My diagnosis of the SNP on the eve of conference

In a very short period of time we will have gone past the last point at which the SNP can make changes sufficient to register with voters during the 2026 Holyrood election. If that doesn’t happen, the following probably will.

There will be a first minister Sarwar in about two years’ time. The only path I can see that would avoid this outcome is very narrow indeed and we’re about to go past the last turn-off. This isn’t the time for bedtime stories; isn’t “just going to be OK”. Let me explain why.

The pattern of voting in last month’s General Election reflects most of the data which has accumulated about people’s attitudes to political parties generally. Very simply, too many people feel let down and so the strength of attachment between people and parties has weakened. That caused votes to “scatter” in unusual ways.

All the evidence suggests the same thing is likely to happen at the Holyrood election but without the distorting effect of a first-past-the-post system, the outcomes are different. Basically it turns the list part of the vote into something of a bloodbath.

READ MORE: Rachel Reeves' 'hypocrisy' highlighted as old clip resurfaces

Without one dominant party hoovering up lots and lots of constituency seats and with some disillusioned voters flirting with new parties, almost every political party will be reliant on getting list seats, including the SNP. And right now there are six parties polling above what they would usually need to take a seat on every list, yet there are only seven available list seats on each.

There are loads and loads of scenarios for how this plays out and I won’t go over them here but almost all of them result in a particularly high threshold for gaining seats from list votes and a very high threshold for gaining more than one.

Combine that with the lack of a SNP-dominated distorting effect of the first-past-the-post element of the election and you have a problem. That problem is that pro-indy parties will almost certainly need to get more than 50% of the vote on the list to get more than 50% of the seats in the Scottish Parliament, and that never happened even at the peak of SNP popularity.

Pro-independence voters in poorer and working-class communities just don’t vote enough in national elections and the SNP have not built deep enough roots in these communities. Ironically it was first-past-the-post seats that created pro-indy majorities in Parliament without electoral majorities and that is very unlikely to be repeated in 2026.

How things would play out in a parliament without a pro-indy majority also offers a number of possible permutations and I won’t go through all of these here either but my assumption is that, this time, all the Unionist parties will repeatedly vote against an SNP nomination for first minister.

If Labour and the LibDems (who I presume would work together) have more seats than the SNP and the Greens, it’s over. If the Greens/SNP have more seats than Labour and the LibDems, Reform and the Tories would know that abstaining on a vote for a Sarwar first ministership would hand power back to the SNP. That seems very unlikely at this point, so the SNP go into opposition.

From there, I’m afraid things don’t get much better. After a bad loss, parties often reach for stories which make them feel better – it was the media, or a failure to explain all the party’s wonderful achievements, or that it would have been OK if it wasn’t for internal critics harming party unity.

Then the people who ran the party and the people who ran the campaign become the people who review their own performance in some internal process which generally produces an outcome that suggests “the foundations are solid”.

Anas Sarwar could be FM come 2026

That is the phrase that marks out a period of denial, of refusal to look seriously at what you got wrong, at resistance to reforming or rebuilding yourself. So what usually happens under this pattern is that the party persuades itself that it just needs to swap out a leader and tell the public it’s all fixed. It usually fails.

In that first cycle of failure, party establishments don’t take seriously their own culpability in how they got to where they got and they often don’t take seriously the fact that electors have a legitimate reasons to be disillusioned.

That’s why most political parties tend to lose power for at least two cycles. In the first, they blame everyone but themselves for why they are in the wilderness. In the second they may be far enough away from the first failure to start to address real problems. Most parties waste their first term in opposition – think Michael Howard’s Tories, or Wendy Alexander’s Scottish Labour, or Ed Miliband’s Labour, or Tim Farron’s LibDems (I had to look that up), or Jim Murphy’s Scottish Labour.

Many independence supporters are pessimistic about the 2026 election but many of them assume that a regrouping and a return to power in 2031 is inevitable. It isn’t. Already party members are speculating that the main problem they face is not having a sufficiently inspirational leader, so if the correct swap can be made things will right themselves. Think of that as the Alexander/Murphy/Kezia Dugdale cycle.

