The dream of Scottish independence is dead

 The SNP simply lacks the electoral and moral weight to demand a referendum

July 5, 2024 3:38 pm(Updated 3:45 pm)

After 17 years in power at Holyrood, a close-run independence referendum, and what has often looked like electoral infallibility, the Scottish National Party has finally lost its iron grip on Scotland.

It had a horrible night in the general election, retaining just nine seats, a loss of 38 and well behind a resurgent Scottish Labour’s 37. This was a significantly lower haul than even the most pessimistic Nationalists were predicting, and it has knocked the stuffing out of the party’s leadership.

There are no SNP MPs left in Glasgow or Edinburgh. The party lost in Fife and Ayrshire, Stirling and Falkirk. High-profile and experienced MPs such as Joanna Cherry, Alyn Smith and John Nicolson were ejected by the electorate. It was, admitted leader John Swinney, “a very, very difficult and damaging night” and there would need to be “soul searching”.

This result was about so much more than Scots voting Labour in order to kick the Tories out of power at Westminster, though that played its part.

Support for independence remains at the same level as it was in the referendum result – around 45 per cent. Yet only 30 per cent of Scots backed the Nationalists. Like fellow voters across Britain, they currently have other, more pressing priorities: the cost of living crisis, the shabby state of the NHS, the declining performance of Scotland’s schools. The SNP made its commitment to independence “page one, line one” of its manifesto, and talked about the issue incessantly during the campaign. This suggested a tin ear and utter self-absorption – the election result confirms it.

Read Next

Today, with its tiny group of MPs, and having been so brutally dismissed by voters, the SNP simply lacks the electoral and moral weight to demand a referendum. It is in no position to dictate terms. The prospect of independence is, for the foreseeable future at least, dead.

Thursday was also a judgment on the long, underwhelming era of SNP governance in Edinburgh – on its divisive approach to social policy, such as the bitter controversy around gender law reform, on its inability to deliver the new ferries that provide a lifeline to Scotland’s islands, and to properly support local government. Taxes on anyone earning above £28,000 have been put up to the highest level in the UK without any commensurate improvement in public services. The police investigation into allegations of misuse of party funds continues, and has already seen the SNP’s former chief executive charged with embezzlement.

And, ultimately, there was the unmistakable – and so often fatal – aroma of arrogance, of the SNP’s belief in its own inevitability, in its own foreverness.

In truth, though he has fallen at his first electoral hurdle, it is hard to blame Swinney for the outcome. He has been in post for just eight weeks, and the damage was largely done by his predecessors as first minister, Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf. Swinney is trying to take his party back towards the centre ground and mainstream policy, but has had little time to prove himself.

Nevertheless, consequences will flow. The first was clear from Swinney’s post-election speech yesterday, when he signalled that the SNP will, at least for a while, turn down the volume on its drive to break up the UK. “I have to accept that we failed to convince people of the urgency of independence in this election campaign,” he said. “Therefore we need to take time to consider and to reflect on how we deliver our commitment to independence.” Of course, he had little choice.

The result matters, too, in terms of what is likely to happen at the next Holyrood election in 2026. This doesn’t feel like a warning shot to an unpopular mid-term government, but rather an electorate that has made up its mind and is on the move. Such is the scale of the SNP’s collapse that Labour will now be supremely confident it can win back control of the Scottish Parliament.

Indeed, Anas Sarwar, Labour’s leader north of the border, has already moved on to the 2026 campaign. which he described as the “second stage”. “Let’s be really clear, it’s a rejection of the SNP,” Sarwar said on Friday morning. “I think John Swinney’s got a lot of reflecting to do on a lot of things. He spent six weeks attacking the Labour Party. You can see the verdict of the Scottish people not just on that approach to this election campaign but on the SNP’s approach to government. The incompetence, the failure, has to end and we’ve got to have governments working in the interests of Scotland.”

The prospect of a Scottish – and indeed British – political debate in which demands for independence are no longer ever present will be welcomed by the many fatigued by decades of relentless, monotonous constitutional argument, usually at the expense of public service and economic reform.

If it has taken electoral humiliation for the SNP to arrive at this conclusion, despite all the warning signs, then that is their own fault. Scotland’s voters have sent the party homeward from Westminster, to think again. The SNP has less than two years to prove it’s got the message – otherwise that grip will be shaken loose completely.

Chris Deerin is Scotland editor of the New Statesman