Scotland decides: the general election 2024

A great deal has happened in Scotland since it last voted in 2019, but I sense that the electorate is very slowly and gradually losing its patience with a faltering SNP

This may be a doomed endeavour, but I wanted to write a few words about current Scottish electoral politics. Any SNP supporters who read this—there may not be any—will excoriate me on principle, most likely, and I am aware that I have deep-seated antipathies which I will try at least to acknowledge if not overcome or ignore. I will also try to remain as realistic as I can, although all politics is partly a matter of expectations and aspirations, and that’s truer than ever in Scottish politics, where wrong-think is often harshly treated. But here goes.

I was prompted by a small story in The Scottish Daily Express reporting the result of a council by-election in the Scottish Borders. The rather florid headline described it as a “huge blow for Humza Yousaf”, which is clearly hyperbole; what is true is that John Bathgate, the Conservative candidate in the Jedburgh and District ward of Scottish Borders Council, won the by-election with 1,377 votes, while the SNP challenger, Phil Dixon, only secured 410 votes. The Nationalist was down about six per cent on the previous election while Conservative first preference votes rose by 8.2 per cent. It should be noted that the previous councillor, Pam Brown, who stepped down for health reasons, was SNP. The area now has a Conservative councillor, a Conservative MSP (Rachael Hamilton) and a Conservative MP (John Lamont).

Let’s be very clear. This does not mean I think, or anyone sane thinks, that the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party is going to sweep the 57 constituencies which at the forthcoming general election will send Members of Parliament to the House of Commons. (It is a new electoral map: the Boundary Commission for Scotland recommended changes which reduce the number of seats from 59 to 57 and these were agreed by Parliament late last year.) The Conservatives are the second-largest party in the Scottish Parliament and comprise the official opposition, with 31 seats to the SNP’s 63, and they also won the second-highest number of Scottish seats at the 2019 general election: but that only amounted to six, with the SNP taking 48, the Liberal Democrats four and Labour only one.

(Since that election, two SNP MPs, Kenny MacAskill (East Lothian) and Neale Hanvey (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath), left to join Alex Salmond’s Alba Party in 2021. Margaret Ferrier, elected for the SNP in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, was subject to a recall petition last summer after breaking Covid-19 lockdown regulations and the seat was won in the ensuing by-election by Labour’s Michael Shanks. And the SNP’s Dr Lisa Cameron, MP for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow, crossed the floor to join the Conservatives.)

There are two connected issues about the Scottish Conservatives which it is easy to overlook but which are worth mentioning. The first is that they exist at all and are the official opposition: at the 1997 general election the Conservatives lost all of their parliamentary representation in Scotland and Wales, with 11 Scottish Conservative MPs out of (then) 72 being defeated, and it was a genuinely existential crisis for the party. It was the end of a long but steady decline. In 1955, a fact often trumpeted by Tories and I am as guilty as the next man, the Scottish Unionist Party (the Conservatives’ official name in Scotland until 1965) won 36 of Scotland’s 72 seats and a majority—albeit 50.1 per cent—of the popular vote. It held 31 in 1959, but thereafter the direction of travel was ominous: 24 in 1964, 20 in 1966, rallying slightly to 23 in 1970, then 21 and 16 in the two elections in 1974. There was another small rally when Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, and the Scottish Conservatives won 22 seats, but it dropped to 21 in 1983, a terrible 10 in 1987, 11 in 1992 and then the final collapse to none in 1997.

The recovery has been slow and modest. In 2001, Peter Duncan, now a respected public relations consultant, won Galloway and Upper Nithsdale to become the only Conservative MP north of the Border. His seat disappeared in 2005’s boundary changes and he failed to win a successor constituency but David Mundell was elected for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale and was the sole Tory in 2010 and 2015 as well. In 2017, that strange, unnecessary, ill-fated, topsy-turvy election called impulsively by Theresa May, a dozen more Conservatives were returned to join Mundell, giving the party 13 out of 59 seats, but seven were then lost in 2019.

In the Scottish Parliament, which the Conservatives had opposed, their performance for the first four elections produced broadly similar results: 18 MSPs in 1999 and 2003, 17 in 2007, 15 in 2011. In 2016, however, under the leadership of the young, unconventional and appealingly optimistic Ruth Davidson, the Conservatives overtook a demoralised Scottish Labour Party to become the second party, with 31 MSPs. That was still a modest number in a chamber of 129, and they held the same number at the Scottish Parliament elections in 2021, able to fend off Labour but seemingly having reached some kind of natural ceiling.

The future is not looking especially rose. An Ipsos poll at the end of January put the Scottish Conservatives on 14 per cent, well behind the SNP (39 per cent) and a resurgent Scottish Labour (32 per cent) under Anas Sarwar, who celebrated his third anniversary as Labour leader next week, and of whom more anon. The flipside of the Conservatives existing and being the official opposition in the Scottish Parliament, however, is that there are substantial swathes of Scotland which, in normal circumstances, in England, would return a Conservative MP by a hefty majority according to socio-economic, cultural, industrial and commercial demographic markers. If you look at the seats which the Tories held on to longest before the wipeout of 1997, they tended either to be affluent urban-verging-on-suburban areas like Edinburgh West (Lord James Douglas-Hamilton), Edinburgh Pentlands (Malcolm Rifkind) and Eastwood (Allan Stewart), or else solidly rural and agricultural seats like Dumfries (Sir Hector Monro) or Kincardine and Deeside (George Kynoch).

The decay had been a long time coming. The last Conservative seat in Glasgow, Hillhead, had been held by Tam Galbraith, a well-to-do establishment lawyer educated at public school and Oxford, from 1948 to 1982. His father, MP for Glasgow Pollok from 1940 to 1955, had been created 1st Baron Strathclyde and outlived him by three years, while his son, the current Lord Strathclyde—rejoicing in the given names of Thomas Galloway Dunlop du Roy de Blicquy Galbraith—led the Conservative peers in opposition and then government from 1998 to 2013. Hillhead was claimed at that point to the the “best educated constituency” in the United Kingdom, where voters were most likely to hold a university degree, and it was home to some of the University of Glasgow’s most visible buildings at the Gilmorehill campus and the Glasgow University Union.

But Galbraith’s majority, from a high of 11,295 in 1951 had dwindled to just 2,002 in 1979. When he died, the by-election was always going to be a challenge for the Conservatives, with difficult economic conditions and a month before the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands. They chose 31-year-old Gerry Malone as their candidate: he had stood for election in Glasgow Provan in February 1974, Glasgow Pollok in October 1974 and Roxburgh, Selkirk and Peebles in 1979, and would go on to be MP for Aberdeen South (1983-87) and Winchester (1992-97). He was a perfectly serviceable choice, a fluent and cultured lawyer, born and educated in Glasgow (though that he had attended a Jesuit school showed that the Scottish Conservatives were no longer the party of the Orange Order), but the SDP, which would celebrate the first anniversary of its foundation the day after the by-election, eventually chose to field Roy Jenkins. The involvement of such a high-profile figure, a former Labour chancellor and home secretary, president of the European Commission until a year before and the joint leader of the SDP-Liberal Alliance, while it raised the stakes, also gave the insurgent party huge credibility. Jenkins won by 2,038.

As I say, I don’t think the modest council by-election this week in Jedburgh signals a huge Conservative revival. 2024 is likely to be a bad year for the Tories anyway, and there are no transformational factors in their favour; Rishi Sunak is not a mould-breaking prime minister, has not struck a chord in Scotland (insofar as he has registered at all) and shows no sign of affecting Britain’s psephological foundations, except perhaps negatively for the Conservatives. Nor does the Scottish party have a revolutionary leader. Douglas Ross has chosen to be awkwardly double-hatted as MP for Moray (since 2017) and MSP for the Highlands and Islands on the regional list since 2021. He is youngish (he turned 41 last month) and classless, energetic but somehow scratchy and abrasive in a way that is not always winning. He is not standing for re-election to the House of Commons at the election, in order to concentrate on his duties at Holyrood. The Conservatives were polling around 20 per cent when he became leader in 2020: they hit a high of 25 per cent in Apri/May 2021 and a low of 12 per cent during Liz Truss’s brief premiership in October 2022 but have fluctuated within a relatively narrow band.

