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Robin McAlpine published a very important piece yesterday, detailing how the SNP is about to become even more of a leadership dictatorship than it already is.
You can read the article to see why this is a change of enormous importance, and a catastrophic one for the independence movement. It will make it just under 17 times harder for any sitting SNP leader to be challenged for the leadership – let alone defeated – and effectively turns the party into a private oligarchy every bit as total and unaccountable as that of Reform (which is not a member-directed political party in the conventional sense, but a limited company personally owned by Nigel Farage, who holds a majority of the voting shares and can do whatever he pleases with it).
We’re annoyed at ourselves, because we got sent the document revealing the change a month ago, but we missed it. And now we’re going to show you why.
Below we’ve highlighted the only mentions of the policy change.
The ironically-titled “Transparency Review” has two page 13s – certainly unlucky for anyone in the party still clinging to a belief in democracy, or as the paper calls it in a stark piece of cynical gaslighting, “the supreme mandate of the members” – and buried on the second page 13 are the two curt paragraphs detailing the proposal for anyone who has somehow managed to remain awake through the preceding dozen pages of tedious wonkspeak and tables of implementation progress reports.
It’s perhaps worth pointing out that the SNP has not suffered from an excessive churn of leaders. Since taking its recognisable modern form it’s had just seven in the last 56 years – William Wolfe, Gordon Wilson, Alex Salmond, John Swinney, Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf. The typical SNP leader holds the office for almost a decade, with Yousaf’s hapless 13-month misrule dragging that figure down considerably.
(Scottish Labour, by contrast, have burned through 10 different full-time leaders in just 26 years and the Scottish Tories 4 in 13 years. That means the average reign for an SNP leader, even including the Yousaf aberration, is 8 years against 3.25 for a Scottish Tory leader and just 2.6 for a Scottish Labour one. Whatever issues the SNP has, switching its leaders too often is not one of them.)
There was no problem to solve. The last time the party chose a leader there wasn’t even a nominal contest – only one person wanted the job. Nor have its leadership elections usually been close or bitterly fought. John Swinney won in 2004 with 84% of the vote, Alex Salmond succeeded him with 76% of the vote, and Nicola Sturgeon took over unopposed, as did Swinney for his second stint. Only Yousaf’s was a meaningful contest, and much good it did him.
But nevertheless even that microscopic prospect of possible future dissent has now been ruthlessly stamped on. As Robin notes, the new rule would make mounting a leadership challenge to all practical intents and purposes impossible. Once a leader is in place, nothing can realistically be done until they voluntarily step down or die.
(This seismic change has been seemingly brought about by just six people. We can safely assume that it’ll be duly rubber-stamped by the payroll vote at the withered and tightly-controlled conference in a few weeks’ time.)
John Swinney is now less of a leader, not even a President, but a King, ruling without election for life. And given that Swinney has never really been all that bothered about independence, that ought to worry anyone who cares about it.
We really don’t know how much clearer it needs to get.
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FOOTNOTE: As further evidence that internal democracy is dead in the SNP, at the same meeting in December it was also quietly determined that the “branch dividend” – the proportion of membership income allocated to branches to run the local parties – will be reduced in future from 25% to 15%.
In recent years that payment has been largely imaginary, as SNP HQ has raided it to plug gaping holes in the accounts, but nevertheless it’s a significant signal that the leadership wants to centralise power even more and eliminate whatever remaining tiny scraps of influence ordinary members might have.
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