A little over two years ago, three SNP MSPs contested the leadership of the party in the wake of the sudden resignation of Nicola Sturgeon. All were full of grand plans and dreams for the future of the party, the nation and the independence movement.
None of the three is leader now, and in nine months’ time none of them will be SNP MSPs. Indeed, it’s overwhelmingly likely that none will be an MSP at all.
And that, readers, is not a sign of a party – or indeed a Parliament – in good health.
We were quite surprised when Kate Forbes announced her intention this week to stand down at the election, though we’d be lying if we said we were unduly distressed. While undoubtedly a relative beacon of competence in the Parliamentary party (recognised recently by Guinness World Records as one of the world’s lowest bars), we’ve never shared the enthusiasm of some others for the Deputy FM.
We’re going to go ahead and say that we called it, again. But that enthusiasm, and the belief that Forbes was going to ride to the rescue, was probably why what passes for the “rebel” faction in the party failed to take action when it might have mattered and when this site urged it, back in the summer of 2023.
We’ll never know if things might be different now if they’d taken our advice. But what’s certain is that any (microscopic, and in our view non-existent) hope that the SNP could have been saved and restored to a functional state, rather having to be destroyed and replaced, walked out of the door with Forbes this week.
Because who’s left in the party who could do it? Most of the “rebels” are also standing down next May. Fergus Ewing, who’s 67, has already quit and will be standing as an independent. We can’t think of a single person likely to be an MSP after the election who could even remotely be trusted to rebuild the shambles that Sturgeon, Yousaf and Swinney have made of the golden legacy handed to them by Alex Salmond.
(Swinney is a natural-devolutionist caretaker who we’re not even sure will lead the party into the election, but if he does we don’t think he’ll last long after it.)
The two candidates being discussed by the chattering classes are Stephen Flynn – a cynical and treacherous careerist who knifed his way to the Westminster leadership and only ever speaks of independence in the most lukewarm terms, as a sort of vague aspiration for some unidentified point in the future – and Mairi McAllan, a dead-eyed robotic drone who only entered Parliament in 2021 but has had FOUR ministerial roles in that time (including the six months she had off for maternity leave), and is only being pushed forward because everybody’s all out of better options.
She’s basically the SNP equivalent of Kezia Dugdale or Jo Swinson, except with the added ability to detach her lower jaw and effortlessly swallow live mammals up to the size of a rabbit in a single gulp.
(Fun trivia fact! Flynn was also the first elected SNP politician ever to block Wings on Twitter, years and years ago when he was still just a councillor, and long before we’d started seriously criticising the party or, frankly, ever heard of him.)
And the grim truth is that we can’t even suggest a better alternative from within the party’s ranks, because everyone with even a scrap of courage or talent has been ruthlessly forced out by the Sturgeonite cabal over the last five years, leaving nothing but imbeciles and cowards behind. By all means tell us we’re wrong, but you have to come up with a name from this list, and we wish you the very best of luck with that.
The fact that the party couldn’t even produce a token challenger to Swinney – a proven failure full of old-cop-three-days-from-retirement energy, who’d ruled himself out as past it – should have told even the densest diehards that the game was up.
Because anyone who honestly believed there was the SLIGHTEST chance of the SNP delivering independence in the next term of Parliament would be fighting tooth and nail to lead the party right now. But not only do they not want to LEAD that Parliament, they don’t even want to be IN it. Swinney’s just the sap who got left holding the baby, like a stinky-nappy version of Pass The Parcel.
An astonishing 40% of current SNP MSPs aren’t even bothering to stand next year, despite the lucrative salaries – almost half the party’s entire cohort are ministers, with accordingly inflated wages – and the vanishingly tiny chance of anyone else wanting to hire such useless numpties for anything more demanding than licking envelopes.
In other words, they’re sacrificing the most money AND power they’ll ever have in their lives (and in most cases a near-certainty of being re-elected) just because they don’t want to be in the grotesque binfire that is the SNP any more.
And folks, anyone who thinks the undercooked leftovers and terminal seatwarmers (or the handful of awful YSI/OFI drone children who’ll fill out the ranks) are going to lead us to the promised land is in grave need of psychiatric intervention.
Those who needed to listen didn’t listen, the house burned down, and now there’s a biohazard in the ruins. The real danger now is the still-walking corpse.
It’ll hurt, despite everything. But in your heart you know what needs to be done.