The general election in Scotland will be a story of the SNP versus the Labour Party. Let us deal with Labour first. Scotland is profoundly, symbolically and emotionally important to the Labour Party. Its first leader, Keir Hardie, and its first prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, were Scotsmen: Hardie was a Lanarkshire miner who started work as a message-boy at the age of seven, while MacDonald was the illegitimate son of a housemaid from Lossiemouth in Moray. The first Scottish Labour Party had been founded in 1888; the Scottish Trades Union Congress had formed the Scottish Workers’ Representation Committee in 1899; the mining and shipbuilding industries in Scotland had been mainstays of the Labour movement; and folk memories still draw heavily on Red Clydeside. the Glasgow rent strikes of 1915 and the much-mythologised “battle” of George Square in 1919.

The pantheon is full of heroes like the Independent Labour Party’s Jimmy Maxton (subject of a biography by Gordon Brown), Glasgow-raised Manny Shinwell (who was born in the year the Fabian Society was founded and died the year that Militant’s Derek Hatton was expelled from Labour) and the great lost leader, John Smith, who succeeded Neil Kinnock in 1992 and was fated, surely, to be prime minister until felled by a heart attack only two years later. The roll call is seemingly endless: John Wheatley, George Buchanan, Tom Johnston, Jennie Lee, Willie Ross, Tom Fraser, Donald Dewar, Robin Cook, Tam Dalyell, Judith Hart, Dennis Canavan, George Robertson, Alistair Darling, John Reid, Anne Begg.

The 2015 general election was devastating for Scottish Labour. Although they had been on the winning side of the previous year’s referendum on independence, former chancellor Alistair Darling acting as chairman of the Better Together campaign, the SNP saw a surge in membership as Labour’s poll ratings slid downwards. Johann Lamont, the Scottish Labour leader, was held at least partially responsible for the strong Yes vote in some Labour heartlands and resigned in October 2014: she did so immediately after giving an interview to The Daily Record in which she accused the party hierarchy of treating her and her team “like a branch office of London”, calling them “dinosaurs” who didn’t understand that “Scotland has changed forever” and that “the focus of Scottish politics is now Holyrood and not Westminster”.

Scottish Labour chose East Renfrewshire MP Jim Murphy as its new leader, as he beat MSPs Neil Findlay and Sarah Boyack in a field that no-one could describe as stellar. Choosing a leader from the Westminster Parliament after the SNP’s strong referendum showing seemed risky at best. Kezia Dugdale, the 33-year-old Lothian MSP, became deputy leader and represent the party in the Scottish Parliament and at First Minister’s Questions. If they were choices to show Scottish Labour had listened and learned, they were vastly inadequate, and harshly punished. In May 2015, when the UK went to the polls and David Cameron unexpectedly won a modest Conservative majority, Scottish Labour lost 40 of its 41 seats. Murphy was defeated, as were the shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander and the shadow Scottish secretary Margaret Curran. Only Ian Murray (Edinburgh South) was left.

It was a disaster but it was not over. Dugdale replaced Murphy as overall leader, but at the 2016 elections for the Scottish Parliament, the party fell from 37 MSPs to 24, dropping to third place with its lowest share of the vote (23 per cent) in 98 years. At the 2017 local elections, Scottish Labour’s first preference votes went from 31.4 per cent to 20.2 per cent and it lost over 130 council seats; it lost control of Glasgow City Council which it had held, barring a three-year interval, since 1975. When the general election campaign began later that year, Labour was polling 13 per cent in Scotland. (The Conservatives had still won 17.5 per cent at their 1997 apocalypse.) The final outcome was not as bad as that, as the party won seven seats overall and rallied to take 27 per cent of the vote; but in December 2019 the six new seats were lost and Murray was left alone again.

The challenge for the United Kingdom Labour Party of poor performance in Scotland is not just a psychological one. Before the rout of 2015 it had relied on dozens of rock-solid industrial and urban seats in Scotland to form part of an overall House of Commons majority. With the party dropping from 28 seats in Wales in 2017 to 22 in 2019, it made the path back to power much more reliant on winning marginal seats in England.

Richard Leonard, an Englishman who had moved to Scotland as a teenager to study at the University of Stirling, had replaced Dugdale as Scottish Labour leader in November 2017, a left-wing trades union official who had been a prominent critic of the Iraq War. He was an ideological ally of Jeremy Corbyn, having read Marx but shunning the label of “Marxist” in favour of a synthesis of “Scottish radicalism” and the ideas of “post-industrial Utopians”, and also finding “unionist” uncomfortable. When Corbyn greeted his election as “a challenge to the rigged system that has benefited a wealthy elite and showed how he will lead Scottish Labour to transform society”, it sounded tired and flat.

At the UK’s last European Parliament elections in 2019, Labour lost both its Scottish seats. Ian Murray and East Lothian MP Martin Whitfield co-authored an article in The Scotsman which was damning of Corbyn and Leonard: they said explicitly that “the blame for the worst result in Scottish Labour’s history lies squarely with our party’s leadership”, said that the two leaders “can’t lead” and ended in existential terms, concluding “if we fail to listen and learn, our party will never recover”.

As a media performer Leonard was anonymous, not even in the same league as Sturgeon or Davidson, nor even on a par with the affable, good-natured Willie Rennie of the Liberal Democrats. But he did not resign after the 2019 general election, promising to conduct a “listening exercise”. Criticism mounted throughout 2020, but Leonard dug in, and when three of his team called for his resignation, he dismissed them as “disgruntled MSPs who never supported my leadership”. Neil Findlay, one of Leonard’s close allies, was contemptuous.

The same people who are demanding LabourRichard resigns are the ones who told us that Better Together was a huge success story for Labour and that Jim Murphy was the salvation of the Party—they have been repeatedly wrong and are wrong again—it’s treachery with a snarl

It was an astonishing unwillingness to face reality, and a denial of the fact that Leonard was simply inadequate to the task. Eventually, however, at the beginning of 2021, he could not hold on any longer and threw in the towel.

The election to succeed Leonard was a straight choice between Anas Sarwar, a Glasgow MSP who had represented Glasgow Central in the House of Commons between 2010 and 2015, and Monica Lennon, born in Bellshill in Lanarkshire (like my mother) and MSP for Central Scotland. Sarwar was 37 and Lennon 40. Jackie Baillie, deputy leader, decided against standing, as did Ian Murray as did former chief whip James Kelly. Sarwar was presented as a modernising candidate, someone who understood the depth of the hole in which Scottish Labour found itself; Lennon seemed more radical, talking about a “third option” in an independence referendum and proposing that Scottish Labour become independent of the Labour Party to carfe its own niche in politics. The result, announced on 27 February 2021, was clear: Sarwar took 57.56 per cent of the vote to Lennon’s 42.44 per cent.

Sarwar is a strange mixture of qualities. He is the first-generation Scots-born son on immigrants from Pakistan, the embodiment of modern Scotland’s increasingly diverse society; but he inherited his seat in the House of Commons from his millionaire father, Mohammad Sarwar, who sat for Glasgow Govan then Central from 1997 to 2010, and went on to be twice governor of Punjab (2013-15, 2018-22) and briefly a member of the Senate of Pakistan (2018). Anas was educated at the highly academic fee-paying Hutchesons’ Grammar School, where a younger pupil was Humza Yousaf, now first minister of Scotland. When he was selected for Glasgow Central, The Guardian called him “preternaturally cool and slick”, “adept at turning every negative question into a positive” and “a moderniser, on the moderate left of the party”. By 2021, the same paper described him as a “centrist”, which must count as some kind of political consistency.

He has proved an effective spokesman for the party. To an extent, the proof of this is in Scottish Labour’s polling figures: it stood at 17 per cent when Sarwar was elected, first exceeded 30 per cent in September 2022 and has scarely dropped below that since last summer. The most recent poll, at the beginning of February, showed Scottish Labour at 34 per cent, one point ahead of the SNP. If nothing else, he had made his party credible again. And, although he was safely nominated on the Glasgow regional list, standing (unsuccessfully) against then-first minister Nicola Sturgeon in her Glasgow Southside constituency in the 2021 Scottish Parliament elections was an early marker of bravery: it was a challenge he could easily have avoided, and he raised the Labour vote by 8.4 per cent.

