Interesting piece in the Guardian today on the woes afflicting the SNP following the General Election in the UK where they fell from 46 to just 9 MPs. But as the piece notes:
Stewart McDonald, a former MP for Glasgow South, who had cleared his Westminster desk before 4 July because he was so certain of defeat, said: "What does an SNP that has learned its lesson look and sound like? I don't think it's possible to overstate the scale of the challenge we are facing as a party."
Almost all argued that countering the Labour message of change to voters who were desperate to get the Tories out of Downing Street was "incredibly difficult if not impossible", as one former MP described it.
There is also wide acknowledgment that voters were turned off by the police investigation into SNP finances – during which the former leader Nicola Sturgeon was arrested and her husband and former chief executive Peter Murrell charged with embezzlement – and the recent expenses row involving the former Holyrood health secretary Michael Matheson's £11,000 iPad bill.
But a key point?
...defeat was longer in the making than six weeks in the summer.
"We failed to learn the lesson from Rutherglen," said one former MP, referring to Labour's overwhelming victory over the SNP at last October's central belt byelection. "For several years we've looked vain, self-indulgent and out of touch with voters' priorities. Yes independence was line one of the manifesto, but we offered no credible roadmap to deliver it."
So now there's talk of the need to run on 'competency first, which then amplifies into the independence message'.
A lot to take in there. Not least that the SNP was extremely popular and powerful for a good decade and more. Some of the downturn is cyclical, some generated by a wish to turf the Tories out at Westminster - as noted before polling for the SNP for the Scottish Parliament is a lot less apocalyptic than the Westminster election, though the graph here has to be concerning for them. Some of it was a function of almost unbelievable things happening within the party. And contextualising all these perhaps the surprise is that the SNP's polling for the Scottish Parliament is holding up reasonably well.
It's far from impossible that the party could regain its previous position - new leadership, a renewed emphasis (particularly a credible one on independence), waning enthusiasm for Labour and so on, events and time itself. But there's a lot of areas to be addressed in order to get there, at least to judge from this.
There is also a demand for behavioural change – interviewees stressed repeatedly that in order to succeed the SNP had to return to its previous discipline and seriousness.
"The Scottish government has still time to turn things around," said one parliamentarian. "But that needs grit at a leadership level, stop imagining you can ride out every problem, accept the need to cut people loose and enforce discipline – the party needs to be up for winning rather than keeping every single member happy."
Another repeated frustration is how poorly the SNP has explained to the electorate what it can and cannot do as a devolved government. "We've spent millions mitigating the worst effects of austerity but don't explain it," said another senior figure.
This will be key with the Holyrood budget in crisis and punishing cuts already trailed by the Scottish government, adding to questions about Swinney's capacity to handle these escalating pressures.
As for the party's founding principle: "Even if the SNP get an absolute doing in 2026 I don't think independence is off the agenda," said one former MP. "But for too long there's been silence on 'what if Westminster say no?' The SNP has got to start getting real with people."
In a way that last one is key. What is the lever that the SNP has, or can point to, in order to bring about independence? Public opinion, political opinion, SNP government either on its own or in tandem with others in Scotland, none of these are quite sufficient. What are the paths towards a referendum? What are the paths on foot of a referendum to independence? We have seen some of that sort of vague thinking around a Border poll on this island, with implausibly short timelines, and suggested outcomes, ignoring the politics of any such poll being within the gift of a British government. Notably Ireland's Future has been increasingly focusing, sensibly many of us would think, on 2030 for any such poll.
One could argue that another aspect of this is how difficult it is for those who seek political rupture, of one form or another, to also simultaneously manage government and institutions that are only partly autonomous. That has resonances even closer to home, doesn't it?
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