The younger SNP activists only used to winning may need to brace

The National

15-06-2025

The ructions have been manifold and varied. We've had three successive First Ministers, the pall of the Salmond affair, the gloom and uncertainty of Operation Branchform, policy controversy and sunken flagships, and a succession of high-cost legal battles.
In a party known for its message discipline and internal solidarity, we've seen the spilling out of internal disputes into the public domain and perceptions of party factionalism feeding the same. This has been expressed both in Holyrood rebellions and an uptick in anonymous briefings to the press from the exiled, the excluded and the terminally or temporarily disgruntled.
From the heights of 2015, last year the SNP were re-engulfed in a fresh struggle to achieve salience in the Westminster campaign with the rise of a Labour party finally in serious contention for government.
READ MORE: Scotland's 2050 vision rests on achieving independence, urges John Swinney
This went as well as might be expected, culminating in the loss of 39 of its Westminster seats. After 17 years being Scotland's dominant party, the writing finally seemed to be on the wall for the SNP government.
Only the remarkable unpopularity of the Starmer government has disrupted this dynamic. Within months of winning 35.3% of the popular vote, pollsters have recorded a 15% fall in Labour's support. Recent local government by-elections fed a fragile sense of SNP momentum, with Labour losses in areas of traditional strength.
International elections furnished some encouraging parallels, with incumbents in Canada and Australia winning unwinnable elections after once-popular opposition parties fumbled elections the press pack had written off as more or less unloseable months before. John Swinney has also sought to address some of the structural issues driving some of his party's situation, pivoting on policy towards the economy and cost of living, 'steadying the ship' in the ubiquitous cliché.
A win in Hamilton would have galvanised this sense of momentum. A defeat, inevitably, does the opposite. Politically, the constituency held out the tantalising prospect not only of an SNP win – something the party has been searching for in vain for a while – but the equally satisfying prospect of Anas Sarwar finding himself beleaguered with questions about Scottish Labour's prospects of displacing the SNP in next year's Holyrood poll.
Elections have consequences – not least in what we talk about. This weekend, John Swinney's leadership is taking up the column inches rather than Sarwar's. The sense of relief in Scottish Labour circles is palpable.
For the SNP, the defeat raises a series of potentially useful questions – both political and organisational. In the by-election, the scuttlebutt from activists and organisers was that they felt like they had grounds for optimism. Starmer's decision not to visit the constituency during his flying visit to Scotland during the campaign looked like a tell, designed to insulate the UK party leader from proximity to what could be an embarrassing defeat.
We all know every political activist in every campaign always claims, at least publicly, they're receiving a great response on the doorsteps. Bullshitting your followers on social media is one thing. Bullshitting yourself is quite another.
READ MORE: 'We were shut down': SNP activists reveal HQ silenced Reform strategy warnings
I've been thinking about the late 2000s and the various accelerations and reversals both the SNP and Scottish Labour experienced during this time.
In 2007, Alex Salmond nudged the SNP ahead of Scottish Labour by one Holyrood seat, establishing a minority government in Edinburgh for the first time by winning 47 seats to Labour's 46. Initially, the new regime wasn't given a snowball's chance in hell of lasting long. Having been ruled by Lib-Lab coalitions since 1999, general political wisdom was rooted to the majority-minded Westminster system, noting the inherent vulnerabilities of a minority government – by definition, always subject to being defeated or ousted by a determined and untied opposition.
The 2008 by-election in Glasgow East – which saw the SNP pick up a 26% increase in support and beat the Labour party – suggested that the Holyrood outcome the previous year hadn't been an electoral fluke. It is difficult to understate the psychological impact. In 2007, Nicola Sturgeon was the solitary successful SNP candidate in Glasgow, winning Glasgow Govan from Gordon Jackson after umpteen runs at the constituency.
When John Mason beat Margaret Curran in 2008, it demonstrated the old Labour hegemony in the beating heart of its historic heartlands in Scotland was not unassailable.
But the UK general election result the following year seemed to scotch the notion the party was facing any more generalised revolt from its traditional political base in west central Scotland. And like all human organisations in denial, Labour were only to happy to seize on any reassuring evidence that everything was fine and that they weren't in the early stages of experiencing an involuntary shift in political gravity, whether they liked it or not.
Under pressure in the rest of the UK from David Cameron's 'modernised' Tories, Scottish Labour claimed 42% of the general election vote and 41 of the 59 Scottish seats in Westminster, outpolling the SNP by almost 545,000 votes. Margaret Curran even won back Glasgow East for her party, taking 61.6% of the popular vote to Mason's 24.7%. Alexander Pope's observation – that 'even victors are by victories undone' – applies most powerfully to the aftermath of the 2014 referendum, but it also coloured Labour's attitudes as early as 2010.
If you were looking for reassurance that ordinary service would shortly be resumed and that the old order of Scottish politics would be returning any day now – the results of the 2010 general election suggested that Labour could be intensely comfortable about its chances of ousting the Nats at the next Holyrood election.
The case for complacency pointed at these strong electoral performances, and concluded the party didn't have to engage in any significant introspection about its future in order to convince a sufficient proportion of the population to 'come home to Labour' in the favoured formulation of the grand seigneurs of the People's Party. These victories were an analgesic, numbing nagging anxieties that any more fundamental might be afoot. It's a lesson that sometimes in politics, taking the pain is better for you.
The Holyrood result in 2011 – delivering the single party majority for the SNP – rebuked these complacent assumptions, marking the point at which the more thoughtful people in Scottish Labour began to notice the sheer slope of the electoral declivity they were hurtling down, surfing over the independence referendum campaign before plunging into the electoral an abyss that lay beyond it in its aftermath. It was too late, of course.
But you can understand why the party felt like the electorate were feeding them mixed messages. In political science writing of the time, scholars analysed the apparent volatility and flair for party disloyalty these diverse outcomes in Westminster and Holyrood votes pointed to. Scots were described as being 'most sophisticated electorate in the world' – happy to be represented by one party in Westminster and to back their principal opponents in Holyrood. This kind of political promiscuity is calculated to confuse politicians or party activists who imagine they have your vote or they don't.
An SNP win in Hamilton would have been a morale boost – but like those Scottish Labour wins of the late 2000s, I wonder if it might also have been a spur to complacency at just the most perilous moment for the party to be complacent.
Defeat underscores the existential insecurity party representatives must feel months out from the next Holyrood poll.
How the party reacts is, to some extent, in its hands. Some thrive on confidence, finding the puff goes out of them when they experience setbacks and disappointments. Others come alive when they're on the back foot, fighting for survival rather than cruising towards easy victories.
Old Tom Paine thought 'what we obtain too cheaply we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.' Old SNP hands are more used to losing than winning, but there's a whole generation of younger party officials and activists who've only known the party in its pomp, in government.
Like the Labour functionaires, lost in the new politics which emerged after 2007, they should brace themselves.