Sarwar has been described as “a confident political operator with soft-left ideals… [who] appears genial, friendly and helpful to supporters, constituents and party workers”. He could deliver a significant tranche of MPs to a wider Labour majority in the House of Commons. In Rutherglen and Hamilton West in October 2023, Scottish Labour won the by-election with a swing from the SNP of 20.4 per cent. Repeated at a general election—which of course is unlikely—would see Labour take 42 of Scotland’s 57 seats: that buoys the spirits. He knows he must win over voters who still want to see an independent Scotland, and has tailored his message accordingly.

We may ultimately disagree on the final destination for Scotland but on this part of the journey, let’s unite to change our country and get rid of this Tory government. [We want] the chance to show you that change is possible and that this isn’t as good as it gets.

He has shrewdly noted that his position is lucky: whether he is facing the Conservative Party as the incumbent government, or the SNP as the main challenger in most Scottish constituencies, he can present Labour as the agents of change, of an attractive home for anyone who is dissatisfied, disappointed or disenfranchised. That is a blunt but powerful message, against which incumbents often struggle.

This brings me on the Scottish National Party and the relatively new first minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf. For decades, success seemed just over the next hill for the SNP. When Alex Salmond led his party in the cry of “Scotland Free by ’93!”, Labour’s Donald Dewar, one of the driest of wits, commented “It’s a good slogan. It rhymes, and they can revive it every 10 years”. But if we lower our gaze from the final goal of a separate Scotland, the SNP has governed since Salmond was sworn in as first minister of a minority Holyrood administration on 17 May 2007. That is a longevity approaching the Thatcher/Major Conservative government. From 47 MSPs and minority rule in 2007, the party won 69 seats in 2011 to have a majority, then 63 in 2016 and 64 in 2021.

Alex Salmond, for whom I have no love but has clearly been one of the most effective and enduring figures in British politics for more than 30 years, stepped down as first minister after the 2014 referendum. Although he was only 59 when he decided to resign, it was inevitable: however well the Yes campaign had performed, he had, in a simple way, “lost” the vote, and in any event he had led the SNP for 20 of the preceding 24 years (1990-2000, 2004-14). Perhaps sensing the possibility of continuing influence, he stood for election to the House of Commons after five years away, and in May 2015 was elected as MP for Gordon. He was made foreign affairs spokesman, but was defeated by his Conservative challenger, Colin Clark, at the snap 2017 election.

With Salmond gone, the succession was obvious: Nicola Sturgeon, the 44-year-old deputy first minister who had been Salmond’s number two for a decade, was elected unopposed. A more clipped, occasionally testy politician without Salmond’s sweep, she nevertheless gripped Holyrood dominantly. Even the fall-out with her predecessor and mentor, and his subsequent trial and acquittal for sexual harassment, which must have been personally difficult as well as politically challenging, barely dented her armour. It was only towards the end of 2022, when Sturgeon had been first minister for almost eight years, that her leadership began to falter.

We are probably still to close to know whether her controversial decision to associate herself closely with the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill was the trigger for her downfall. I suggested at the time that the argument over a second independence referendum, which ended up in front of the Supreme Court in October 2022, was a high-risk move, but concluded that she had probably won that round in the court of public opinion, however cynically. But the gender recognition bill felt different. Sturgeon saw another day in court and potential political advantage, but, as I pointed out

It is a high risk move, with a majority of Scots opposing a relaxation of rules for gender recognition… The Scottish government wants to make this a fight about independence. Certainly, when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But legally this challenge is likely to fail, and it is far from clear that the verdict of the court of public opinion will be favourable either.

The blaze of publicity around the case of Isla Bryson, a trans woman guilty of raping two women and sent to an all-female prison for assessment, put the first minister on the spot and asked questions on which she was not able to obfuscate. On 15 February 2023, she suddenly announced her intention to resign. She denied it was motivated by what she called “choppy waters”, rather that it was the result of much deeper thought.

Since the very first moment in the job, I have believed that part of serving well would be to know, almost instinctively, when the time is right to make way for someone else. And when that time came, to have the courage to do so, even if many across the country, and in my party, might feel it too soon. In my head and in my heart I know that time is now. That it is right for me, for my party and for the country.

It was less than a month after the prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, had announced her own departure from office. After six “challenging” years, Ardern admitted “I no longer have enough in the tank”; she had taken stock over her summer break, and “I had hoped that I would find what I needed to carry on over that period but, unfortunately, I haven’t, and I would be doing a disservice to New Zealand to continue”.

Sturgeon argued that, while independence was closer than it had perhaps ever been, it needed fresh impetus. “We need to reach across the divide in Scottish politics, and my judgement now is that this needs a new leader.” At that point, she was only 52, but she had been first minister for just over eight years, deputy first minister for seven and a half years before that (responsible first for health and wellbeing, then for infrastructure and investment) and a shadow cabinet member for eight years before that. She could be forgiven for wanting a break.

There was one more factor. The SNP was being investigated by Police Scotland over alleged fraud, and in April 2023, Sturgeon’s husband, Peter Murrell, who had been the party’s chief executive since 2001, was arrested and the couple’s Glasgow home searched. Sturgeon herself was arrested, questioned and released without charge in June. The investigation continues.

After a sometimes-fractious and barbed leadership election, the SNP chose the health and social care secretary, Humza Yousaf, as its next leader and therefore first minister of Scotland. He won 52.1 per cent of the vote to the 47.9 per cent of the 32-year-old finance and economy secretary, Kate Forbes. Ash Regan, the former community safety minister, was eliminated in the first round, and in October defected to Salmond’s Alba Party. Forbes’s socially conservative personal views, based on her membership of the Free Church of Scotland, an 8,000-strong strict Calvinist group, caused considerable controversy among progressive SNP members. Forbes had been an MSP for nearly seven years and a minister for nearly five, but the spotlight of potential leadership was different: she admitted to “tiptoeing around” her faith, said she would have resigned over the gender recognition bill if she had not been on maternity leave from her ministerial duties, and said that, while she would not have supported equal marriage if she had been an MSP when the legislation was passed in 2014, she would not seek to overturn it as first minister. Nor would she seek changes to the provision of legal abortion despite personal opposition.

By contrast, Yousaf expressed support for the gender recognition bill. He is a practising Muslim, but has stressed that he does not legislate on the basis of his faith; although he missed the final vote on the equal marriage legislation, he had supported the bill at earlier stages. However, given his open worship—he was pictured praying on his first night at Bute House—some felt he was attempting to triangulate, appealing both to secular progressives and religious Muslims.

Yousaf came to the post of first minister with a decade of experience in government, including cabinet portfolios for justice and health, but he was only 37 when he was sworn in. If you take a generation as 15 years, he is a generation younger than Sturgeon and two generations younger than Salmond. He is the first Scottish head of government to come of age with a devolved government as an established fact rather than a contested policy, and most of his adult like has been spent under an SNP administration. This makes his world view different from those of Sturgeon and Salmond, but I think it also affects the way the electorate sees him.

The SNP has always been a very broad church united by a desire for independence. Before devolution, it was able to use that ambition, and the grievance often associated with it, to gloss over substantial policy differences on other matters. When it was founded in 1934, it was the result of a merger between the centre-left National Party of Scotland, which supported home rule, and the Scottish Party, an imperialist movement which campaigned for dominion status for Scotland within the Empire and was chaired by the 6th Duke of Montrose, a former senior Royal Navy officer who was lord lieutenant of Buteshire. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the SNP had to evolve a political stance beyond simply supporting independence. When Winnie Ewing won the famous Hamilton by-election in November 1967, she was able to attract the support of many who were not usually politically engaged, including women and young people, by presenting the party as a vaguely modernising, meritocratic force. Her summation of the victory was “Stop the world, Scotland wants to get on”.

