That Sinking Feeling: The SNP's difficult year

After a history-making rise to dominance, the SNP’s winning streak has been broken with a general election slump. Only time will tell how permanent that break will be.

The SNP’s Westminster seat count shrank from 47 to nine in the 4 July vote, an election which saw turnout in Scotland slump to just 59 per cent. In the weeks since then, the party has entered a period of soul-searching as a string of rows – Angus Robertson’s meeting with an Israeli diplomat, culture funding, drugs deaths, an increase in probable suicides – compounded the sense of demoralisation many say has taken hold. “It’s just like, fucking hell, are we over the worst?” said a serving councillor, “And it just keeps coming.”

With around a year and a half to go until the 2026 Scottish Parliament election, the SNP will have to find its feet fast. “Everybody’s hurting,” said returning MP Pete Wishart, “but the situation is retrievable.”

After 21 years as an MP, Wishart is taking stock. And he wants the entire membership to get involved. “We are in the market for new ideas and new suggestions. If people have got genuinely radical ways forward that address a particular situation, I want to hear them and I think the whole party wants to hear them,” he told Holyrood.

“This is the biggest setback the SNP’s experienced in my time in elected politics, and that’s going back quite a few years. We’ve got to take a bit of time to get ourselves back into fighting shape for the next challenges. That takes honest reflection.

“We are so used to winning and winning well that we did start to get used to that,” he went on.

“We feel the setbacks more pronounced and more sharply. For older members like us, we were brought up on defeat and disappointment; that was the thing that shaped us for the challenges to come. There’s a lot in the fact that part of the challenge is how we respond to that adversity.”

“It feels like we have lost that sense of purpose,” a former MP’s staffer commented. “A reset is not necessarily a bad thing. We didn’t have one after Nicola Sturgeon resigned, we’re still muddling along on the same strategy. What has to happen to trigger that? Is it losing all the MPs, is it losing at Holyrood, is it something else?”

It has been 18 months since Sturgeon announced her resignation as SNP leader and first minister of Scotland, 17 months since Humza Yousaf became her successor, and fewer than four since John Swinney took over from him. 

Swinney stepped up against the wreckage of the Bute House Agreement and a string of scrapped or stalled Holyrood projects, including the Deposit Return Scheme, Highly Protected Marine Areas and the Gender Recognition Reform Act. Any hopes that he would either immediately recapture the sparkle of Sturgeon’s heyday or enjoy the time and space to instigate a reset before facing the electorate were dashed after Rishi Sunak announced a general election sooner than anyone anticipated. 

After a string of political and economic crises, and revolving doors at both Bute House and Downing Street, just six in 10 voters turned out in Scotland. The SNP’s vote share fell by 15 percentage points to 30 per cent. Although the result put them within touching distance of Labour – which polled 35 per cent in Scotland and increased its constituency count from two to 37 – it also cost the SNP its position as Westminster’s third largest party. 

Returns submitted to the Electoral Commission show SNP membership has fallen to 65,000, with five-figure declines reported as well by Labour and the Lib Dems.

Those figures emerged during summer recess, a period which has been less than quiet for the SNP. 

After 17 years in control of the Scottish Government, it has now had to face up to a year-on-year increase in drugs deaths and a rise in probable suicides on its watch. With an enlarged public sector pay deal to pay for, and with purse strings tightened by UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves, finance secretary Shona Robison has not only initiated emergency spending controls across government but warned of further cuts to come. Peak fares are returning on the railways, the provision of free bus travel for asylum seekers has been cancelled, winter fuel allowance for pensioners will be means-tested and Creative Scotland has closed grant streams for lack of guaranteed funding. 

First Minister John Swinney leads a party pondering its direction | Alamy

If that’s not enough, a meeting between external affairs secretary Angus Robertson and the Israeli deputy ambassador led to a public row, with serving MSPs calling for Robertson to go while the entire Westminster group accused him of legitimising the Netanyahu government’s siege of Gaza. 

Good news – the suspension of public sector strikes, a £1.7bn increase in revenue for the public purse – has been hard to come by, and SNP insiders are feeling it. “The conversations I’m having with lots of other members are quite uniformly pessimistic,” one long-serving activist told Holyrood. “The public are pretty sick of us and all the stuff that’s hanging around in terms of Operation Branchform,” an MSP said. “I’ve been a member for almost 40 years, I’ve seen it through lots of incarnations. What I think I’m hearing now is this sense of frustration primarily with the Scottish Government,” said an organiser. 

At the top of the party there remains a conviction that momentum can be recovered. But the air of despondency hanging over many of its number has not gone unnoticed. “It’s like our own members have started to believe the unionist line,” an insider said.

