SNP - Game's A Bogey
Alex Massie reflects on a truly miserable 'Year of the Camper Van' for the SNP and has a telling assessment of the party's new leader, Humza Yousaf.
"If Sturgeon could not address a crippled health service or an education system in palpable decline, why should anyone expect Yousaf to make a better fist of doing so?
"He has been first minister for nine months and you would be hard pressed to point to a single notable achievement he can call his own since he moved into Bute House.
"It seems worth observing that the subject upon which he has, for understandable personal reasons, been most voluble — the war in Gaza — is also one for which he has precisely no responsibility and no realistic prospect of influencing."
After the SNP’s annus horribilis, things can only get — worse
The decline began before Yousaf became leader but he has shown few signs of being able to restore the SNP to the dominance it took for granted
The Year of the Camper Van was also a year in which an old song died. Nicola Sturgeon’s departure confirmed that Scottish independence is a non-starter for the foreseeable future. Sturgeon led her party into a constitutional cul-de-sac from which it has not yet escaped. The game is a bogey.
And without that carrot, the reason for the SNP’s existence, all that is left is managerialism. Largely incompetent managerialism, at that. Humza Yousaf’s pitch for the leadership of the SNP accepted all of this: more of the same, he vowed, just a little worse. Such is the price of accepting that you are the “continuity candidate” stepping into shoes which are, by your own admission, too big for you. If Sturgeon could not address a crippled health service or an education system in palpable decline, why should anyone expect Yousaf to make a better fist of doing so?
Meanwhile, the investigation into the SNP’s finances plods on. It seems extraordinary that it has already lasted two years but not half as extraordinary as the mystery of the hundred grand camper van stashed at Peter Murrell’s mum’s house. Even if there is nothing to see here in a legal sense, there is plenty to see in reality and everyone knows it.
Sturgeon’s departure confirmed her failure. But even her sterner critics can be surprised by the rapidity of her disappearance. She is not to be named and not to be thought about. Her half-life has proved remarkably short. From a nationalist perspective, there is something melancholy about this: all that promise, but to what particular end?
Politics abhors a vacuum, however. The SNP’s difficulty is necessarily someone else’s opportunity. Despite this, paradoxically, Labour’s likely victory in the forthcoming general election may yet make matters a little easier for the SNP. In the first place, expectations have already been lowered to the point at which an objectively bad result may still be considered better than it might have been. Since everyone believes the SNP will lose a barrel-load of seats, the bar for relative, though not absolute, success is low. Yousaf will claim victory if the SNP remain the largest party in Scotland.
This should not be confused with any mandate for independence — that ship is no more ready to sail than Hull 802 — but it will allow Yousaf to argue that the SNP has hit rock bottom and, consequently, be ready for recovery. This is the kind of consolation losers seek but also the best, perhaps only, option available to Yousaf.
Labour’s triumph has another unusual consequence too. It actually reduces the importance of voting for Labour candidates in Scotland. If the election result was truly in doubt, every seat would matter. But if voters believe Labour will romp to victory all across England, Scottish constituencies become less, not more, important. The SNP will argue that, look, “Labour is going to win anyway, so vote SNP to keep Labour honest and to protect Scotland’s voice at Westminster”.
That message has the advantage of being more plausible than pretending there is no difference between Keir Starmer’s Labour party and Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives. It is rarely a good idea to base an election campaign on a proposition voters instinctively know is untrue.
Nevertheless, these basement-level expectations for the SNP are themselves a measure of how Scottish politics has been transformed this year. The days of unchallenged, even unchallengeable, nationalist supremacy are coming to an end. In 2019 the SNP won 45 per cent of the vote in the general election; the polls now suggest the party has since shed one in five of its voters.
This decline began before Yousaf became first minister but he has shown few signs of being able to restore the SNP to the status of unquestioned dominance it had begun to take for granted. He has been first minister for nine months and you would be hard pressed to point to a single notable achievement he can call his own since he moved into Bute House. It seems worth observing that the subject upon which he has, for understandable personal reasons, been most voluble — the war in Gaza — is also one for which he has precisely no responsibility and no realistic prospect of influencing.
Incumbency is a great political advantage until it suddenly ceases to be. When the political weather turns, it can turn extremely quickly. The Conservatives are now being punished for the crime of being in government for too long. But if this is true, and it obviously is, in London, might the same logic not apply in Edinburgh? And of course it does for the SNP will be asking for a third decade in power at the next Holyrood election and such an outcome cannot possibly be considered a sign of good democratic health.
None of this means the SNP is finished for the long-term. The party still enjoys the support of at least one in three voters. Its time will probably come again. Nevertheless, the long era of nationalist ascendancy peaked some time ago. To put it another way: Yousaf is an Ed Miliband, not a Tony Blair or a Gordon Brown.
Lurking behind all this is a question which, in the end, haunts all governments: “Is this as good as it gets?” When voters begin to ask this question the only acceptable answer is “Let’s hope not”. Logic demands that the electorate then start to punish the governing party whenever they have the chance of doing so. Yousaf has been hobbled by events beyond his control but it is not too early to say that it is already getting late for his leadership.