In the general elections of 1974, however, when the SNP won seven (February) then 11 (October) seats, never having held more than one before, they made inroads in diverse areas. They took some urban and suburban constituencies, like Dundee East (Gordon Wilson) and East Dunbartonshire (Margaret Bain, later Ewing), but mostly they found success in rural areas which had previously voted Conservative, like Galloway (George Thompson), Argyll (Iain MacCormick) and South Angus (Andrew Welsh). Indeed, its enemies were happy at this point to try to portray the SNP essentially as a party of the centre-right, and the phrase “Tartan Tories” started to gain currency: Gerry Hassan—a polemicists as well as an academic—noted that it “served Labour as an assault phrase as it struggled to come to terms with the SNP”, and it was reinforced when the SNP voted with Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative opposition to bring down the Labour government in 1979.

Gradually, however, the SNP became an identifiable party of the Left, sometimes more radically so than Labour, while remaining able to use the “big tent” of independence to persuade voters to set aside or subjugate policy disagreements on other issues to that overarching goal. The stark difference between Yousaf and Forbes on issues of sexuality and sexual mores are a case in point. Another is the issue of the monarchy: the SNP’s official policy has been that first Queen Elizabeth and now the King should remain head of state of an independent Scotland, and Nicola Sturgeon often spoke positively about the Queen and her contribution to public life. Asked if she was a “monarchist”, Sturgeon could only manage to say “I support the Queen and her successors remaining head of state—it is the policy of my party”. Nevertheless, many leading SNP figures are republicans, and during the leadership campaign Yousaf declared that his ultimate aim was to remove the monarchy.

I believe we should be citizens first, not subjects… it’s not the most immediate issue… we would keep the monarchy for a period of time but I hope an independent Scotland would be a republic in the future.

(In fact we are citizens and have been since the passage of the British Nationality Act 1948, which replaced the status of “British subject” with that of “Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies”. Yousaf’s father, born in Mian Channu in Punjab in 1953, was born a citizen of the Dominion of Pakistan, of which the head of state was Elizabeth II as Queen of Pakistan, according to the Pakistan Citizenship Act, 1951.)

Yousaf is wholly a professional politician. Graduating in politics in 2007, he was a parliamentary assistant to Bashir Ahmad (2007-09), Anne McLaughlin (2009) then Alex Salmond (2009-10), then communications officer for the SNP (2010-11) before being elected as an MSP for Glasgow aged 26. Although he worked in a call centre in the summer of 2006, he has never had a substantive role outside the Holyrood system. Yet he has not always proved an especially slick or lucky politician.

In 2016, he was caught by police driving a friend’s car without insurance, which might be a minor infraction, but he was minister of transport at the time, which was embarrassing. In 2020, as justice secretary, he had to make changes to the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 during its consideration, in order to safeguard aspects of free speech such as libraries stocking controversial books. In June 2021, as health secretary, he claimed that children had been hospitalised “because of Covid”, but was quickly and firmly contradicted by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, whose Scotland officer stated “We’re not seeing any evidence of an increase in paediatric admissions with Covid”. In September of that year, he was sharply criticised for advising the public to “think twice” before calling an ambulance.

The first minister has a tendency to speak and act impulsively. In September 2020, as justice secretary, he somewhat bizarrely tweeted his condolences at the “dreadfully sad news” of the stabbing of Omer Sadiq, a prominent gangland figure, then hastily deleted the tweet. In May 2021, presented with footage on social media which seemed to show Rangers fans engaging in an anti-Catholic chant at an event at Ibrox, he did not hesitate. He tweeted “if (and I stress if) this clip is genuine then any player or staff member found to be guilty of anti-Catholic hatred should be shown the door by the Club”. This was in response to a message from Police Scotland which said clearly they “are assessing its contents and will liaise with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service as part of our enquiries”. He had inserted the caveat “if (and I stress if)”, though some more cautious souls might have thought the cabinet secretary for justice should exercise even greater caution. Unhappily for Yousaf, the clip turned out to have been doctored and the police stated that “no crime had been established”.

Attending the COP28 climate change summit in Dubai in December last year, he had a meeting with the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to discuss the conflict in Gaza despite the Scottish Government having no competence in foreign affairs (which are reserved to Westminster) and without any officials from the UK government present. He also invited the Turkish leader to visit Scotland. The first minister’s office claimed that a UK official was invited to the meeting but was unable to attend. But Yousaf has form: in August, he met the prime minister of Iceland, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, again without UK officials present. In response to the meeting with Erdoğan, the foreign secretary, Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, wrote to complain to Angus Robertson, nominally responsible for “external affairs” for the Scottish Government, and his tone was stinging.

The absence of an FCDO official at this meeting contravenes the protocols in our guidance on FCDO support to devolved government ministers’ overseas visits. Any further breaches of the protocol of ministerial meetings have a FCDO official present will result in no further FCDO facilitation of meetings or logistical support. We will also need to consider the presence of Scottish government offices in UK government posts.

The SNP, of course, has painted this as Westminster doing down the Scottish people and acting high-handedly. But diplomacy is a delicate endeavour, and Turkey is more delicate than most: a NATO ally, it has condemned Israel’s operations in Gaza as war crimes, and is accused of carrying out brutal measures against the Kurdish population in northern Syria. And this is an area in which the Scottish Government does not have any powers or competence, the first minister will not be briefed in detail on the situation and cannot be advised. It is freelance, knee-jerk diplomacy for the purposes of self-aggrandisment.

Yousaf’s colleagues do not always help. In December, the transport, net zero and just transition secretary, Màiri McAllan, admittedly only 30 at the time, claimed that world leaders were “lining up” to ask the Scottish Government’s advice “on how we have managed to lead the way so successfully on a number of fronts”. When pressed on this, she failed to name any world leader, or any policy issue on which the government’s advice had been sought.

The last opinion poll before Yousaf’s election was announced placed the SNP at 39 per cent, with a healthy lead over Labour (29 per cent) and the Conservatives (16 per cent). Since then his party has tracked up and down, but more generally down, with a low of 32 per cent in October last year and a current standing of 33 per cent. The broad picture seems to be of that loss transferring directly to Scottish Labour; the Conservatives are more or less static, as are the Liberal Democrats, while the Scottish Greens, who are, we should recall, in coalition with the SNP under the Bute House Agreement, are on a very low level of support of around two per cent.

There is something more going on that Anas Sarwar’s steady and shrewd leadership of Scottish Labour, and something more than Humza Yousaf’s erratic carelessness. The controversy over the gender recognition bill was, I think, one of the first signs that the cause of independence is losing its power to distract from all other issues, the departure of Sturgeon, the second substantial figure, after Salmond, in the march towards independence, has robbed the SNP of a kind of magical protection. For the first time since the party took office in 2007, it is starting to be held accountable for the quotidian business of running the government of Scotland, and it is being found badly wanting.

There are Nationalists and SNP allies who will claim that the Scottish media are biased against the Scottish Government. Here, for example, is Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp, journalist and “independence campaigner”, describing newspapers as “little more than a cabal of second rate political pamphleteers”, and claiming it is “clear the mainstream news agenda is clearly anti-SNP and anti-independence”. In June last year, The National reported a study by Professor John Robertson which showed “BBC Scotland politicises public services to attack the SNP government”. Of course, The National, launched in 2014, explicitly supports independence, and its details were unveiled at an SNP rally. And even Professor Robertson had conceded that the BBC’s coverage of the referendum campaign was “balanced in crude numerical terms”, and two other observers noted drily, “a little-reported finding from Professor Robertson’s study of the BBC’s supposed pro-Union bias was that the number of statements favourable to the Yes campaign (736) significantly outnumbered those favourable to the No campaign (622)”.

In 2016, Andrew Collier, a veteran of the SNP and the Yes campaign who has written speeches for Salmond and Sturgeon, argued that Nationalists were paranoid about media bias, whereas the true picture was much more nuanced:

Some [newspapers]—notably the Mail, Express and Telegraph—do have an embedded policy of attacking everything the national movement stands for, and so to an extent are fair targets for sensible criticism. Other papers such as the Scotsman and Herald are soft unionist and more nuanced. The Daily Record was fairer and more sympathetic during the referendum campaign than its Labour-supporting history led us to expect, and The Scottish Sun—the country’s biggest selling daily paper—went as close to backing independence as it felt able. Yet each and every one was verbally firebombed in the same brutal way.