All of this is made much worse by another factor that always catches parties that lose power by surprise – the phone stops ringing. You assume all your contacts, all your lines of communications, all your networks remain intact. They don’t.

Many of them formed around you only because you had power. Without power and influence, your networks dissolve overnight. Without your networks, it is much harder to show the public you’ve rebuilt and are in a new, better shape.

READ MORE: Unearthed Rachel Reeves clips undermines Winter Fuel Payment claim

What I’m worried about is that a lot of people I’ve spoken to in the SNP assume that the solution to all of this is to find another leader who has the gift of the gab. Over the devolution years, the party has become steeped in the idea of inspirational leadership and the need for super-eloquent communication.

This is a mistake. One of the fundamental reasons the SNP are in trouble is exactly because the party has been led by very able communicators – but the public became increasingly angry that delivery failed to match the speeches.

The last thing the SNP need in the immediate future is more talking without delivery. They need action. The party should be looking for a next leader who has the skillset to rebuild the party internally (or who knows the people to bring in to do that) and to try to get its policy development and (while in power) its governmental performance together.

If that leader appeared to you to be the opposite of your idea of central casting’s ideal SNP leader, he or she would still be the leader the party needs right now.

Because there will be time to bring in another leader with the gift of the gab towards 2031 if need be, but that leader must have firm foundations on which to stand. Someone needs to build those foundations as soon as possible. And if all of the above is right, the SNP group in the Scottish Parliament will be a slimmed down group. It is a hard reality to face but can you identify a credible 2031 Cabinet from among the current cohort, with a back-up option or two for each position? That is what a party ready to return to government looks like.

If the SNP do not have those people in the Parliament by June 2026 it will not have them there for 2031. I don’t believe the current cohort has anything like the depth of talent or ability from which to rebuild. It is almost inevitable now that real pain awaits the SNP.

It is already feeling that pain through a late-term government which seems unable to buy a good headline. It will feel it a lot more reading “First Minister Sarwar” in all the newspapers for the subsequent five years. I am arguing strongly that the best bet for the party is to accelerate that pain, absorb it as fast as possible, take the resultant action and get past it quickly.

I believe that means changing leader now to at least try to give the impression that a new generation of the SNP is ready to take over. I absolutely believe that means that the party should have open selections for every seat, with the clear instruction that if the candidate in place is not a strong contender for a frontline cabinet job at least within five years, they shouldn’t be selected.

The party needs now to pick a leader not to schmooze the public but to listen to it carefully and make the appropriate changes, a leader who understands what an effective election-fighting machine looks like. Next year, in 2025, the SNP need to pick candidates to form ideally two cabinets it can be really proud of, an heir and a spare.

That might give them enough fresh impetus to get over the line in 2026. If they don’t get over that line, it prepares them seriously to be the contender the independence movement needs by 2031.

I got into politics because I believe hope isn’t foolish. I hate that I’ve turned into a Cassandra figure but I do not believe that ignoring reality or believing false promises ever helps. People can respond to all of the above with as much vitriol to me as usual if they want but it won’t make any difference. This is all going to happen anyway.

I just hope you can see that there is an alternative to wandering into failure and stagnation – if the SNP buck the usual trend; ban denialism and self-pity; face up to their failures and weaknesses with an almost masochistic zeal; absorb the inevitable pain quickly; and pull out the stops to rebuild the party into a fighting shape as quickly as they possibly can.

There is a lot of resignation around, a lot of people who believe its too late to fix things for the Holyrood election. It isn’t. The Scottish Labour Party isn’t strong and it is disillusionment with the SNP rather than a drift of voters to Labour which is causing the problem. If the public can be persuaded that the reasons for their disillusionment are being addressed, there is a chance.

In the worst-case scenario, with a stronger parliamentary team, the SNP can give Labour hell for five years and dominate the 2031 election. But the SNP need a new generation and they need more heavyweights in parliament. And all of that requires serious change.

If the party can bite the bullet and make those changes fast, if it can be courageous and own up to its own failures, if it can persuade the public it has listened, there is more reason for optimism than it might appear.

Failure is never inevitable – but you need the courage to do something about it.