It’s a proxy measure of the level and enthusiasm of support - how many people are willing to pay money to be asked to go leafletting/canvassing, sit in draughty church halls for tedious meetings, etc, etc. Generally speaking, all parties have become much less the mass movements they were in the 40s and 50s, but the variations, year on year, still give some measure of engagement, if not necessarily reflecting how the voters in general are feeling.
“We request that you provide essential information pertaining to the current membership status and voting procedures within the SNP, which is necessary for ensuring a fair and transparent leadership election.” sounds eminently more reasonable than “this election that hasn’t even happened yet was rigged and I’ll tell you all about it in two weeks!”, but I do think they’re cut from the same cloth. There are no specific allegations; just a general undermining of the electoral process.
Exactly - on which note it’s interesting to ask why SNP members have left the party. Candidate answers include:
- Cost of living crisis - it’s a monthly or annual fee that people might not feel comfortable continuing when circumstances lead them to take a systematic look at their household budget.
- Broken promises on independence - since 2016 the membership have been told that the next referendum is just round the corner, maybe not this year but next year absolutely and there’s only so long you can offer “jam tomorrow” before people give up on you.
- The Gender Recognition Reform debate - anecdotally, we know that there are people who left the party over Sturgeon’s determination to push this through, but it’s not clear how many. In many ways the party will be glad to be has found a fault line it can’t gloss over.
- General discontent with the gap between radical rhetoric and centre-right technocratic policy coupled with failure to deliver - a lot of SNP support has come from the left and people may be realising that the party isn’t the vehicle for their politics they thought it was.
The answer will of course be a mix of all of these, but in what proportion will matter. E.g., if its the more committed Independence Now faction that have left, then Yousaf as the continuity candidate will benefit from a membership that is more gradualist than it used to be. If its the culturally conservative types who have left, this will damage Forbes in particular. On the other hand, if it’s more a loss of left-wingers and the party is reverting back to its Tartan Tory past, then that will help Forbes.
The membership is small enough that it will be very difficult to poll, so anecdote and indirect evidence will be all we have - the biggest piece of which indirect evidence will be the result!
And possibly the Scottish Greens.
If the recent trend continues, it will be very easy to poll the membership in a couple of years - just ask both of them.
True, they are the natural fallback for for left Independence types.
(Around 2014 there were also a number of micro left/independence parties such as noted perjurer Tommy Sheridan’s Scottish Socialist Party etc. but I don’t know if they’re even in existence any more, still less viable orgs.)
One potential outcome here is that there is a degree of splintering of the SNP with one wing leaving for the Greens and the other for Salmond’s Alba. Under the STV voting system for Hollyrood that might mean more coalitions but it shouldn’t really open the door for Labour or the Tories by itself because e.g. a new Green voter will almost certainly put SNP as a second preference above Labour.
Splitters!
It is all kicking off this morning.
This tweet was written on 14th Feb - I’d not picked that up and slightly misunderstood but I’m glad I did because:
The author was tweeting in his role as press officer for the SNP Hollyrood MSPs. That is, he was the press guy for the actual elected SNP members. This is not the same as being press guy for the actual Scottish NAtional Party HQ. An important distinction because:
He was the one asked whether the party had lost members in the light of the GRR/de-facto referendum rows. He passed this query on to HQ - who have the membership records - and in good faith passed on their response that the idea of losing that many members was “drivel”. That’s what this tweet is - him backing up SNP HQ’s denial of massive membership losses. The full denial said that they’d maybe lost 300, but 300 more had joined so it was a wash. Foote relayed this and commented forcefully.
He resigned yesterday. Because of course, that was all bollocks. He’d been fed bullshit and loyally passed it on to press contacts. Foote is a former newspaper editor with a good reputation and it has been somewhat tarnished by his association with this “drivel”.
How could they lie so blatantly? This is the explanation they have proffered. It is the purest sophistry and doesn’t stand up for a second:
Do we believe that the SNP record the reasons for every member leaving? Do we think that 300 figure has any relation to the number of people who left because of GRR or Indyref2 Do we think this was anything other than a pathetic attempt at deceit? Do our heads, in short, zip up at the back?