Douglas Ross, who of course has an axe to grind as leader of the Scottish Conservatives, has suggested in fact the BBC tends to treat the Scottish Government deferentially. In 2022, the corporation found it had displayed “pro-SNP bias” in its serialisation of a book by Professor Devi Sridhar, a public health academic at the University of Edinburgh who had advised Sturgeon closely during the pandemic.

I would be happy to agree (though my hunch is it leans towards flattery of the Scottish Government) that the Scottish media is no more biased than any other and that neither side is disadvantaged. But there is an element of SNP support which fervently and earnestly believes not just that the media is biased against proponents of independence but that elements of the state like the Security Service (MI5) is actively working against the SNP. A favoured object of suspicion is the British Army’s 77th Brigade, a hybrid unit of regular soldiers and Reservists which “constrains our hostile state actors and adversaries through information operations and targeting, deployed and at stand off”. Douglas Chapman, MP for Dunfermline and West Fife, claimed in 2019 that the unit was “attacking and undermining our democratic choices”. Last year, a former SNP MSP, Campbell Martin, claimed that the Security Service had used its influence to cause the party to focus on gender issues and thereby damage its electoral prospects.

In any event, the charge sheet against the Scottish Government, which is responsible for the past 17 years, is substantial. I won’t go through it exhaustively here, but we can touch on some highlights, or rather lowlights.

In 2015, early in her tenure as first minister, Sturgeon wrote in The Daily Record that she had “a sacred responsibility” to improve both the quality of education and access to it “to make sure every young person in our land gets the same chance I had to succeed at whatever they want to do in life”. She tried to strike a realistic note to suggest that Scotland’s performance was good—the SNP had been in power for eight years, after all—but could be better: “those who say Scottish education is failing badly are wrong. But let me be clear—those who say it is good enough are wrong, too.” Her commitment to this cause was substantial. “Making sure the Scottish education system becomes, genuinely, one of the best in the world will be a driving and defining priority of my Government.” She reiterated this months later.

Let me be clear—I want to be judged on this. If you are not, as First Minister, prepared to put your neck on the line on the education of our young people then what are you prepared to. It really matters.

This was politically brave (unless you suspect, as I sometimes do a little, that soft-pedalling by the media would dull the edge of scrutiny and accountability). Certainly it has not been a resounding success. In 2021, Audit Scotland found that “progress on closing the poverty-related attainment gap between the most and least deprived school pupils has been limited” and certainly fell short of the government’s own ambitions. Funding for education between 2013/14 and 2018/19 was largely static, and in some local authorities, exam results and other markers of attainment had declined rather than improved. A mea culpa when Sturgeon left office last year? No chance. “Our investment to double early learning and childcare is transforming opportunities for the youngest children,” she declared with significant vagueness.

Scotland is also gripped by a drugs crisis. Between 2014/15 and 2018/19, the funding for Alcohol and Drugs Partnerships (ADPs) fell by 6.3 per cent, and in 2019 Scotland had a higher rate of drug-related deaths than any EU country or the United States. The Scottish Government stressed that it was “committed to tackling this issue” and said that it had “invested over £746 million to tackle problem alcohol and drug use since 2008. Despite this investment, drug deaths have continued to increase over this period.” Clearly something was not working. There was a particularly steep rise in drug-related deaths among homeless people. Here at least there was a hint of contrition. In April 2021, Sturgeon sacked the public health minister, Joe FitzPatrick, and admitted she and her colleagues “took our eye off the ball”. As a colleague of mine in the House of Commons used to say grimly in crises, deputy heads must roll.

There are issues which involve basic administrative competence and levels of accountability. In 2014, Ferguson Marine Ltd, the last remaining shipyard on the lower Clyde, went into administration. First Minister Alex Salmond negotiated a deal with Scotland’s richest man, businessman Jim McColl, for him to buy the concern, and the following year the yard was awarded a £97 million contract to build two ferries, one to serve the isle of Arran and the other to travel between Skye, North Uist and Harris in the Hebrides. But Ferguson had not built ferries of a comparable size for some time, the newly installed management team had never built any, and the business was under such tight financial strictures that it could not meet the requirements stipulated in the contract which made it liable for any cost overruns. In addition it had submitted the most expensive bid, which was £37 million more than the cheapest.

This did not augur well. Erik Østergaard, chairman of the statutory harbour authority Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd (CMAL), which owns 16 ports and harbours on the Clyde and in the islands, pointed out several of these flaws, after which the Scottish Government absolved him of any blame should the contract encounter problems. Østergaard advised reopening the procurement but Transport Scotland informed him that ministers were aware of the hazard but had decided to press on regardless.

After that, the saga is both depressingly predictable and yet outrageous. Steel was cut before designs were finalised; the Scottish Government gave payments and loans to ease cashflow problems at Ferguson but these were consumed by workforce costs and led to no improvements in the pace of the actual construction; the builders ignored some of CMAL’s recommendations because they would be time-consuming and expensive to implement. In November 2017, Sturgeon launched the MV Glen Sannox, the ferry destined for Arran, but it was 431 days behind schedule, and, incredibly, windows had been painted on, the funnel was not operational and the bulbous bow, though present, was fabricated from flat sheet steel and had already been ruled inadequate by Lloyd’s Register and in need of replacement.

In August 2019, Ferguson went into administration. Shortly before, Audit Scotland had warned that the project was so far behind and progress so slow that “both vessels were years away from being delivered and were showing signs of deterioration”. That is, the ships were literally falling into disrepair during construction. In spite of this, CMAL paid Ferguson £82.5 million in milestone payments, which was 85 per cent of the contract value, and £750,000 in variation to contract payments. Derek Mackay, the finance and economy secretary, stepped in to assume control of the company to allow work to continue and announced that the government would nationalise it in four weeks if a private buyer was not found. By December, three commercial bids had been received but none was deemed sustainable, and Ferguson formally came under the ownership of the Scottish Government, which also wrote off £50 million of previous loans. A turnaround director, Tim Hair, was brought in at a cost of £1.2 million (on the strength of one interview over the telephone), and he brought some improvements, but work was badly affected by Covid-19. Ferguson received £49 million in additional cash from the Scottish Government’s Covid business support fund.

By 2022, it was clear the ferry procurement was a disaster. Four hundred cables on the Glen Sannox were too short, and replacing them proved so slow that CMAL warned it threatened the whole project. A maritime safety expert warned that the engines, having sat idle for six years, might not work. Ferguson then said that the hybrid engines would run only on diesel for the foreseeable future because regulations required bespoke sensors for liquid natural gas operation, and these had a lead time of 36 weeks.

While this was happening in Glasgow, existing ferry services were collapsing. Community groups said the situation was critical, and the operator, Caledonia MacBrayne, was fined £3.2 million by Transport Scotland for breach of service. Passengers were even becoming violent because of the delays in the ferry service. Ferguson suggested the Glen Sannox would be delivered between March and May 2023, five years late. (It was not.) The sister ship, MV Glen Rosa, was slated for delivery in early 2024. But neither could operate on their planned routes before a £130 million infrastructure upgrade to facilities across the islands, including a £40 million enhancement of the port at Ardrossan, the responsibility for which was disputed between Transport Scotland, who own it, and North Ayrshire Council.

Last March Ferguson pledged a final “absolute deadline”: Glen Sannox would be delivered by December 2023 (but in the autumn of possible) and Glen Rosa in the late summer of 2024. In May 2023, Neil Gray, wellbeing economy, fair work and energy secretary, told the Scottish Parliament that it would be cheaper to scrap the Glen Rosa and start again but that the build would continue, with specific written ministerial authority, because a new ferry could not be ready before 2027. The cost of the Glen Sannox rose by another £20 million and it would now be available to passengers at the beginning of 2024, which Ferguson CEO David Tydeman told MSPs was on schedule. Then it failed a safety audit and sea trials were pushed back to the first quarter of 2024, raising doubts over whether it would be in service for the summer season. In addition, the capacity of both ferries has been cut from 1,000 to 852. Glen Sannox began sea trials at the beginning of this month but is not expected in service until late May.

