The SNP loses its grip on Scottish politics
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
On his 16th birthday, Euan Jenner woke up to find Scotland had voted against independence. Like most young Scots, he wanted it otherwise; if he had been a day older, he could have voted.
But for Jenner, now a hospitality worker in Glasgow, defeat came with a consolation. The independence fervour of 2014 helped the Scottish National party dominate Scottish politics for the following decade.
The SNP swept other parties, particularly Labour, aside. It won 56 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats in 2015 and came top in the next two general elections too. Yes campaign posters lingered prominently in people’s windows, years after the referendum.
For supporters like Jenner, these victories allowed Scotland to stand apart — at least symbolically — from the chaos of Brexit and the UK’s Covid response. The SNP defied the usual timescales of popularity, thanks to the savviness of its leaders Nicola Sturgeon and her predecessor Alex Salmond, ruthless party discipline and the rallying cry of independence.
Now political gravity appears to have caught up with it.
Ahead of the UK’s general election in July, a combination of scandal, poor management and incumbency at a time of economic malaise has eroded Scotland’s once-dominant party. In April, Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell, the SNP’s former chief executive, was charged with embezzlement as part of a police inquiry into party funding; Sturgeon herself remains under investigation. Both deny wrongdoing.
“It is an inflection point,” says James Mitchell, professor of public policy at Edinburgh university. “Independence has gone off the boil.”
The SNP is expected to lose up to two-thirds of its seats in most recent polls. Labour, refreshed under its leader in Scotland Anas Sarwar, is likely to retake some of its former strongholds. Like Catalan nationalists, to whom the nation long looked for inspiration, the SNP came to the brink of breaking away — only to find itself cast back in the direction it came from. Like the UK Conservative party, it is set to bear the brunt of voters’ desire for change.
The end of one-party dominance is already being felt. “Control of the media, the civil service organisations — the [SNP’s] grip was absolute,” says one senior opponent of the party. “The spell has broken.”
Polls indicate nearly half of Scots still want to leave the UK. But there is no clear path to another vote which would require the approval of the government in Westminster, nor much expectation of one. “It does feel a lot less possible than five years ago,” says David Cherry, a 33-year-old photographer and filmmaker and Yes supporter. “The ones in the pub who used to never shut up about it are quiet these days,” says Adam Robinson, a 75-year-old retired energy surveyor and No voter.
At its height, the SNP managed to bring together independence supporters as effectively as Boris Johnson’s Tory party swept up Brexit voters. But now constitutional issues have fallen in relevance.
In Glasgow, which swung dramatically away from Labour to the SNP in 2015, several voters seemed to be gradually detaching from the party — and showing a fresh openness to the alternatives. “For a while, I was looking at things through rose-tinted glasses. Recently, I’ve looked at things differently,” says Jenner, the hospitality worker, who is considering voting Green. “A second referendum feels like a fluid thing — it doesn’t feel like a concrete idea.”
The SNP’s rise began in earnest around 2007, near the end of the New Labour government. Labour stood accused of taking Scotland for granted, and of sending its best talent to Westminster rather than the devolved parliament it had created in Edinburgh.
The Conservatives were already in retreat north of the border: Salmond liked to joke that there were fewer Tory MPs in Scotland than giant pandas at Edinburgh zoo. In 2015, the Scottish Labour party and Liberal Democrats were also pushed to the brink of extinction. The SNP won 50 per cent of the vote — taking seats that had been held by former prime minister Gordon Brown and former Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy.
In Glasgow, areas which had voted Labour since the 1950s with some of the largest majorities in Britain, flipped. “It was utterly unimaginable that I would be an MP. It was all Labour,” says Alison Thewliss, elected as SNP MP for the recently abolished constituency Glasgow Central that year.
Yet nearby, at the mouth of the River Clyde, the seeds of one of the SNP’s most embarrassing episodes had already been sown. The “ferry fiasco” started with the Scottish government’s plans to overhaul passenger transport to the western isles. On the eve of the 2014 referendum, Salmond, then Scotland’s first minister, saw an opportunity to revive the region’s faded shipbuilding industry. He encouraged a local businessman to buy Ferguson, a shipyard on the banks of the Clyde. Ministers then allowed Ferguson’s bid to build two new ferries to go through, even though it could not offer the standard refund guarantees.
