Blues and twos - Police Scotland investigation could cost the SNP half its seats (Free to read)

Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong for Humza Yousaf, and Alex Salmond is not going to let anyone forget it

If there was any doubt about the damage inflicted on the SNP by the criminal investigation into party finances it is now over. An extensive poll by YouGov suggests that those scenes of a police forensics tent outside Nicola  Sturgeon’s Glasgow home, and the arrest of her husband, the SNP chief executive, Peter Murrell, have done lasting damage in the SNP heartland. 

According to this survey of 3,500 Scots conducted in April and May, the nationalists stand to lose 21 of their 48 MPs in the next general election including nearly all their Glasgow seats.  Labour would return 24 seats across Scotland, up from only one. This could be enough to put Keir Starmer in Number Ten with a majority, and pitch Humza Yousaf out of Bute House in a palace coup. It would be the 2015 election tsunami in reverse.

Yougov’s assessment is unambiguous: “accusations of party mismanagement and potential criminal cases being brought against senior officials, have taken a serious toll”. Peter Murrell, and the treasurer, Colin Beattie, were released without charge, but the criminal investigation goes on, supervised by the National Crime Agency – the UK force that deals with serious and organised crime. Nicola Sturgeon has yet to be asked to help police with their inquiries, but this bewildering crisis shows no sign of an early resolution. Police Scotland aren’t backing down, despite criticism from SNP insiders like the former spin-doctor, Murray Foote, that the whole affair is a “wild goose chase”.

The polling figures are a further blow to a party that still can’t quite believe what has happened to it in the few short months since Sturgeon resigned without warning in February.  The SNP has been rocked by resignations, divisions over policy and doubts about the integrity of the leadership election that installed Humza Yousaf. . And it has to be said that there appears to be very little prospect of recovery under the politician who replaced the SNP’s most electorally

successful leader.

Well, no one said it was going to be easy. Everything that could go wrong for Humza Yousaf has gone wrong since he took over in April. The scandal over missing party funds rumbles on, even if the arrests haven't; the First Minister is now being criticised for failing to deal with a new “sex pest” scandal that has wrecked the SNP group in North Lanarkshire, and to cap it all he faces the SNP's first by election defeat since 2014 in following the former SNP MP, Margaret Ferrier's, suspension from parliament.

And as if that weren't enough, the Scottish Government faces multi-million pound compensation claims from businesses over the ill fated Deposit Return Scheme for bottles and cans which looks likely to be scrapped as early as next week. Over at Ferguson Marine, the wellbeing economy minister, Neil Gray, has decided to press ahead with building a ferry, “Hull 802” despite civil servants saying it would be a waste of money. The health service is failing in large parts of Scotland according to the BMA and Yousaf is threatening to roll out a new round of tax increases in the middle of a cost of living crisis.

But fear not, because the party is about to “come together” this summer in a kind of festival of independence . Humza Yousaf has promised to “harness the energies of the independence movement”, convene regional assemblies across Scotland, produce new policy papers on the merits of independence. This is all to build the campaign for the independence referendum that, er, everyone knows is not going to happen. Yousaf has himself suggested during his leadership campaign that Indyref2 isn't coming any time soon.

But this summer of independence will be not be like all the summers of independence Scotland has enjoyed since the referendum in 2014. Humza Yousaf will bring his special magic to the cause, we're told and provide all the drive that Nicola Sturgeon lacked. Though no one outside Bute House believes that the “continuity candidate” has a fraction of the wit or resolve of his predecessor. But hope springs. And something has to be done to draw a line under the perma crisis that the Scottish National Party has become since Sturgeon's departure.

The summer of indy will kick off on June 24^th with what Yousaf calls a “special Independence Convention” in Dundee. This should not be confused with the existing organisation of the same name which has been burrowing away since 2005, and nor does it have anything to do with the Independence Convention that the former SNP minister, Ash Regan, was calling for during the leadership campaign. That Convention, promoted by one Alex Salmond, is supposed to be a new version of the Scottish Constitutional Convention of the 1980s,the cross-party/non-party body that campaigned, successfully, for the Scottish parliament.

Humza Yousaf's Independence Convention is nothing of the sort. It is a strictly SNP affair – an exercise in deep navel gazing, which will include - we are told – discussion of the much-derided “defacto referendum” that Nicola Sturgeon proposed. You may have thought that the idea of turning the next general election into a referendum on independence had died the death after Nicola Sturgeon handed in the keys to Bute House in February. Even Humza Yousaf poured cold water on it before he became leader, but he now says it “will form part of the discussion”.

You may also recall that there was supposed to be a special conference on the defacto plan in March. This was cancelled on the not unreasonable grounds that the only person still talking about it seriously had just resigned. The problems with the defacto referendum ploy were fairly obvious. Westminster would reject a overall majority vote for the SNP on the grounds that it had no constitutional standing because a general election is about electing a government in Westminster, not breaking up Britain. . However, if the SNP failed to secure a majority of votes, the UK government would of course claim that the nationalists had had their Indyref2 - and lost.

Mairi McAllan, MSP, the minister for Net Zero, suggested on Question Time last week that a second independence referendum would only come when support for independence was near 60% in the polls. That seems to be the new definition of the “settled will” of the Scottish people. But if so, we are a long way from that, even though support for independence is still relatively high, historically speaking, at just under 50%. And I'm not sure the hard line nationalists accept that 60% should be the benchmark.

What will occupy much of the time in Dundee will be questions about the conduct of the leadership in the months since Sturgeon resigned. To say the roof has fallen in would be an insult to demolition. The SNP government can't seem to get anything right. Gender Reform, recycling, waiting lists, ferries...everything goes south.

There will also be talk about the plan to scrap juries for rape trials in Humza Yousaf's draft Victims, Witnesses and Justice Reform Bill, which appears to have united the entire legal profession against what defence lawyers believe is an assault on the cornerstone of our justice system. It has not gone without notice in the SNP that Alex Salmond would probably be in jail right now had it not been for the Jury in his trial on 13 charges of sexual assault and attempted rape in 2020. The accusers were members of the SNP and the Scottish government.

Salmond has been largely rehabilitated in recent months and now appears on BBC Question Time as if nothing had happened. The person he said led a conspiracy to have him falsely imprisoned, Peter Murrell, is gone, as is Nicola Sturgeon. But he is still around leading his own breakaway party, Alba. Salmond will no doubt be addressing the latest All Under One Banner march in Stirling on the very same day as Yousaf heads up the SNP convention in Dundee.

Salmond has been a trenchant critic of the failures of the Scottish government under both Sturgeon and Yousaf. He is also the leader who took the SNP to its first election victory in 2007, to its first landslide in 2011 and to its first independence referendum in 2014. And he still has a lot left in the tank. He may be deluded in thinking his time has come again, but a lot of people in the independence movement are comparing him with Yousaf, and not liking what they see. The nationalists desperately want a winner, and Yousaf looks like a loser.