I go through this exhaustively because it is so revealing. How did the various parties to this disaster—it is commonly dubbed the “Ferry Fiasco” but that is far too generous—react to the catalogue of mistakes, misjudgements and sheer disregard for propriety and honesty?

Not well. Jim McColl, who “saved” Ferguson in 2014 by buying it for £600,000, was rewarded for an uncompetitive bid for a public contract. He had been an enthusiast for independence but changed his mind after the 2014 referendum, and was also a member of the Scottish Government’s Council of Economic Advisers, before it was wound up in 2021. Still, by 2017, The Sunday Times estimated his net worth at £1.07 billion. The yard was nationalised in 2019 but in May 2022, by which time the ferries were years overdue, McColl blamed the Scottish Government. He said Mackay, the finance and economy secretary, had created a “circus” in 2019, and accused CMAL of making design changes which had doubled the bill for the fixed-price contract. A turnaround had never been needed, he argued, simply investment. “The government all along had led us to believe that we were working towards a point where we would have some sort of a settlement.”

In 2023, the Scottish Parliament’s Public Audit Committee criticised Nicola Sturgeon for choosing Ferguson for the ferry contract prematurely. That decision, it felt, had weakened CMAL’s hand when problems arose. There had been “a significant lack of transparency and accountability throughout the project”, and “uncertainty remains over which Minister had the final sign-off on the contract”. There was also a “lack of engagement by some key stakeholders in our scrutiny work”, and on an administrative level “record and note keeping of these meetings was weak and fell well short of the standards of transparency and accountability we would expect”.

Ministers did not even agree with the assessment of the auditor general for Scotland.

The AGS’s report states that “the Scottish Government is committed to paying additional vessel costs, regardless of the final price”. In evidence to the Committee, Scottish Government representatives challenged this assertion.

This was a set of circumstances in which almost everything went wrong. But when things go wrong, there tends to be culpability. And the saga of the ferries illustrates several faults which bedevil the SNP administration. The first is sheer incompetence. It is clear that Sturgeon acted unwisely in rushing to award the contract, no-one knew exactly where decision-making authority lay, and there was no effective ministerial oversight. All ministers involved bear responsibility for that, but the buck stops at Bute House.

There was also a lack of professionalism. Civil servants failed to keep proper records, and this was not, it would seem, remarked upon by ministers. Derek Mackay, when he first entered the story as minister for transport and the Islands, told the Labour MSP for Greenock and Inverclyde, Duncan McNeil, that Ferguson’s inability to provide a builders’ refund guarantee would not put it out of the running for the ferry contract, which Ferguson took to “give us the green light and said that we did not necessarily need to put up a cash refund guarantee, as something else could be negotiated”. During the summer of 2015, while the bid process was at its height, there were utterly inadequate procedures for making decisions while key ministers were away. And in May 2017, when the first minister met Jim McColl to discuss the problems with the ferries, it seems no minutes were kept of that meeting, and, while a special adviser was present, it would appear that no Scottish Government official was. It was, in short, a shambles.

Added to incompetence and unprofessionalism was a disdain, to put it mildly, for public scrutiny and accountability. The Public Audit Committee expressed disappointment at ministers’ reluctance to engage with the process—this can happen with select committees at Westminster too, but is never excusable—and the fact that they simply didn’t seem to care about sloppy decision-making and record-keeping. When Sturgeon was challenged on the May 2017 meeting, her response was dismissive.

Officials have been unable to locate a note of this meeting over and above the document already provided. As I confirmed in my last letter, in compliance with the ministerial code, a special adviser was present at the meeting and actions arising were relayed to officials and clearly indicate the topics discussed. The committee already has that email.

That just isn’t good enough.

And the ferries? They are currently six years behind schedule and likely to cost four times as much as planned. Glen Sannox is finally undergoing sea trials but Glen Rosa will not be delivered until next year. Caledonia MacBrayne is also awaiting four smaller, less complex vessels—they are being built in Turkey.

I labour this because I think, though it is mainly a feeling rather than a conclusion, that Yousaf as first minister, as discussed above, is still working within this mindset but has lost some of the electorate’s indulgence. It seems to me that for a long time—frustratingly long for non-SNP supporters like me—the Scottish Government was able to shrug off major policy failures like education and drugs because it was seen first and foremost as the vessel for the dream of independence, to which all else was secondary. By promising jam tomorrow, and everything better in an independent Scotland, the government persuaded voters not to subject it to the kind of accountability which most administrations experience. But perhaps that is now ending.

I began with the prospects for the forthcoming general election. We need to be careful to disaggregate UK general elections and Scottish parliamentary elections, because I think after 25 years of devolved government the electorate is sophisticated enough to do that. So when we go to the polls in October or November or whatever, the peopel of Scotland will have many different motivations, not simply the most recent actions of the SNP or the Scottish Government, and they will be aware, even if only subconsciously, that they are not voting for the administration at Holyrood which controls a substantial part of their everyday lives.

The polling evidence, while not dramatic, points to three interrelated trends.

1. The SNP have gradually lost support, from over 40 per cent towards the end of Sturgeon’s tenure as first minister, to much closer to 30 per cent now.

2. Scottish Labour has built its level of support, Sarwar inheriting a level of around 20 per cent and the party now regularly polling in the mid-30s per cent.

3. Given the stasis in the other parties, it seems a fair conclusion that a lot of this change consists of voters switching directly from the SNP to Labour.

As I’ve explained above, I think this has, predictably and logically, been driven by Anas Sarwar performing well as Scottish Labour leader and Humza Yousaf performing poorly as first minister and SNP leader. Douglas Ross’s inability to strike any real chord has allowed the other two parties to dominate the struggle, but the changing nature of support for the SNP, and perhaps the electorate coming to regard it more cynically and transactionally after a very long honeymoon, has also had an impact and has hindered Yousaf.

My own view is that SNP chose poorly in selecting Humza Yousaf to replace Nicola Sturgeon. Any successor was going to find it challenging to replace someone who’d been in office—as first minister and deputy first minister before that—for so long, but Yousaf is a bad politician, impulsive, careless, accident-prone and tribal. Kate Forbes would have been a leap in the dark (I almost said leap of faith): she is not yet 34 and was still a student, albeit a graduate student, at the beginning of 2013. Her strong religious belief and its attendant social conservatism would undoubtedly have been difficult for many SNP activists to absorb, especially in a political culture like the one we’re living through in which we’re very bad at agreeing to disagree while respecting each others’ views, and the SNP might well have lost some support to the Greens, who have identified themselves very closely with issues of sexuality and gender, and present themselves very strongly as social progressives.

(One might note, however, that that identification, whether because of substance or tone, led to Robin Harper, the party’s first MSP and the UK’s first Green parliamentarian, leaving the Greens because they had “lost the plot”, and had also seen the departure of Andy Wightman, one of their six MSPs, because he felt the party had become “provocative, alienating and confrontational for many women and men”, and “very censorious of any deviation from an agreed line”. Wightman is not a dazzling populist but he is a politician of extremely high-minded seriousness, an expert in and campaigner for land reform and a thoroughly thoughtful parliamentarian. Lorna Slater, co-leader of the Scottish Greens, unfortunately revealed a potentially damaging aspect of her party when she told The Scotsman dismissively that he “has very specific followers, but most people have no idea who he is”. If you take this with the evidence which suggests Sturgeon ran far ahead of public support with the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, it suggests that some elements of the political class hold views which are out of sync with the general public; whether they are able to lead opinion, as opponents of the death penalty did in the 1960s, or suffer an adverse electoral reaction is yet to be seen.)