Analysis by Sir John Curtice of Northstat opinion polling carried out for The Sunday Times suggests that, on current voting intentions, the SNP would win the Holyrood election in 2026 with 41 seats, pipping Labour by one. The number may not be enough to secure another term in government, given the potential for a coalition between Labour and a third party, but, if correct, the polling suggests that Wishart’s ‘retrievable’ contention may be right. “Fending off Labour’s challenge will require strong and effective leadership from the SNP,” Curtice said.

“There’s quite a lot of good feeling towards John [Swinney], more than for some of his predecessors, but there are things that have happened where you’re saying, I can’t believe we’ve done this,” an activist said, including Robertson’s meeting with the Israeli deputy ambassador to the UK. The talks were announced via social media by the diplomat’s office and though the Scottish Government scrambled to insist that Robertson had emphasised the need for a ceasefire in Gaza, critics within the SNP – including the Westminster group – said he had lent legitimacy to the Israeli government while it is under investigation for potential war crimes.

“This is something a child could have told them would have turned into a PR nightmare,” a former aide to MSPs said. “Why weren’t we able to anticipate that?” 

Deidre Brock was amongst the SNP MPs to lose their seats in the general election | Alamy

There are questions, too, over the “For Scotland” campaign slogan used by the SNP during the general election, with issues raised over its strength and clarity. Party bosses used the 2023 Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election to test general election messages, and lost both contests. The mood on the doors was “quite hostile” in Rutherglen, an MSP said, and though it was clear the general election result was “going to be bad”, the outcome, in which the party was wiped out across much of the central belt, was worse than anticipated. “If anyone says they thought it would be that bad, I think they are fibbing. We were absolutely trounced, no two ways about it,” the MSP said.

“It was hard to explain why you should be voting SNP,” a campaigner from the east coast agreed. “Labour had this really strong message. Previously the SNP had control of that message – ‘vote SNP to get the Tories out forever with independence’. This time people didn’t buy that. 
“The SNP has lost the reputation for competence it had, and dropping optimistic, positive policies that put distance between Scotland and the rest of the UK is hard to square. We’ve got this independence strategy that is just not credible. People in the party don’t believe in it, let alone independence supporters. That’s the core issue that needs to be addressed.”

One key factor outwith the SNP’s control is how Labour responds to government, and how the UK and Scottish arms of that party align their agendas. There have been disagreements before about issues including the adoption of self-identification for transgender people, and while Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has promised “no more austerity”, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said “painful” action is necessary to tackle an “economic black hole” inherited from the Conservatives. Chancellor Rachel Reeves is expected to increase taxes in October’s Budget, and Starmer has said that he will not “shy away from making unpopular decisions now if it’s the right thing for the country in the long term”. Already Labour MPs have voted against scrapping the two-child cap on benefits and Starmer said that “if we don’t take tough action across the board, we won’t be able to fix the foundations of the country like we need”.

“Labour had this big space they exploited very well in opposition,” said Wishart. “That’s now gone; they are in charge now. I looked across at the new Scottish Labour MPs, their first job was to come down and vote to keep children in poverty. 

“We are now into a completely different set of political circumstances. The SNP is in second place in nearly every constituency, which gives us a huge springboard to come fighting back.”

But SNP MSPs are steeling themselves for the impact Reeves’s budget will have on the money available to the Scottish Government, and the political ramifications of that. There are questions over to what extent ministers in Edinburgh will carry the can for anything that impacts on living conditions for people in Scotland.

(R-L) Shona Robison with colleagues Stephen Flynn, Kate Forbes and Stewart Hosie at the party's general election launch | Alamy

“It’s very hard in the current climate to know what we can actually do that will make a massive difference to people’s lives,” one said. “Labour have signed up to the Tory spending plans, there’s no more money coming from there. Folk are really struggling, our public services are really, really toiling, there’s no fat left to trim in the services that have the biggest impact on people’s lives. 

“By mitigating, by trying to take responsibility and show people Scotland can run its own affairs, people forget what we are doing,” the MSP said of the Scottish Government’s approach so far. “Once you’ve given them something, taking it away is difficult. 

“Labour won’t make a big positive difference to people’s lives, but I don’t know if there’s enough time for people to realise that before 2026.”

And the reality is that deep cuts are coming. An SNP councillor said Glasgow had entered “managed decline”; another in a neighbouring authority said that was true about more areas thanks to a “dire” funding situation driven in part by Yousaf’s decision to announce a nationwide council tax freeze at SNP conference last year. “It’s going to be down to the bone,” the councillor said. “What a fight we are going to have.”