Why the SNP is at war with itself

It is late September 1997 in the early hours of the morning and I am standing with several colleagues on the sea-front at Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute. It is cold, we have smoked all my cigarettes, and the pubs have closed. An intense discussion is ongoing and colleagues are drifting away when the last of my fellow Scottish political hacks starts to gesticulate wildly. Frustrated that there is no more nicotine he grabs the empty packet and throws it to the ground. A police van that had been parked some distance away starts to move slowly towards us. Oh dear. This is the early hours in Rothesay and we have been caught littering. It is time, the policeman makes clear, for everyone to go home. The litterer, the thrower of the cigarette packet, is more experienced than me at dealing with law enforcement. We are in town for the SNP autumn conference at the town’s theatre – the art deco Rothesay Pavilion – and somehow he parlays this into a lift back to his hotel.

Where, I wonder, as they drive off, is the late night taxi rank. There is no late night taxi rank.

That is why I have to walk many miles back to the quaint bed and breakfast I’m staying in along the coast.

In myriad ways that was a simpler and more innocent time. Labour had a majority of 179 seats at Westminster. Boris Johnson was a humble newspaper columnist. London commentators wondered if the Tories were out of power for ever. And the SNP led by Alex Salmond was a fringe party. The Nationalists were so small, like a travelling golf club on tour, that their annual conference could be held in a small theatre in a dinky and charming Scottish seaside town that seemed to be stuck in the 1920s. If you have never been to Rothesay, think of a town like Scarborough, in England, and add Glaswegians, “Empire biscuits”, and a dash of Whisky Galore.

Now the SNP has an estimated 120,000 members and when the party meets it needs to be accommodated in the vast, modern conference centre by the River Clyde in Glasgow.

The reason I mentioned that 1997 Rothesay conference is not just to illustrate the point that the SNP has come a long way in under a quarter of a century, growing from a party with just six MPs in 1997 (up on three in 1992) into an awe-inspiring and disciplined, professional political machine that came close to breaking up the United Kingdom and may yet do so. Devolution handed the SNP the keys to power and they have been in government at Holyrood since 2007.

What is even more remarkable – weird even – is the personnel question. A small group dominated the SNP in the 1990s. Virtually the same small group, with a handful of additions, dominates still, although the clan leadership has become deeply divided, as we are about to find out when Alex Salmond’s trial starts next month.

In the mid-1990s Alex Salmond was the dominant figure. He still looms over the scene with followers dedicated to his legend. Nicola Sturgeon, now First Minister, was the younger darling of the movement. John Swinney, today the struggling education Secretary, was a rising star in the 1990s. Mike Russell, then Salmond’s closest aide and party chief executive, is in the Scottish cabinet too and ready if Sturgeon has to go. Others, such as Fiona Hyslop, were leading players in the mid-1990s and she is still a minister in Edinburgh. Ian Blackford, now Westminster leader, was a prominent activist and anti-Salmondite back then.

No other party has managed anything similar in terms of resilience, continuation of control and ruthless concentration of power. It is – in British Labour terms – as though next month Tony Blair is about to go on trial, while Gordon Brown is still Prime Minister, and Jack Straw, Robin Cook and Donald Dewar are cabinet ministers who might have to take over if Brown is forced to quit.

The long run of success is mainly down to Salmond and the strategic calculations he made in the 1990s that enabled his party to part engineer and then exploit the implosion of the Scottish Labour party, the hitherto dominant force that held the Union together strong.

To understand why the SNP is at war now – over its future direction and the leadership after Sturgeon – it helps to quickly grasp the history and the context in which Salmond operated as leader.

Salmond started in the late 1970s as a left-wing activist, albeit he had a day job as a civil servant and from 1982 as an oil economist for the Royal Bank of Scotland.

When he became leader in 1990, having won his Westminster seat in 1987, Salmond embarked on a clever strategy known as “gradualism.” The party should – in essence – accept the devolution settlement Labour proposed and then work to take power, and step by step work towards getting a referendum on independence and winning it.