We may still be six months or more from a general election, and as Tory diarist sans pareil Alan Clark used to muse, anything can happen at backgammon. It is an odd quirk that what will probably be the two largest parties in Scotland, the SNP and Scottish Labour, are currently being led by first-generation Glasgow-born children of Punjabi immigrants, who attended the same fee-paying school at the same time. Meanwhile the Conservative prime minister is descended from two Punjabi grandfathers (from Gujranwala and Ludhiana), albeit by way of East Africa. (The religiously eclectic region was not as involved as others during the Indian Rebellion of 1857; more than half of the Indian Army’s 680,000 combat troops who fought in the First World War were from Punjab; its population rose from 24.3 million in 1901 to 34.3 million in 1941. Alas it is also the location of the Jallianwala Bagh at Amritsar, where British and Indian troops under the command of Brigadier General Reginald Dyer killed between 379 and 1,500 civilians on 13 April 1919, in a grotesque and barbaric response to a peaceful gathering protesting against the introduction of the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act 1919. If you can stand it, the recreation in Richard Attenborough’s 1982 epic Gandhi conveys some of the horror.)

We should pause briefly on the topic of independence itself. Humza Yousaf can be forgiven for wondering how to deal with it: the 2014 referendum, which became inevitable once the SNP won a majority in the Scottish Parliament in 2011, was agreed in advance—probably with both sides expecting or at least hoping to win—to be a generational settling of the matter. Alex Salmond, then first minister, told the BBC it was a “once in a generation opportunity”, hoping thereby to make people take the chance which would not come again soon; conversely, unionists hoped to win and put the matter to bed for a couple of decades. That did not happen, for a number of reasons, including the SNP’s enormous success at Westminster the year after the referendum, and the decision to leave the European Union, which did not enjoy the support of a majority in Scotland, in 2016.

If it is still a live issue, however, should Yousaf focus on it, as the idealised goal his party is built on, but at the same time risking achieving nothing else? Or should he shift his attention to other policy areas? Many of the questions which were discussed but not resolved in 2014 still face us: when Winnie Ewing, victor of the 1967 Hamilton by-election and later famous in the European Parliament as “Madame Écosse”, died last June, I wrote in City AM that the SNP had, in one sense, made very little progress in the 55 years since Ewing’s surprise victory. Last June the party gathered in Dundee for its Convention on Independence, but it was still a talking shop. I argued that many challenges remained.

The party of independence still has so many questions to answer: what would Scotland’s currency be, a simple adoption of sterling and the monetary policy of the Bank of England, or a more bespoke solution? Would Scotland join NATO? What would its institutions look like, as a constitutional monarchy? How would it deal with legacy debt and liabilities?

It is not obvious politically what Yousaf should do, either. Since he became SNP leader nearly a year ago, opinion polls have generally but not universally shown a larger No than Yes preference when presented with the question used in the 2014 referendum, “Should Scotland be an independent country?” The No lead has been as big as 10 points and as small as one point. And half a dozen polls have shown a small plurality for Yes, from eight points in November 2023 to just three points in June. The weight of evidence suggests a fresh referendum would deliver another narrow win for No, which would be a setback for the SNP and probably fatal for Yousaf: and yet… if he were to gamble and win he would go down in history. At the moment, however, the UK government is not minded to see another referendum, and, as the constitution is a reserved matter under the Scotland Act 1998, that is where the decision currently lies.

Should we be surprised that Scottish politics has hardly been affected at all by Alex Salmond establishing a new pro-independence party three years ago? He had resigned from the SNP in 2018 after accusations of sexual misconduct, of which he was acquitted in 2020. The bad blood which ensued between him and his former protégée Nicola Sturgeon as a result of the prosecution led some to suspect the SNP hierarchy of plotting against their former master. There were suggestions that Salmond, still a hugely influential figure in Scottish politics, if somewhat diminished by his decision to host a television programme on Russia’s state-controlled broadcaster RT, might start a new movement or party. Polling in 2020 suggested, rather optimistically, that as many as 40 per cent of SNP voters might back another pro-independence party if it was led by Salmond.

Alex Salmond is a talented and canny operator, and a clever man, but his closest allies would struggle to say he is suffused with humility and self-abnegation. Understandably, he liked those numbers. In February 2021, therefore, he launched Alba, taking the Gaelic name for Scotland, holding a formal, if somewhat haphazard and chaotic, event the following month. Its first elected recruit was Councillor Chris McEleny, who had previously led the SNP group on Inverclyde Council and is now Alba’s general secretary, followed by two sitting MPs from the Scottish National Party, Kenny MacAskill and Neale Hanvey, as well as former Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock MP Corri Wilson. None was enormously impressive, though MacAskill had served as Salmond’s justice secretary through his reign as first minister (2007-14), perhaps most memorably agreeing to the release on compassionate grounds of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi from Greenock Prison. Meanwhile Hanvey had found himself enmeshed in accusations of antisemitism in 2019. They were joined by Councillor Lynne Anderson, who had been the SNP’s national equalities convener.

Alba never quite took flight. MacAskill became depute leader in September 2021, but it remained a Salmond vehicle, and at the Scottish Parliament elections in May 2021, the party only garnered 45,000 votes, 1.7 per cent of the total, winning no seats. At the local elections in 2022, Alba fielded 111 candidates, and received 0.7 per cent of first preference votes. Yet a poll later that year suggested the party might fight its way into the Scottish Parliament at the next election (which is in May 2026), 34 per cent of those who voted SNP in 2021 saying they would consider voting for Alba on the regional list. Last October, as mentioned above, former SNP leadership contender Ash Regan defected to Alba, giving the party its first MSP; although, again, while Regan was a junior minister, and has been at Holyrood since 2016, she is not a figure of heavyweight national standing. Salmond has stated that his party will contest the forthcoming general election, although he has not specified how many candidates will stand and maintains that the 2026 Holyrood elections are a bigger priority. Pete Wishart, SNP MP for Perth and North Perthshire and chair of the House of Commons Scottish Affairs Committee (as well as keyboard player for Celtic rock legends Runrig and Big Country), dismissed Alba as “unelectable”, and remarked acidly “the few votes they secure will only help unionist parties seeking to replace SNP MPs. They will have to explain how this helps us get to independence.”

That there is vicious internecine social media war between the SNP and Alba is unsurprising. Encouraged to co-operate with Alba to work towards independence, Wishart raged “If Alba stop the hate and and start to act against the Alba supporters who spew loathing against the SNP practically every day then anything just might be possible”. But there is rancour on both sides: “ALBA don’t need the ruined SNP & their unelectable behaviour & policies”; Alba are “unelectable far-right grifters & parasites who team up with Farage & the Tories to attack the SNP even while riding the SNP’s coattails - & expecting SNP members to vote for them coz they spout slogans.”; “Pete Wishart thinks Alba voters and members are a ‘menace’ to society. By which he means we challenge elite interests/power & careerists like him. I’m good with that”; “Alex Salmond’s despicable behaviour towards women is what discedited him. Which makes me have a quiet chuckle every time an Alba supporter says they do so because of their stance on womens rights”.

The Conservatives are in a bind north of the Border. Ross was elected unopposed in August 2020, gaining the backing of Ruth Davidson and former Scottish secretary David Mundell. His predecessor Jackson Carlaw, who served just less than a year (2019-20), most of it acting, was 60 years old when he was elected, and had already acted as leader when Davidson was on maternity leave in 2018-19. He had first been deputy chairman of the Scottish Conservatives as long ago as 1992 (when Lord Sanderson of Bowden was chairman), and was not without talent or intelligence, but he was exactly what he seemed to be: a well-to-do car salesman from the Glasgow suburbs who veered into off-colour humour a little easily. He won an easy victory over South Scotland MSP Michelle Ballantyne (who later switched to Reform UK) in February 2020 but by July saw what most others could see, that he was not the leader the party needed, and he came to the “painful conclusion” that he should announce his resignation.

Ross has made it more difficult for himself by splitting his time between Westminster and Holyrood. He was elected to the Scottish Parliament on the Highlands and Islands list in May 2021 in order to play his full part as leader of the opposition, including leading for the Conservatives at First Minister’s Questions on Thursdays, The 31 seats the party won equalled their best performance and the vote share of 21.9 per cent in the constituency seats and 23.5 per cent on the regional lists was a record for them in the Scottish Parliament. But holding on to his seat in the House of Commons though he will not stand in Moray this time round is arguably a distraction. He was an early critic of Boris Johnson’s conduct over “Partygate”, calling for the prime minister to resign in January 2022. This led the then-leader of the House, Jacob Rees-Mogg, to remark somewhat cattily, “I don’t think Douglas Ross is a big figure. I think Alister Jack is a really serious and senior figure.” Jack, the Scottish secretary, is a decent and dependable sort, though, as a wealthy, Glenalmond-educated landowner, he has the faint air of a man who has turned up 50 years too late, but Ross is considerably punchier and more combative, as well as having the mandate of the Scottish party.

