Monthly Archive February 28, 2023

How ‘fixed’ is SNP leadership contest?

via Substack

SO, Nicola Sturgeon has called it a day as Scotland’s First Minister and leader of the SNP and I’m sure that Gordon Wilson – the late party leader – must be birlin’ in his grave at the miles of worldwide newspaper coverage and hours of and broadcast news about it.

I’ll run through the leadership contenders shortly. For the moment though let’s look at Nicola’s legacy – and what has driven the deep divisions in the party.

Nicola always appeared to be a decent FM who managed to get things done eventually, but the incestuous and autocratic running of the SNP was not a good look and was always going to backfire on her and her husband and party chief executive Peter Morrell.

This isn’t the place to talk about his £107,600 ‘loan’ to the party, which Nicola claimed to know nothing about. Instead, consider where we are now as we wait for the dwindling number of SNP faithful to cast their votes for the next person to occupy the hot seat.

Neither Kate Forbes nor Humza Yousaf would get my vote were I still a party member, and for different reasons.

I think Kate has done a sterling job with the finance brief, especially after stepping to deliver a budget at such short notice after Derek Mackay’s departure, and she has been relatively competent in the role since.

But – and it’s a BIG but – her remarks on gay marriage and people having children outside of marriage were something else.

Her church, the fundamentalist Free Church of Scotland, sprang to her defence accusing her detractors of “a level of bigotry” that had no place in society.

Of course, Ms Forbes is entitled to her beliefs, but I can’t understand why, after she admitted “tiptoeing” around them on other occasions, she decided to air them in a series of interviews which, I think, highlighted her naivety, as well as losing her some major political supporters.

Then we have Humza Yousaf reckoning that he is the man for the jobs. In every interview he does he touts his “experience in office” – but this is a man who has made a dog’s breakfast of almost every senior ScotGov position he’s held.

He started in Alex Salmond’s administration as external affairs and international development minister. Then, under Nicola’s reign he went to: Transport (remember the horrifically expensive and continuing ferries debacle and the delayed dualling of Scotland’s most dangerous road the A9); Justice (the controversial Hate Crime Bill which critics said stifled free speech); and Health (blaming the pandemic for everything he got wrong – NHS performance and A & E waiting times among them).

That is not an exhaustive list, but if he had failed so abysmally out in the real world he’d be unemployable.

So, with two Sturgeon loyalists leading the field (allegedly) that brings us on to the third – and many say the best – candidate, Ash Regan, who held the community safety brief before she quit government over the gender reform legislation Nicola and her squad were determined to railroad through the Scottish parliament.

In my book she gets five stars for stepping away from something who has torn the SNP apart, wasted parliamentary time and detracted from the main purpose of the party – to secure independence for Scotland.

Regan was elected to Holyrood in the 2016 election when she saw off the then-Labour leader Kezia Dugdale with a majority of over 5000.

Before Holyrood, she worked in marketing and PR, studied international relations, worked as head of campaigns and advocacy at the Common Weal (think-and-do tank) and joined the national committee of Women for Independence (WfI) in 2014 – when she also (post-referendum) joined the SNP.

She has said she will “re-invigorate” the SNP, which had “dismantled” the Yes movement since 2014; she has pledged more power to members and will return the indy movement “back to the people” and focus more on the cause – which all sounds good to me.

She told The Herald in an interview ahead of her campaign launch that the wider Yes movement had become “marginalised” in recent years and that if elected, she intended to change that.

Regan said: “As a party, I don’t think we’ve listened enough to the groups who got us here. I know these people because I campaigned side-by-side with them throughout the first referendum.

“The party has effectively dismantled the Yes campaign, but I want to re-constitute it once more.

“It’s also important that we get on with the business of governing on the day-to-day issues affecting all of the people of Scotland. And, as much as possible, allow some of the groups who did amazing work for the Yes cause in 2013 and 2014 to do what they did so well back then. I want to get the band back together, if you like.”

In a world where the SNP establishment hadn’t stitched everything up, Ash Regan would be a shoo-in to the leadership and FM post, but sadly that will only happen if SNP members take a look around them and see what’s happened to their once principled party.

Shortly before he died Gordon Wilson told me the SNP had to learn how to cope with the mass influx of members who signed up to the party after the 2014 referendum. He recalled a surge of membership during his leadership – “nothing like as huge as this time, but still too many for us to cope with” – and how the leadership didn’t know how to handle it. He said the proper way to do it would be to embrace the wider Yes movement and bring them into the fold. Give that success pro-indy demonstrations since then – organised by the movement instead of a party allegedly supporting the cause – have been massive, he wasn’t far off the mark.

This is exactly what Ash Regan wants to do as SNP leader and I think she’d make a superb leader because she is willing to embrace EVERYONE who wants independence and not simply the SNP few.

In his second volume of The Battle for Independence, Wilson said: “The independence referendum has place Scotland on the world map … brought Scotland out of the shadows only to disclose an invincible ignorance as the campaign developed.”

Sturgeon’s resignation, as I said earlier, made headlines around the world.

Let us hope her successor can keep our country in the news – and for all the right reasons.