THE Scottish National Party’s problems run deeper than Humza Yousaf, or the rift with the Scottish Greens.
A different SNP leader might be able to strike a new deal enabling it to continue holding power at Holyrood short-term. But that will not address the roots of its troubles.
Those stem ultimately from the gulf between its radical presentation as an insurgent party committed to the break-up of the British state, and its uninspired record over 17 years in office.
A movement whose appeal is insurgency cannot indefinitely survive accommodation to the status quo. The Jeremy Corbyn movement discovered this when its support for the EU led it to crash and burn in 2019.
There are parallels. The SNP in some senses foreshadowed the Corbyn phenomenon: in England and Wales, the huge growth in Labour Party membership from 2015 represented a revival of mass participatory politics, but in Scotland the SNP had achieved this earlier.
Between 2013 and 2015 its membership increased five-fold, from 20,000 to over 100,000. Adjusted for Scotland’s population, its growth was even more impressive than that of Corbyn’s Labour.
What drove this was the sense that people had an opportunity to break with the system. Labour’s rightward march from the 1990s was widely perceived to rob citizens across Britain of real political choice, given the extreme similarity of the Conservative and Labour policy platforms: in opposition David Cameron promised to stick to Labour spending plans just as Keir Starmer promises to stick to Tory ones today.
The appeal of a party offering an alternative was obvious: and the SNP soared in membership and secured 45 per cent of the Scottish vote for independence in 2014, a far stronger showing than most had predicted.
Just as Corbyn’s Labour allowed an unexpectedly good result in 2017 to feed a complacent “almost there” attitude that underrated the challenges it faced, so too has the SNP rested on the laurels of 2014. Yousaf still speaks about being on “the last few miles of the marathon” when it comes to independence.
But this is a finish line that can move. And the SNP has done little to convince Scots its vision would result in a real break with the neoliberal orthodoxy of Westminster.
It too is a party of privatisation, one whose idea of a national care service means outsourcing care to private companies, which has handed the renewable energy sector to foreign corporate profiteers who won’t build or recruit in Scotland itself, one which has even handed Scotland’s forests over in a £2 billion PFI deal. It is a party of austerity, cutting council budgets by more than its own budget has been cut by Westminster.
All this is equally true of its coalition partner the Greens, who as elsewhere have proved unwilling in office to challenge the capitalist system which drives environmental degradation.
To make up for their class collaborationism, both parties have hidden behind a facade of social radicalism, promoting divisive identity politics while propping up an economic system based on exploitation and inequality. When this proved less popular than the SNP hoped, it tried to jettison the Greens: but doing so doesn’t get to the heart of the matter.
SNP hegemony has not served Scotland well. Its capture of the insurgent vote marginalised socialist politics — one reason the Corbyn movement was notably less successful in Scotland than in England or Wales. It has trapped political debate in a constitutional cul-de-sac, in which national divisions have trumped those of class.
Socialists, whether for or against an independent Scotland, now have an opportunity to address that. In all parts of Britain the political left has been in retreat in recent years: only through a militant class struggle, identifying those who own and control our countries’ resources as our common enemy, can we start to advance.