Construction soon ran in trouble. Costs spiralled to at least £240mn, more than two and a half times the original budget. Sturgeon launched one of the ferries in 2017, but it was unfinished: the windows had to be painted on. The two ships, due to enter service five years ago, are still not in operation.
The ferry fiasco has become emblematic of the SNP’s failings. The wider ferry service has suffered delays and cancellations, hitting the tourist industry. “The failure to deliver has become an international symbol of the failures of nationalism in Scotland,” says Torcuil Crichton, Labour’s candidate for the western Isles seat of Na h-Eileanan an Iar.
Like the rest of the UK, the most important issue for Scottish voters today, according to polls, is healthcare. Here too the SNP’s record is under scrutiny. Health spending in Scotland has gone from being 10 per cent higher per person than the UK average two decades ago to being 1 per cent lower today, according to analysis by the Fraser of Allander Institute. “It’s a huge change,” says João Sousa, the institute’s deputy director.
Understanding why health spending has fallen behind other parts of the UK is complicated by the way in which the Scottish government budgets, says Sousa. Either way, the NHS in Scotland is under severe strain: waiting lists have doubled since the start of the pandemic, rising 10 per cent in the past year. John Swinney, the SNP veteran who became first minister after he was elected party leader in May, has conceded that funding needs to rise.
Other public services are creaking too. Scotland had been the best-performing UK nation in maths when the SNP came to power in 2007, according to the Pisa rankings. But its scores have fallen behind England — and reached record lows in the 2022 rankings.
College lecturers with the Educational Institute of Scotland are striking in protest at a pay rise expected in 2022, which is still being negotiated. “People are in real terms much worse off,” says Richie Bisset, a 50-year-old lecturer. “I’m a supporter of Scottish independence but I work in further education so there’s no way I can bring myself to vote for the Scottish National party . . . I don’t think they’ve got a genuine route to a referendum.”
Meanwhile, drug deaths remain the highest in Europe and high-profile construction projects, such as the upgrading of Scotland’s longest trunk road, the A9, are over-budget and behind schedule.
In her pandemic press conferences, Sturgeon was controlled and progressive — a neat contrast to then UK prime minister Boris Johnson. But Scotland’s health outcomes were not markedly better than England’s. Sturgeon was “one of the best communicators in British politics in modern times. But that hid her weaknesses,” says Edinburgh university’s Mitchell. “The SNP never stopped campaigning. There comes a point when the public can see through it.”
The SNP’s opponents had long tried to use the party’s record against it. As prime minister in 2016, David Cameron accused the SNP of a “grievance agenda”, rather than a “governing agenda.” But voters were unreceptive until recently.
Two events proved pivotal. The first was the departure of Sturgeon after nine years as Scotland’s first minister and SNP leader. Without her, the party’s famed discipline broke down. Senior SNP figures once pledged not to criticise each other; now they traded blows over trans rights and competence. Sturgeon’s replacement, Humza Yousaf fell out with the SNP’s coalition partners at Holyrood, the Greens, leaving the party as a minority government.
The other decisive event was Sturgeon’s arrest in June 2023 three months after stepping down. At issue is whether £660,000 raised for a campaign for a second independence referendum was used instead for SNP purposes. Weeks earlier, the police had seized a luxury camper van — which may have been purchased as an election battle-bus; it was parked outside Sturgeon’s mother-in-law’s home.
Scandals act like short-circuits for voters — allowing them to sidestep policy analysis, and withdraw the benefit of the doubt from politicians. The SNP’s aura had cracked. In its end of year Hogmanay show, BBC Scotland aired a comedy sketch imagining Sturgeon partying on a caravan site. “Hey pal, don’t tell anybody you saw this caravan,” the actor playing Sturgeon says. “That would never have been allowed through the editorial net 12 months earlier,” says one business figure.
To add to the air of sleaze, Michael Matheson, the Scottish health secretary, resigned in February after running up £11,000 in data charges on his official iPad during a family holiday. The Scottish parliament is now also investigating whether SNP has used postage stamps, intended only for parliamentary work, for its campaigning in the current election.
Scottish voters had already started holding the SNP accountable for its record. In 2022, SNP supporters were almost as likely to vote with the party again whether they thought the health service had got better or worse, according to John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde. By May 2023, those who were negative on the NHS were 17 per cent less likely to be sticking with the party.
For years, the SNP sat in the middle of Scottish politics, appearing business-friendly while embracing social policies. Under Sturgeon, it drifted left, introduced a child benefit for poor families, worth £26.70 a month per child, NHS baby boxes full of goods for newborns and higher taxes on the rich.