Ramifications are ramifying at speed. There are now calls for the chair of the party, Peter Murrell - who happens to be Nicola Sturgeon’s husband - to stand down with immediate effect. There is talk of a no-confidence motion happening today. (This is they guy who made the sudden massive loan when it looked like the figures weren’t adding up, let’s not forget.)
MEanwhile, Ash Regan is saying she’ll go to court to interdict the whole election until we can get to the bottom of the whole mess. Her other grievance is that one of the senior members of Yousaf’s campaign team is one Liz Lloyd, better known as Sturgeon’s chief of staff! There’s being a continuity candidate and then there’s this. It did look like this might be in breach of rules about inducing people to work on your campaign in return for promised future roles but happily, mere hours after Regan raised her concerns, Lloyd announced she’d be resigning from any government role. So that’s all above board.
Yousaf - who is not lacking in chutzpah, be fair to the man - has put out a statement saying that his campaign was always about cleaning up HQ, he’s always known there were issues to address and by golly he’s the man to sort it out. Outstanding work from the establishment candidate there and if none of us remember him saying word one about cleaning up HQ, that’s probably our fault.
The SNP has been getting away with a lot of bullshit for a long time and this has inevitably led to a little complacency about how much more bullshit it can get away with. Maybe - maybe - we are going to have some kind of reckoning. But it’s always easier not to ask awkward questions, so I won’t hold my breath.
And he’s gone!
If I follow you correctly it’s like this:
- The press officer asked party HQ "How many party members have quit?" and HQ answered "Very few in the last week over our latest outrage." Which the press officer duly trumpeted as "Very few" with "since forever for any reason" unsaid but strongly implied.
I am impressed as always that this sort of thing provokes outrage in the UK. On our side of the Atlantic it provokes no more than a shrug. Lying by deliberate half-truth is the American Way it seems. Followed by denying that it was even intended to mislead, much less constitutes an actual lie.
From someone south of the border, the impression I get it is that the claims of mismanagement and subterfuge directed at the SNP heads by Forbes and Regan seem to hold some water. Yousaf being the continuity candidate and far less strong on the need to address it.
Do you get the feeling that view is gaining traction with the SNP electorate? Is it swaying the vote do you think?
By all means, Stanislaus, please keep blogging, er, posting!
We are still struggling together! 
Not quite. The press officer wasn’t even told the small print bit. Just the figure of 300 as opposed to 30,000. Which is why he felt comfortable using his considerable clout to utterly rubbish the question. He’s not resigning because he got caught pulling a fast one - he’s resigning because he was made the fall guy for the nameless party officer who had delusions of cleverness.
I think it’s fair to say there is increasing skepticism about the probity of SNP HQ, but I don’t know how far it runs within the SNP. E.g. here’s a Scotsman (one of Scotland’s two main papers, for US-ian context) editorial saying the contest should be scrapped, but that is an outsider’s view:
I think the fact that many votes will have been cast before the news broke of internal SNP shenanigans certainly lends weight to scrapping the contest. Where is the harm in running it when voters are in possession of the full facts?
And of course that is something completely within the power of the SNP to do.
More generally, it’s really interesting to reflect on the way that the SNP has made itself essentially criticism proof over the past 8 years.
There are various strands to this but they all relate to the way the SNP has successfully blurred the lines between “the Scottish National Party”, “the Scottish Government”, “Scotland” and “the people of Scotland”. Criticise e.g. SNP ministers’ continued use of a figure for Scotland’s potential share of Europe’s online energy after they had been told it was false and you will be told that you are talking down Scotland.
This goes both wide and deep, and is what you get when you’re government is also a campaigning org for a movement. In the rhetoric of independence, to suggest that there might be practical difficulties was talking down Scotland, to suggest that the leaders of the movement were making tactical errors was talking down Scotland, to scrutinise the figures was talking down Scotland (“your’e saying we’re too wee, too poor, too stupid”). In government, the rhetoric carried over. To suggest the Government wasn’t performing well was to suggest that Scotland couldn’t perform well. To suggest the SNP was less than transparent or not beyond mild shenanigans was to suggest that the the movement was flawed.
