they’ve just been dealt by Scottish voters.
But it’s a pointless exercise. They may as well be yelling down a manhole.
Because we all know nothing is going to change in the SNP between now and 2026.
The party, in all likelihood, is simply sticking its fingers in its ears and desperately trying to convince itself that everything’s going to be fine somehow – they were only six points behind Labour last week, the Holyrood electoral system is a different beast to a Westminster one, and maybe in two years’ time everyone will be sick of Keir Starmer’s inevitably disappointing administration.
But that’s not how real-life politics works. Last week smashed the myth of the SNP’s invulnerability. Even in 2017, when they lost around the same number of votes as they did a week ago (half a million), they still won the election by a mile, taking 22 seats more than the next biggest party. But now that they’ve taken a proper kicking, their true weakness has been exposed, and that rarely works out well for the former bully.
Even if you assumed for the sake of argument, though, that they genuinely accepted that they’d lost the faith of the Scottish public – and more importantly a large chunk of their own former support – and wanted to change, what COULD they change?
Leader? They’ve already had three leaders in 18 months, a fourth would leave them looking like – well, like the Tories. John Swinney was elected uncontested because there was nobody else remotely credible who wanted the job, and what’s changed about that?
The entire purpose of Swinney, as we told you at the time, was to be a caretaker who could absorb TWO defeats and leave the way clear to give the “real” next leader a fresh start. In any event Stephen Flynn flukily kept his Westminster seat and is now effectively out of the running, and Kate Forbes doesn’t want to inherit this mess any more now than she did two months ago.
Policy? What policies could they change? Swinney has nailed his colours firmly to the “queer” mast and most of his MSPs are strident gender activists, so any new direction in “social justice” is out of the question. They have almost no powers over the economy or immigration, which are the issues most concerning voters.
And more to the point they’ve been making a total dog’s breakfast of everything they DO have responsibility for, which leads us to the next thing.
Personnel/competence? Everyone, including numerous SNP politicians, agrees that the party has dropped the ball domestically over the last few years. But how do you fix that when you can only rearrange the deckchairs you’ve already got? What’s the point in reshuffling a Cabinet that comprises only hapless dolts?
Shirley-Anne Somerville isn’t going to suddenly get any less useless if you put her in charge of housing than she was at being in charge of education, is she? You want Karen Adam or Joe Fitzpatrick running Justice? You can’t fix a burst pipe with a packet of Cheesy Wotsits, you need the right tools for the job, and while the SNP has plenty of tools, none of them are in working order.
(By all means have a go at Fantasy Cabinet by filling every ministerial post in the Scottish Government with current SNP MSPs in the comments below. What portfolio would YOU entrust Jamie Hepburn or Kaukab Stewart with? We’re all ears.)
If last week’s election wasn’t about independence – and it wasn’t – and it wasn’t about the SNP’s record at Wesminster (because they don’t have one), and it wasn’t about getting rid of the Tories (there hardly WERE any Tories in Scotland and only one of them lost his seat), then it was a judgement on the party’s record at Holyrood, and why would the electorate’s verdict on that be any more forgiving in two years’ time when it actually matters?
(And of course, we ALL know that despite their being comprehensively rejected by voters in the most emphatic and resounding way imaginable, the party will already be bending over backwards to ignore that democratic verdict and get the likes of Nicolson, Smith, Thewliss, McDonald and Black back in at Holyrood in 2026 via the list.)
Independence strategy? The SNP doesn’t have an independence strategy. And don’t take our word for it, that’s from someone who was a loyal SNP MP just last month.
It’s been demanding a second referendum from the UK government since 2016, the UK government’s been telling it to sod off, the SNP’s gone “Um, okay”, and that’s STILL its official plan. It’s had EIGHT YEARS to come up with something better, and it half-heartedly adopted the only viable alternative proposal for about five minutes in 2023 and then ditched it in a panic. Going back to it now would look absolutely farcical.
“Unity”? The SNP sure as heck isn’t going to make any overtures to other indy parties or the “grassroots Yes movement”, people that it’s spent the last decade sidelining, attacking and bitterly blaming for all its woes.
Partly because it sees those people as usurpers of its God-given birthright to be the sole embodiment of independence and hates them with a burning passion – very much in the same way that Scottish Labour used to regard the SNP – but also because the grassroots Yes movement doesn’t really even exist any more in any tangible sense.
(If you doubt that, try getting it to go on a march.)
So in short: the SNP couldn’t meaningfully change anything if it wanted to, and it doesn’t want to anyway. All it really plans to do for the next two years is cling onto whatever it can, scrabble around at the bottom of the bag for some more rotten carrots to offer its supporters, and hope things don’t get too much worse.
But they will, of course – Operation Branchform continues to loom heavily on the horizon, the party’s accounts are due next month (and the election defeat is going to make the finances much much worse), and a whole bunch of policy chickens are about to come home to roost. The activist base has been decimated, and more will leave as a result of the election because nobody wants to be the last off a sinking ship.
Short version: the SNP is nowhere near rock bottom yet.
As for what the rest of us are going to talk about between now and 2026, we’re open to suggestions, readers.
