The Scottish National party has been in government since 2007, but only in the past year has the weight of incumbency started to look like an unmanageable burden. At the party’s election manifesto launch on Wednesday, John Swinney performed the role of a steady-handed veteran for which he was recruited just over a month ago. But voters have not forgotten the chaos that led to his appointment – the calamitous miscalculation that collapsed Humza Yousaf’s coalition with the Scottish Greens and triggered his resignation after little more than a year as first minister.
Also not forgotten are the financial scandals that have tarnished the legacy of Nicola Sturgeon, Mr Yousaf’s predecessor. The period when Ms Sturgeon rose above the political fray, and opposition barbs bounced off the SNP without sticking, feels long gone.
The party retains a reliable core of voters who are motivated by the demand for independence. But breaking up the union is not the most salient issue for most Scots. Many who voted yes in the 2014 referendum see the cost of living crisis and crumbling public services as issues to address ahead of separation from England. And even on that mission – the SNP’s foundational purpose – progress has stalled.
Mr Swinney’s manifesto advances the independence policy agreed at the SNP’s conference last year. Winning a majority of Scottish Westminster seats would be treated as licence to begin negotiations with the UK government “to give democratic effect to Scotland becoming an independent country”. The first minister rejects the corollary view that failure to reach that target should mean the demand be dropped. He retrospectively configures the result of the 2021 Scottish parliament elections as a pro-independence mandate to trump the plebiscite seven years earlier.
The second prong of the SNP strategy is an attack on Labour from the left. There is ammunition in Sir Keir Starmer’s cautious prospectus, drafted with an eye on ex-Tory voters in England, not the mood in Scotland. Labour’s silence on Brexit, and the shadowing of Conservative fiscal plans that dictate painful spending cuts in the next parliament, make it easy for Scottish Nationalists to overlay patterns of grim continuity on to likely regime change at Westminster.
But the SNP’s proposed alternative links its radical constitutional and economic projects. The plan stirs UK-wide tax rises together with independence and rejoining the European single market. It heroically assumes no cost to Scotland from any Brexit-style rupture from the single market with England.
SNP candidates are cast as agents of defiance to be sent to protect the national interest in a repressive alien parliament. Problems in areas of Holyrood competence – policing, education, health, transport – are, by rhetorical pivot to the terms of devolution, made to sound like someone else’s fault. By this device, Mr Swinney hopes to deflect blame for his party’s failures in office.
This is a line that resonated when Downing Street was occupied by Boris Johnson and Liz Truss – prime ministers whom even Scottish Tories struggled to endorse. The prospect of the UK having a majority Labour government for the first time since 2010 changes the calculus. The SNP argument has worn thin from overuse. The demand for independence has been abused as a catch-all excuse for failure on other issues: 16 years is a long time – too long – for a ruling party to switch into opposition mode whenever there is a whiff of accountability in the air.
