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A historic day for Scotland? Sadly not.
Scotland's new first minister is the embodiment of the crisis in the SNP - and Scottish politics more generally. But there are a few reasons to be optimistic, too.
After the rapid fall from grace of his predecessor, Humza Yousaf, the job of steadying the ship for the governing Scottish National Party (SNP) now falls to a man who last led the party 20 years ago: John Swinney.
His elevation to the top job is a sign of desperation. Swinney stood down as party leader in 2004 after a string of bad electoral results. For years, he was Nicola Sturgeon's deputy, but stood down when she announced her resignation (seemingly out of the blue) in February 2023. He later admitted he had tried to leave the government on numerous occasions since 2016. His wife has multiple sclerosis and all the indications were that he was done with frontline politics. Yet he's back - and that's mainly because he was probably the only politician with sufficient kudos across the SNP to hold the party together.
But Swinney is beset with problems to tackle. Most notably, having lost the referendum vote in 2014, the SNP has no clear route to independence. The current government in Westminster has no interest in authorising another referendum and various strategies to force one have come to nothing. The party is divided between realists who recognise that they will have to bide their time and hope for a consistent opinion-poll lead for independence to force the issue and the impatient separatists demanding progress (although no one has any good ideas about how that will happen).
So, on the SNP's unique selling point - achieving independence from the UK - the party is at a dead end. After the Brexit referendum in 2016, the SNP could argue that anti-Brexit Scotland had been dragged out of the EU by a pro-Brexit Conservative government in Westminster. As a result, something fundamental had changed and another referendum on independence was required. However, with Brexit officially done and dusted four years ago, with little appetite for reopening the issue, and with Labour looking set to be back in government by the end of the year (possibly with a majority of Scottish MPs, too), that argument looks a lot weaker now.
Meanwhile, the SNP in government has been a disaster. Almost all the areas of government that voters say are important to them - like the NHS, education and policing - are devolved issues. Yet Scotland has been doing as badly or worse on all fronts than England, despite having more money to spend per capita.
Instead of governing competently, the SNP has been a 'font of bad laws', including:
bans on mean words being said or sung at football matches (passed in 2012, repealed in 2018);
the idea of giving every newborn in Scotland a 'named person' to watch over them - a policy championed by Swinney (ruled illegal in 2016, finally dropped in 2019);
the Hate Crime Act, a terrible attack on free speech, even within one's own home (passed in 2021, brought into effect this year, already falling apart under its own contradictions);
the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, which was supposed to bring in self-ID for gender, but was vetoed by the UK government, amid a storm of controversy over male rapists being sent to women's prisons.
Other failures include a deposit return scheme for bottles which had to be abandoned, an ongoing fiasco over vital ferries for island communities that are overdue and over budget, and an attempt to restrict fishing in Scottish waters, which went down like a cup of cold sick even with many SNP supporters. The coalition with the Green Party (the collapse of which led to Yousaf's demise) added fringe, 'woke' obsessions to the SNP's instinctive authoritarianism.
No wonder that Swinney was keen to say when he announced his candidacy that his 'focus will be the economy, jobs, the cost of living. It will be the NHS, our schools and our public services. It will be addressing the climate crisis.' Eco-worrying aside, these are the kind of issues that Scottish voters are really concerned about. Whether the SNP is capable of being a boring but competent government is another matter.
Moreover, it will be interesting to see if Swinney can hold together the different factions within his own party. Without the immediate prospect of another independence referendum to sustain party discipline, there will be plenty of tensions to come, particularly for a minority government that will have to get support from other parties to get anything done. While Swinney says he's in it for the long haul, a disastrous result in the UK general election later this year could stir things up yet again. No wonder Kate Forbes, the obvious challenger for the leadership this time, has decided to sit on her hands for now.
It would be nice if the hoo-hah at Holyrood could deliver a serious new era for Scottish politics. There are some encouraging signs - like the grassroots activism against the Gender Reform Bill and the Hate Crime Act by groups like For Women Scotland and the Scottish Union for Education. Hilary Cass has given evidence about gender services to the Scottish Parliament this morning. More people are wising up to the sorry state of Scottish schools and the lurch from education into indoctrination around 'social justice' issues.
Above all, the SNP, which looked untouchable just 18 months ago, could soon collapse like a house of cards, showing that even the most impregnable position in politics can be anything but. However, with no new Scottish Parliament elections due till 2026, the equally vacuous Labour Party being the main beneficiary of the SNP's woes and with the Tories ineffectual, Scottish party politics looks stuck.