It wasn’t just coming from teh SNP or the Scottish Government. There is a whole socio-political history to be written about the twitter hashtag #snpbad which became teh default response of online activists/supporters to any story suggesting that e.g. failure to launch ferries was a poor reflection on the government. The underlying idea was simply that the media had an anti-SNP (and thus anti-Scottish by transference) agenda and was only running a story about e.g. infections killing children in hospitals as a way of stopping independence. It was an incredible rhetorical acheivement becusae it relieved the SNP/Government/Scotland’s defenders of any obligation to actually address the substance of the criticism. The fact that criticism was being made was itself proof of the ill-intention and insincerity of the critic.
I mentioned above the apparent inability of the media to really interrogate the SNP and discover the internal disagreements. Thinking about that some more, it’s really a commentary on the way journalism works. You need sources. Looking at Westminster coverage, its notable that stories suddenly break when its in the interests on one faction that they do so. If the attack is coming from the opposition the story devolves into a he-said, she-said: “The opposition today criticised the governments transport policy, saying it was late and unfit for purpose. A government spokesman said the policy was on track to deliver.” Yadda yadda. But when an internal source allows it to be known that there are divisions within the party over transport, that becomes a big story because its the internal sources that can give the detail of cabinet rows and the juicy quotes. And that also gives you the next day’s story when the other faction releases its attack.
The SNP doesn’t fight in public, until now. So the media can’t get stories through access journalism , struggles to stand up stores without internal government corroboration and can’t make a story run over days and days without the internal conflict angle.
We haven’t mentioned tacitly condoned outriders like the vile Wings Over Scotland blog/twitter feed which co-ordinated abusive attacks on journalists, or the total lack of comedy/satire aimed at the SNPs failings. But all these things have combined to give the SNP as party and government the idea that they are immured against criticism or oversight and can get away with a lot. And this is one of those ideas that is reliably true until the day that it isn’t.
That point has definitely been raised, and its got a lot of merit. People may well be motivated to vote for the candidate who they think will do best at cleaning house and - begging Yousaf’s pardon - that was not a feature of anyone’s campaign until last week.
I mentally fast-forward to a point where Yousaf has been selected under the current voting run.
Do Regan and Forbes quietly fall into line? Hard to see a cosy relationship and cohesive SNP without the leadership governance boil being lanced in some way.
That will probably depend on the closeness of the result.
Certainly it looks like some sort of comprehensive public audit of the results will be needed to close the book on this. However, that’s probably fine. As said above, the SNP has been using this system for a while and it is run independently, so the actual tallying of votes will be correct.
The accusations are more around more subtle ways of putting the thumb on the scale. E.g. did one candiate (Yousaf) get early or more detailed sight of membership data? The system has the capability to give a running total of votes - apparently the SNP have not enabled access to this but those denials are not yet aboslutely categorical ( e…g. “to the best of my knowledge, no” rather than “No.”) Probably because people have a new-found need to be cautious about everything they say to the press rather than more nefarious reasons, but this is not a good time to be leaving room for error. Again, if one candidate knew even turnout data - far less up-to-date vote tallies - ahead of the others, or exclusively, that would be a real advantage in directing resources. It’s this stuff that will be the focus on any questions.
Of the two other candidates, Regan is perfectly capable of going full “stop the steal” when she inevitably loses. Forbes is a more sophisticated operator and her position will be more calculated. So if it’s close for Yousaf expect to see her - despite everything she’s said about him - in a senior Cabinet role. In the meantime, her route to victory involves winning Regan supporters second preferences, so expect to see her keep banging the drum about the importance of transparency.
However, redoing the election will a) be massively embarrassing and b) really piss off members and c) be massively embarrassing so it’s an extreme solution that important people in nice suits will want to avoid at all costs.
Also - although I’m being very skeptical about Regan’s chances, there is a possible future where discontent with the party bosses ramps up enough that she picks up a load of votes as the outsider. Very dependent on how many people have already voted though.