The first day back at Holyrood after Easter recess should have been the moment for Scotland’s new leader, Humza Yousaf, to reset the agenda after a bruising leadership contest.
Instead, hours before his first big policy statement on Tuesday, Yousaf found himself besieged by reporters asking questions about the arrest of the SNP treasurer, Colin Beattie, earlier that morning, and having to insist that while Beattie’s arrest was a “very serious matter”, people were “innocent until proven guilty”.
The clamour was further evidence of a Scottish National party in chaos. Just two weeks earlier, its former chief executive Peter Murrell – the husband of Yousaf’s predecessor, Nicola Sturgeon – had also been arrested, with police dramatically raiding the couple’s home and erecting a tent to gather evidence in the garden.
The arrests are part of a police inquiry into the SNP’s handling of more than £600,000 in donations raised to campaign for a second independence referendum, but allegedly used for day-to-day running costs instead. It is no repeat of the Westminster MPs’ expenses scandal, but the criminal allegations still raise the prospect of financial wrongdoing.
Now MSPs, activists and officials are asking soul-searching questions, many of which boil down to: how could a national party, leading Scotland’s battle for independence from the UK, have been allowed to descend into such turmoil?
“Some people are still in shock, some are in denial, some are saying ‘what the fuck?’” says one senior politician representing the north of Scotland.
Speaking to a wide range of elected representatives, activists and officials, almost all refer to the explosion in membership that took place immediately after Scotland’s first independence referendum of 2014 as the pivot point for a party where governance – as one ex-minister put it – “became nonexistent”.
“The party depended on the old mechanisms for too long and that’s why we are in deep shit,” says a former national executive committee member bluntly.
Despite being in government at Holyrood since 2007, it was the influx of energised Yes voters that turned the party – which was still led by people who could remember being spat at in the street while leafletting – into a popular, mass-membership organisation that other Scottish parties feared and admired.
As one senior official who worked closely with Sturgeon accepted: “We should have modernised, and we never really changed the governance to accommodate the membership post 2014. Yes there was a lack of transparency and accountability, but it’s unfair to pin everything on one person. Everyone needs to take a long hard look at themselves.”
A number of sources describe a kind of institutional stasis, as the party bounced from election campaign to massive conference venue: glossy, controlled and hugely successful in public, but behind the scenes never having time to do more than triage or, increasingly, ignore longer-term issues. Repeatedly, SNP insiders point out that much of the work was done by volunteers with other responsibilities.
“Restructuring takes a lot of energy, as does arranging two conferences a year and running eight election campaigns, with a small HQ team. People still don’t appreciate how difficult it was running a party during Covid. People were exhausted.”
Many describe an almost passive acceptance of the highly unusual situation of having a married couple at the very top of the party. Murrell had established his reputation in transforming the party’s electoral prospects while his wife was still deputy leader, and “it didn’t seem to be a problem” when she then took over from Alex Salmond as leader and first minister. “Scottish politics is a small world,” says one veteran activist who has worked with both.
But what it amounted to was a blurring of the lines between party and government. As one former MP with experience of both Salmond and Sturgeon’s leadership explains: “When we went into government in 2007, nobody had ever run anything. The lines between party and government got blurred and increasingly party machinery was co-opted into running the FM [first minister].
“After 2014 we lacked the experience and ability to run a large national party,” they add. “The leadership team were very inexperienced in handling internal democracy on that scale and increasingly steamrollered over reasonable challenge. Nobody seemed to realise there would be a mighty explosion at some point.”
While the willingness to speak about it in public is certainly new, frustrations among the rank and file membership about the behaviour of the SNP leadership go back years, as do attempts to change it.
That’s one of the reasons why such a substantial portion of members voted for Kate Forbes, who was narrowly beaten by Yousaf in the leadership contest, suggests another senior party figure. “They were pissed off with HQ, with emails not answered, complaints not dealt with, and above all the complacency.”
Another senior official suggests that MSPs and MPs who largely endorsed Yousaf for leadership ignore this at their peril: “The split between the parliamentarians and the membership could end up being a more fundamental issue to the party’s future than the finances.”
The clamour for party reform that started during the leadership contest is now deafening, but recent revelations have also galvanised some members.
One central belt MSP explains: “Party members have been upset, baffled, shocked, hurt, but there’s also a new confidence in asking questions and demanding transparency from the party. They’re thinking about how to move forward, how to re-engage the people we need to, and at branch level, members are saying ‘let’s get out there, get the new leaflets ready’. There’s nothing they can do about the ongoing revelations, but they can affect what’s happening in their own constituency.”
As one former minister who served with Sturgeon puts it: “The trump card was always: ‘Do you really want to do that to the boss?’ It was based on respect and trust, and a discipline based on loyalty.”
So what does it mean for Yousaf, leading a party in which the internal critics are unleashed? Forbes and her campaign team have already formed a backbench group focusing on the economy, and other MSPs point to the “energy and experience” on the backbenches. “It depends if Humza is true to his word about being open to new ideas and input from beyond the inner circle,” says one.
Many members note a change in tone from Yousaf. Over the Easter recess, and even with the physical demands of Ramadan fasting (Yousaf is a practising Muslim), they admire his visibility, inviting the media to Bute House for a “fireside” briefing, campaigning at weekends with activists, and emailing party members to reassure them soon after Murrell’s arrest. As one senior MSP put it: “What a difference – actually acknowledging there’s a problem.”