The 2022 local elections were a setback for Ross and his party, as they lost 63 seats with a 5.6 per cent swing against them and slipped into third place behind Labour. The circumstances were not promising: a fortnight before, the House of Commons had voted to refer Johnson to the Committee of Privileges to investigate whether he had misled the House over his observance of Covid lockdown regulations, a week after the Metropolitan Police had issued him with a fixed-penalty notice for holding a birthday party (for himself) in the cabinet room in June 2020. Ross took the poor result on the chin: he accepted “criticism from colleagues” and said that he heard “loud and clear” the public anger over the conduct of the prime minister and others. However, he would stay in post:

because there is a lot of work we have to do to continue to fight the SNP to stop their distraction of national politics onto their obsession about independence and deliver for the people of Scotland.

If there was discontent, it had not crystallised into a plan of action. One MSP told a journalist “If there’s a plot to oust him, no-one’s asked me to join”. And in truth there were no plausible and available alternatives: Andrew Bowie, the MP for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine who had briefly been Theresa May’s parliamentary private secretary, offered no improvement over Ross; Meghan Gallacher, the cheerful MSP for Central Scotland who had just turned 30, was appointed deputy leader; Murdo Fraser, shadow Covid recovery secretary, able but slightly odd, was enormously experienced but had sniffed around the leadership a decade before. Ruth Davidson, now Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links, had undertaken some campaigning and is always the subject of vaguely wistful wonderings but has been clear she has no interest in returning to frontline elected politics.

It is hard to see what the Conservatives can do to break their current ceiling of around 25 per cent. A Scottish Labour revival is good news for the Union, as it inevitably comes mainly at the expense of the SNP, but it pushes Scottish politics back towards it’s old, slightly fractured model of three parties knocking lumps out of each other while the Liberal Democrats look on from the sidelines. If one accepts that Scottish politics sits in some ways slightly to the Left of the rest of the UK, certainly in terms of economics and the public sector—which accounts for half of Scotland’s GDP—and the SNP has a strong claim on the nakedly patriotic, saltire-clutching sentiment among Scottish voters, Conservatism’s room for expansion seems limited. The recent Scottish party conference used the slogan “Focused on Scotland’s real priorities”. This is not terrible, as it neatly twins the SNP’s concentration on the constitutional question and the Scottish Government’s poor record of delivery and administration, but it is no rallying cry.

The party has some broadly sensible policy headlines: it talks about “the SNP’s soft-touch justice system”, the “need to restore Scotland’s schools to the world-class reputation they held before the SNP came to power”, “creating Scottish jobs”, improving transport links “to build a stronger economy and leave nowhere behind” and points to independence as the “biggest threat to Scotland’s NHS”. But it is hard to see solutions to these problems which do not require either significant investment or radical and potentially unwelcome slaughtering of sacred cows.

The SNP has proved canny at persuading voters to bribe themselves. NHS Scotland scrapped prescription charges in 2011, which was sold by the SNP as a great gesture of largesse and solidarity among the people of Scotland. But in England, where the supposedly grasping government still levies this terrible “tax on ill health”, 95 per cent of prescriptions are issued without charge. To all intents and purposes, prescriptions are free, with exemptions for those on low incomes and chronic or multiple conditions. A 2018 study in the British Medical Journal concluded there was not:

sufficient evidence that universal free prescriptions was a demonstrably effective or ineffective policy, in terms of reducing hospital admissions or reducing socioeconomic inequality in hospital admissions, in the context of a universal, publicly administered medical care system, the National Health Service of Scotland.

Yet the SNP deploys this attack line at every opportunity. It also calls them “free prescriptions”, when they are manifestly not: they are paid for out of general taxation. So every taxpayer pays for them. But that would be the case for the overwhelming majority of prescriptions without the Scottish Government’s sleight of hand.

A similar piece of apparent prestidigitation was the Abolition of Bridge Tolls (Scotland) Act 2008. The SNP has gone into the May 2007 Scottish Parliament elections with a manifesto commitment to abolish the tolls on the Forth Road Bridge and the Tay Road Bridge. The reasoning behind the legislation was that it was “unacceptable and unfair to leave the two road bridges into and out of Fife as the only remaining toll bridges in Scotland” and the act would achieve a situation in which “the entire road network in Scotland, and travellers on that network, are treated consistently and fairly”. One objection to the maintenance of tolls was:

The toll revenue being used to pay for maintenance rather than the original construction costs. (This was cited as an anomaly because the Scottish Executive pays for the maintenance of other major road bridges throughout Scotland).

Let us be clear here. The legislation did not in any way decrease the amount of money required to maintain the two bridges. That was a set cost. All the legislation did was redistribute the liability for those costs. While the status quo ante was imperfect, in that most bridges were maintained through normal means by the Scottish Executive (renamed the Scottish Government in 2012), it did mean that the burden of maintenance of the bridges fell on those who used them. The act did not magically make this cost disappear, it simply redistributed it much more broadly, placing it on the shoulders of every Scottish taxpayer, whether or not they were car owners. I had left Scotland by 2007, though I lived in Fife for eight years, but if I had lived in, say, Glasgow, or Banff, or Kirkcudbright, I struggle to see why I would have thought it a great leap forward for my tax liability to expand to take on the upkeep of two bridges I might never use.

These tolls were not rapacious. It cost £1 to use the Forth Road Bridge, and 80 pm to cross the Tay. And last February it was suggested that tolls might have to be reintroduced to generate revenue for investment and discourage the use of cars. It seems a particularly striking decision in a world of an expanding London congestion charge, the M6 toll road and the new Tyne Tunnels. But it was sold as something becoming “free”.

My thesis that the electorate’s indulgence of the Scottish Government is gradually ebbing away is supported by a poll conducted earlier this month by Ipsos. Now, let is exercise due caution: the poll shows the SNP leading Scottish Labour, with a seven point advantage in voting intention at the general election. It also remains the party most trusted to manage the NHS, grow Scotland’s economy, manage schools and education and tackle the cost of living crisis. Look, however, at the direction of travel. In each of the four areas, the measure of trust in the SNP has fallen since May 2022 (as has that in the Conservatives), while Scottish Labour has gained trust, quite substantially in the case of the NHS, the economy and education. It confirms for me the picture of patience slowly, ever so slowly, beginning to run out with an SNP which has been in government for nearly 17 years, and a willingness to give Labour a fresh hearing.

You can choose among a range of outcomes, according to political sympathy or how much reality you can face. YouGov in January predicted 25 SNP seats, 24 Labour and four apiece for the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Ipsos this month was more favourable to the SNP, predicting its winning 40 seats, Labour 13 and the Conservative and Liberal Democrats two each. A Survation poll, interpreted by Professor Sir John Curtice, suggests the SNP and Labour will draw level on 23 seats each, with the Conservatives on six and the Liberal Democrats on five.

There is a good chance, then, that the SNP will lose substantial ground to Scottish Labour, but may well remain the largest party in Scotland. The Conservatives cannot seriously hope to do more than hold on to what they have, and largely the same is true of the Liberal Democrats. Even if we split the difference in the polls and imagine the SNP in the high 20s and the Labour Party in the low 20s, that is still a bloody nose for the Nationalists. The first minister can reasonably say that the Westminster election is secondary to him, and the poll that really matters is the election to the Scottish Parliament in 2026. Perhaps the most important target for the SNP is 29: if the party wins 29 seats, it will have a majority of Scottish MPs and will retain some moral case for pushing for another referendum on independence. If it falls below that line, and more Scottish seats are won by unionist parties, the SNP will have to rethink its short- and medium-term strategy radically.

What do I think? God knows. I come from generations of Scots and have no idea what they/we will do. If I had to guess, I’d say Scottish Labour will continue to gain on the SNP, and the Nationalists will eventually fall just short. Let’s say 27 or 28. That will make things interesting.