THE ongoing police probe into the SNP’s finances could prevent a pro-independence majority being returned at the Holyrood elections in 2026, Professor John Curtice has said.
Speaking to Sky News, the leading polling expert said that whether next year’s election returns a majority of Unionist or pro-independence MSPs was “on a knife edge”.
It comes just one day after a Survation poll predicted that 66 Yes-supporting MSPs would be returned in 2026 – a slim majority in a Parliament with 129 seats.
Curtice, a professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, told Sky News that since the polls were tight the police probe into the SNP could make a difference.
"Operation Branchform is a problem for the SNP, insofar as it does make it more difficult for them to raise money because there are question marks about whether or not the party could be trusted with donations that are coming in being spent for the appropriate purpose,” he said.
"And the party, at the end of the day, will want to be able to fight the Holyrood election with as much financial heft and resource as it can possibly muster."
Curtice went on: "A lack of financial resource may well make it somewhat more difficult for the party to run an effective ground war.
"It may not be able to spend so much money on advertising or on social media.
“Maybe that could cost it one or two seats, and as I have explained, because the prospect of there being a pro-independence majority at the moment looks as though it is literally on a knife edge, that could matter."
Operation Branchform was officially launched in the summer of 2021 and is still ongoing, although Police Scotland have repeatedly stated that the conclusions of their probe have been handed to the Crown Office.
Prosecutors at the Crown Office have the ability to commission further investigations, and last week a spokesperson confirmed that probes into former first minister Nicola Sturgeon and former SNP treasurer Colin Beattie were ongoing.
The pair were both arrested, questioned, and released without charge amid the police probe in 2023.
Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s now-former husband who formerly served as SNP chief executive, has been charged in connection with embezzlement.
Operation Branchform initially opened with the aim of looking into what happened to some £600,000 raised by the SNP to fight a second independence referendum.