But it found it hard to satisfy all of its supporters. Older and younger voters diverged on its embrace of trans rights. The SNP has been broadly pro-immigration, but Scottish voters turned negative since 2023 — and now, by a margin of 42 to 31 per cent, favour a reduction in numbers although they remain less hostile to immigration than the rest of the UK.
Swinney, the SNP leader who previously held the role between 2000 and 2004, has tried to keep the independence flame alive in this year’s election. The SNP will have a mandate for another referendum if it wins a majority of Scottish seats, he has said. But he concedes the party has had “a very tough time.” And he faces pressure from his former ally Salmond, whose new party, Alba, wants a faster path to separation. Salmond, who was tried and acquitted of charges of sexual misconduct, parted ways with the SNP in 2018.
Many Remainers expected that Brexit would hasten moves for independence in Scotland, which voted 62-38 to remain in the EU. Reality has been messier. There is anger at the Conservatives, which during their 14 years in office, have never won more than 30 per cent of the vote in Scotland. But there is also a recognition that independence was complicated by falling North Sea oil revenues and by Brexit itself.
If Scotland managed to leave the UK and join the EU, what would happen to its trade border with England?
Successive Conservative prime ministers have refused to contemplate a second referendum. The SNP’s best hope seemed to be a hung parliament, in which it could cajole Labour into agreeing to one. But that possibility receded after Liz Truss’s disastrous premiership, with Labour establishing a commanding poll lead.
Curtice, of Strathclyde university, says that arguably the one thing that Truss achieved — at least for now — is to “guarantee the future of the union.”
Voters in Scotland, as in the rest of the UK, are focused on evicting the Conservatives from Downing Street. That change in focus frustrates the SNP. “People will say: ‘we want the Tories out’. The Tories haven’t been in here!” says Thewliss, now the party’s candidate for Glasgow North. She says there is mileage in the SNP’s desire to rejoin the EU: “Brexit still comes up on the doorstep.”
The SNP is a diminished force. Between 2013 and 2019, its membership quintupled to 125,000. Since then, it has nearly halved, to 72,000. It declared no cash donations in the first quarter of 2024, a sign of a major squeeze in fundraising, although it has since received £128,000 left in a man’s will. Electoral losses will cut off sources of funding. Defeat could worsen divisions: “There will be a bloodletting,” says Edinburgh university’s Mitchell.
Yet, unlike the Conservative party in England, it is not facing annihilation. Polls suggest it will be Scotland’s second largest party behind Labour, retaining perhaps 20 MPs. “If this is a floor, it’s quite a high floor,” says one pollster. “Give it a year, they’ll be back.” The electorate is volatile and many Scottish seats have swung between parties at recent elections. The SNP lost seats in the 2017 general election, and mostly recovered two years later.
In the campaign, the SNP has portrayed Keir Starmer’s Labour as close to Tory austerity. Labour’s fiscal caution could alienate some progressive voters. “I don’t fancy any of them,” says Robinson, the retired energy surveyor, who will reluctantly vote Labour this time.
Crucially, even Labour figures concede that there has been no resurgence in Britishness north of the border. Demographics favour separatism: more than 60 per cent of young people back independence. In Glasgow, on the eve of the Euro 2024 football tournament, a stall was selling T-shirts with Diego Maradona’s Hand of God goal against England. More fundamentally, former prime minister Gordon Brown worries that there is now a lack of unifying culture between England and Scotland: the passing of Elizabeth II has reduced the influence of the monarchy, while the BBC has also become less central. Only a quarter of Scots identify as British.
If Labour wins the most seats in England and Scotland in July, it will be the first time since 2005 that politics has aligned both sides of the border. But “at some point in the future a government will be elected in the UK with very little support in Scotland,” says Mitchell. If that happens, separatists may gather momentum again — from a much higher baseline of support. Mitchell advocates reforms to the House of Lords and other institutions to strengthen Scotland’s voice, as an insurance policy.
Many Yes voters in Glasgow are prepared to bide their time. Amy Mukja, a full-time mother, says she is likely to switch from the SNP to Labour this election because “obviously the Tories have made a massive mess of everything.” But she still wants independence: “I’m kind of patient with it, as long as it’s not forgotten.”
Data visualisation by Jonathan Vincent
This article has been amended since original publication to correct the age of Euan Jenner
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