BIGGER THEY ARE, HARDER THEY FALL — A decade ago, Scotland narrowly voted to reject independence from the United Kingdom. After a major electoral reversal for Scotland’s nationalists in July’s U.K. general election, their goal has never looked further away. The Scottish National Party was beaten, or to use a piece of Scottish slang, skelped — arguably even more than the Conservatives which were ousted from government. After winning 48 out of 59 seats last time around , the SNP picked up just 9 out of the 57 House of Commons seats allocated to Scotland. That result piled on to the misery for the SNP, which has dominated Scottish politics since the independence referendum in September 2014 but in recent years has been hit by scandal … incompetence … poor leadership … declining funds … a rejuvenated opposition … shifting political circumstances outside their control … and more. Name the crisis, and the SNP have probably endured it in the last few years. “Parties die. If we don’t change, we will die,” was how one SNP official candidly put it in an anonymous post-mortem with POLITICO U.K. The SNP had already started to slide in the opinion polls by the time its popular leader, Nicola Sturgeon, suddenly quit in February 2023. Still, it marked a dark turning point for Scotland’s nationalists. In the second week of SNP leader Humza Yousaf’s leadership — he replaced Sturgeon after a predictably messy and bad-tempered leadership contest — a blue forensic police tent was erected in the garden of Sturgeon’s modest home. Scottish police had erected the tent as they arrested her husband Peter Murrell, the SNP’s CEO for two decades until 2023, in connection with an investigation into the SNP’s finances. The longtime SNP leader’s home and garden was searched in full view of the watching TV cameras. The police then arrested Sturgeon herself, and one other party figure. A year on, Murrell has been charged with embezzlement, while Sturgeon herself is still under investigation. The stench of scandal may well have been enough to fell the SNP. But it forms only part of the story — and played no part as Yousaf, in a moment of high farce , blew up his own leadership earlier this year. He was replaced in May by an old ally of Sturgeon, John Swinney, who inherited a party which is widely seen to have presided over declining outcomes at the head of Scotland’s government, which holds certain powers devolved from the London U.K. government. As it has in every election since the referendum, the SNP fought July’s elections to the Westminster U.K. parliament on a platform of independence for Scotland, but found that even Scots sympathetic to the idea tended to have other priorities. Amid deep organizational struggles and a lack of funding, it struggled to combat the message from a rejuvenated Scottish Labour Party that touted its closeness to the U.K. Labour Party that won a landslide nationally. “‘The SNP want to send a message to Westminster, we want to send a government’ is one of the best [Scottish Labour] attack lines I’ve ever heard,” a second SNP official speaking anonymously admitted . As the major party tied to independence, the SNP’s tanking is also effectively a rejection of the cause. Senior figures in the SNP now accept that their goal of independence is a “hard sell” to the Scottish electorate. If it wants the cause — which is still supported by close to 50 percent of Scots — to survive in the short term, the next two years are critical. Scottish Labour eyes 2026’s Scottish parliament elections as the moment it can deal a terminal blow to the SNP by wrestling them from the head of the Scottish government. If Labour succeeds and the SNP is totally vanquished, the independence cause will be pushed back to the fringes of debate — as it was for much of the SNP’s history before 2014’s referendum. Scotland’s nationalists have work to do. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at amcdonald@politico.co.uk or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @9andrewmcdonald .
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