Humiliated, Scotland’s independence warriors lick their wounds

LONDON — A few weeks after their worst election result ever, a group of Scottish National Party officials could be found drowning their sorrows in Westminster pubs.

July’s U.K. general election was a disaster for the party. The SNP, which advocates Scottish independence, first won power in Scotland in 2007, but has now lost all but nine of their 48 seats in the Westminster parliament.

The result makes the SNP all but irrelevant in Westminster, slashing the state funding the party is entitled to from around £1.3 million annually to just £360,000. As a result, many of the staffers who gathered for drinks in late July were now without a job, leaving the party in Westminster with just a skeleton staff. A string of scandals has also led donations to dry up.

While still in power in Scotland, the collapse of the SNP’s influence in Westminster and ongoing turbulence at party HQ back in Edinburgh led many of those out drinking to paint a bleak picture of the party’s future.

“Parties die. If we don’t change, we will die,” one former Scottish National Party official said, speaking on condition of anonymity like others in this article in order to be candid.

The group began the evening in Westminster’s famous political drinking spot, the Red Lion pub. As the night went on, the tears and recriminations relocated along the river to the Players late-night piano bar in Charing Cross.

“It didn’t have to be like this,” the former official continued. “We could have changed, we could have done root and branch reform of the party and could have stood a chance.”

“But [SNP] HQ thought they knew better and we lost because of their incompetence.” 

Bloodletting

The SNP has endured 18 months of turbulence since Nicola Sturgeon suddenly resigned as both party leader and the country’s first minister in 2023, triggering a bad-tempered leadership contest that saw Humza Yousaf elected. Yousaf himself resigned earlier this year after effectively blowing up his own leadership. 

Such events — along with an ongoing police investigation that has so far led to the party’s former CEO Peter Murrell, who is also Sturgeon’s husband, being charged with embezzlement — have contributed to a drop in trust in the party, which is also seen as having presided over declining public services during the 17 years it led the Scottish government. 

The advocates of Scottish independence lost all but nine of their 48 seats in the Westminster parliament. | Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

These were the circumstances that greeted new leader John Swinney when he took over the party in May. Few blame him for the SNP’s U.K. election result, but frustration runs high at the failure of leaders to reform the party’s inner workings.

“Despite the influx of money and talent post-referendum, there did not seem to be enough investment or improvement in the SNP as an organization,” Mhairi Black, a now former MP who was one of the SNP’s rising talents, wrote in the National newspaper. 

“Instead, we got a decade’s supply of foam fingers, frisbees and pens.”

Others have taken aim at Sturgeon herself, who angered many party figures by appearing on ITV as a pundit on election night. High-profile MP Joanna Cherry, who also lost her seat, said she had been “dismayed” to hear Sturgeon distance herself from the SNP’s struggles by talking about the party in the third person.

“There have been some pretty deep-rooted problems in the SNP that ha[ve] not been helped by some major distractions, such as ongoing police enquiries,” said Fergus Mutch, a former senior adviser to Sturgeon and her predecessor Alex Salmond.

“There was a sense that the SNP were losing focus on the things that matter to the people of Scotland.”

Facing the future

The challenges in Scotland are exacerbated by the party’s irrelevance in Westminster. 

Following July’s election result, the SNP’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn lost his right to ask two questions at the weekly prime minister’s questions joust in the House of Commons because his party is no longer the U.K. parliament’s third-biggest group.

With less airtime at the weekly televised set-piece moment, the party now accepts it will have to be “more focused” on a few specific issues in order to have any impact at Westminster.

Flynn admitted on election night that independence has become a “hard sell” to the electorate, while Swinney said the SNP — which put independence on the first page of its manifesto — is not “winning that argument” with the public. 

In July, many former SNP voters switched to a rejuvenated Scottish Labour Party, which won 37 seats in the Westminster parliament and now wants to play a role in Starmer’s government. Labour also sees a chance to kick the SNP out of power in Scotland in 2026 when the Scottish parliament next goes to the polls.

“‘The SNP want to send a message to Westminster, we want to send a government’ is one of the best [Scottish Labour] attack lines I’ve ever heard,” said a second party official who also lost their job. 

“We couldn’t do much about that.”