He steadily wore down and defeated the “Fundamentalist” activists or tartan Taliban “fundies” who feared a sell-out. Devolution would be, they said, a trap stopping short of full sovereignty and freedom.

For a while it looked as though the fundamentalists were right. Salmond stepped aside as leader in 2000, defeated by Donald Dewar and Labour. He returned to the leadership in Holyrood in 2004, sensing that Labour had doomed itself long-term with the Iraq War.

All along Salmond advocated “independence in Europe”, because he understood that EU integration could make independence an easier sell at any future referendum. With the EU, Scots would not have to worry about leaving the UK single market because it was part of the bigger EU single market. There would be no border checks at Gretna. Breaking up Britain would in this way happen gradually and smoothly, was the theory.

Thanks to Labour’s spectacular implosion in Scotland, Salmond got into power as First Minister in 2007. When, by 2011, Salmond strengthened his position, David Cameron as Prime Minister had no choice other than to agree to hold a referendum in 2014.

Although the pro-Union forces won that contest, narrowly, Salmond had unleashed a new wave of angrier nationalism. Even though he handed over to his chosen successor, Sturgeon, party membership surged. Activists excited by the close result were impatient for change and a second referendum. Sturgeon rode this wave for a while – and she is still very popular with SNP voters – with anti-Brexit feeling since 2016 helping.

But Sturgeon, for all she shouts foul, cannot force the British government to hold an independence referendum and opinion in Scotland on separation is still finely balanced. Some pro-EU Remain voters have shifted across. The assumption is that if the SNP wins a majority at Holyrood next May then Boris will allow a referendum. He says not.

There is a Nationalist split on what to do, with MPs starting to speak out, highly unusually, against the leader. Some are saying Sturgeon is being insufficiently robust on pushing for a referendum. Some say she should hold her own poll and defy Westminster and Boris Johnson.

Whatever the wisdom or otherwise of that analysis, what is plainly apparent is that the iron rule of the Salmond era – discipline, all eyes on the same prize – is completely out the window.

Understanding that Sturgeon’s position is weak, with the Salmond trial right ahead, and knowing a leadership election or two may soon follow even if she survives the short term fall out, a proxy war has broken out.

The field of battle is Edinburgh Central, that for the moment is held at Holyrood by outgoing MSP the former Tory leader Ruth Davidson.

An impatient Salmondite, Joanna Cherry QC MP, a veteran of the Brexit wars, declared at the weekend that she will leave Westminster and seek the nomination in that key Holyrood seat instead.

This represents a declaration of war against Angus Robertson, the party’s moderate former SNP leader at Westminster, who had already announced that he is running for the Holyrood nomination in Edinburgh Central.

The winner of this bitter contest will become a potential frontrunner in the next leadership race or the one after that, to be fought over Nationalist core strategy as much as personality.

Ironically, some Salmond’s supporters this time are more like the old “fundies” he fought in the 1990s who again want to push on to full independence at top speed.

Sturgeon is for observing the constitutional law and getting there sort of sensibly. In support of the Sturgeon leadership, Robertson runs a think tank and polling outfit that makes the case that if they are ever to persuade more than half of Scotland to back independence, then they will have to do it gradually and in moderate tones that persuade the unpersuaded.

It is impossible to know which is the correct strategy, from the SNP’s point of view.

Robertson and his friends may be right that moderation and calm is the only long-term route to the hearts of swing voters, especially when Brexit makes leaving the UK (hard border at Gretna?) more difficult in practical terms. Or Cherry may be right that younger Scotland has simply decided this is about much more than economics and they will just surge, led by someone like Cherry, over the enemy lines crying “freeeeedom!”.

All one can say with any certainty is that this fight is the end of a decades old story – the fading bars of “an auld song” – during which a group that dominated their party and then Scottish politics came close to breaking up Britain. Now they are broken apart themselves.