Scotland deserves better than this woefully incompetent SNP charade
The party and its leader are on a knife-edge. With a general election approaching, as it faces Labour's resurgence north of the border, the prospects look particularly bleak.
In just over a week’s time, on May 7, it will be exactly nine years since the 2015 general election. When asked as to some of the more prominent and noted general elections in the past half a century, I imagine the majority would respond with 1979, 1997 and 2019. In any case, 2015 would presumably not feature; whilst this is entirely understandable, what followed from that election was seismic for all parties: David Cameron — or, rather, Lord Cameron, now Foreign Secretary — was gone as Prime Minister a year later following on from the Brexit referendum, dramatically splitting the Tory Party; Labour shifted monumentally to the Left, electing Jeremy Corbyn as its leader months later; and the strong arithmetic of the Liberal Democrats in the Commons was no longer, having lost 49 of its 57 seats.
One omittance I have deliberately failed to mention is, of course, Scotland. One of the reasons why Ed Miliband did not lead Labour to victory in 2015 was largely due to Scotland. The victory of the No campaign in the independence referendum the year prior was a huge triumph for the Union and, although it was criticised strongly by pro-independence politicians and parties, the working together of politicians from the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats was, I believe, the correct move: this was about the future of our country, after all.
But despite the Scottish nationalists’ sadness in seeing independence rejected, the SNP’s landslide victory in 2015 was something completely contrary: losing 40 of its 41 seats, Labour were completely wiped out — Scotland was no longer a fortress of Labour dominance. Seats that were once held by Gordon Brown and the late Alistair Darling turned yellow. Those defeated on election night north of the border included Jim Murphy, then Scottish Labour leader, and Douglas Alexander, then Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary (now making a comeback as a candidate at the general election this year). The tale from right across Scotland was that the nationalist surge had well and truly come to fruition, with the SNP victorious in 56 of Scotland’s 59 seats.
Fast forward nine years, and the scale of celebration at present is particularly difficult to find, especially after this most torrid of weeks for the SNP. Humza Yousaf’s decision on Thursday to terminate the Bute House Agreement (BHA) between his party and the Greens, both of whose co-leaders, Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater, had served as ministers in the Scottish government since 2021, has brought both the First Minister himself and the party he leads (at the moment) to the brink of survival.
Ever since Nicola Sturgeon departed as First Minister and SNP leader last year, the party has struggled to reciprocate the perception of itself as a strong, dominant political force which was once the case years ago. Even those opposed to the SNP and the nationalist cause could not ignore the fact that voters were supporting it in great numbers. But this relationship has now turned sour for reasons which are familiar by now. This can be put down to many things: the controversies surrounding the Gender Recognition Reform Bill; Operation Branchform, Police Scotland’s investigation into the party’s finances, and the dramatic effects that has had on Sturgeon and her husband and former SNP chief executive, Peter Murrell, who was charged with embezzlement more than a week ago; and the coalition with the Greens has scarcely helped neither Yousaf nor his troubled party.
The termination of the BHA unsurprisingly brought anger from both Harvie and Slater; the latter accused the SNP of an “act of political cowardice”. If you’re wondering why Yousaf has terminated the BHA at this very moment, a straightforward answer with a straightforward reason you will not find: he argued on Thursday it had run its course and “served its purpose”; and that he would now lead an SNP minority government — the suspicion was that, with Green members soon to vote on whether to continue its partnership with the SNP, Yousaf walked away instead of being potentially humiliated.
The truth, of course, is that this partnership should have ended a while ago. The Greens have teamed up with the SNP to rack up taxes for ordinary working Scots while the economy has limped on. Prosperity and wealth creation are nowhere to be seen; the Greens were seldom opposed to such tax rises.
So here we now are. The forthcoming week will see two no-confidence motions debated at Holyrood: a no-confidence motion in Yousaf as First Minister, put down by the Scottish Conservatives, and a no-confidence motion in the Scottish government, put down by Scottish Labour. The former has commanded cross-party support, with Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens all indicating they would back the Tory motion. This brings the parliamentary arithmetic all into question, with the sole Alba Party MSP, Ash Regan, one of the former leadership candidates whom Yousaf defeated last year in the race to succeed Sturgeon, potentially holding the balance of power. How humiliating would it look — and, inevitably, will it look — for Yousaf to beg Regan not to vote against him when, after leaving the SNP last year, he said she was “not a particularly great loss” to the party.
Both motions that will be debated this week have the potential to cause cataclysmic damage for both Yousaf and the troubled government and party he leads. But this goes to a wider point: after 17 years leading Scotland, the SNP’s chaos, division and inefficiency are all now out in the public forum. Worse for them, voters on whom the party could once rely are turning elsewhere, many of them to Labour, as recent opinion polls for the upcoming general election show. Whether Yousaf and his troubled party will be in government in Edinburgh by this time next week is unforeseen. But considerably large would be the price some people in the SNP would pay to hark back to the morning of May 8, 2015, when Scotland was covered from top to bottom in yellow. Nearly nine years on from that sweet victory, things could hardly get worse — could they?