The secret to how the SNP turned Scotland into a one-party state

The Herald Scotland

09-05-2025

Is Doctor Faustus a secret member of the SNP's inner circle? You'd be forgiven for imagining that the party forged a pact with the Devil, that Mephistopheles promised them decades in power in return for the souls of every First Minister.
No matter what the SNP does – or increasingly doesn't do – there's barely a dent in support. It's remarkable. No party is so teflon in Britain.
To many – especially hardline unionists – it's baffling. How, they wonder, can a party still be in power after it was rocked by scandals, caught up in police investigations, failed to honour promises on everything from health and education to policing and the environment, got itself embroiled in culture war firestorms, and ditched multiple policies whenever it suited?
Well, if you paid attention to events this week you'd have divined the answer to this seeming mystery. For this week, the SNP did precisely nothing and yet it still continues secure in the knowledge that Holyrood is an easy win come 2026.
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Even when the SNP sits on its hands, even when it rows backwards, even when it simply repeats the same lines it's been repeating for years, it remains safe.
Why? The hard truth for unionists is that Labour and the Tories are so dysfunctional that the SNP can do zilch, nada, absolutely zero, and still look better than the big beasts of Westminster.
The answer to the mystery is no more complicated than that. It's long been argued that the only path to independence is for the SNP to govern well and wait until support for Yes rises into the mid-50s or 60s.
There's truth there, sure, but it's also true that as long as Labour and the Tories fail so badly as political vehicles for the hopes of the people then all is well in SNP-world.
The SNP will remain in power forever, as long as Labour and the Tories behave as they do. The only way to break the spell is for the government and opposition in Westminster to grow up.
So Scotland has become a one-party state effectively – or at least a state where only one party gets to govern – but that's not due to any great endeavour by the SNP, it's due to chaos and cruelty from London.
The SNP sits in permanent opposition to the London government. As long as the government in London isn't working, the SNP reigns supreme in Scotland.
Perhaps there will be some bounce for Labour in the wake of the US-UK trade deal, but don't hold your breath. Scottish voters aren't stupid. The deal was far from 'big and beautiful' in terms of serving British interests.
The Financial Times said on its front page: 'The scope of the deal is limited, many details have yet to be ironed out, and the end result still leaves Britain facing a tougher trading relationship with the US than before Trump began his global trade war.'
Only Labour's most cultish supporters will cheers this to the rafters.
So the SNP can do what it does best: sit back, relax, and let London stagger around aimlessly.
That's certainly the impression John Swinney has given lately. His Programme for Government was more a programme for nothing.
Swinney announced a 'new plan' for child poverty, only it's not a new plan. His plan has been enshrined in law since the Child Poverty Act 2017. So unless the word 'new' now means 'eight years old', the announcement is meaningless.
John Dickie, director of Scotland's Child Poverty Action Group, made just that criticism when he said the plan wasn't 'new' but already 'a statutory requirement'.
The SNP has also gone into the negative. The government isn't just doing nothing, it has also stopped with the plans it promised to enact.
Legalisation to outlaw misogyny and conversion therapy have been dropped ahead of the election as the party clearly wishes to never find itself in another culture war again.
On its flagship project, independence, matters are just as tired. In comments that the SNP sought to portray as reigniting the independence debate, Swinney said that a 'democratic majority' of pro-Yes MSPs after the next Scottish election was the path to another referendum.
Spoiler alert: there's already a pro-independence majority in Holyrood – and that has done precisely naff all in getting anywhere down the road towards indyref2.
So it's been nothing, followed by nothing, with a side order of nothing and then some more nothing as dessert. Yet still the SNP is impregnable.
The Tories and Labour are being cannibalised by Reform north and south of the border. Yet polling for the SNP has barely changed since the autumn of 2023 for both the constituency and regional vote at Holyrood.
Today, it remains around 33% and 29% respectively. Meanwhile, the inroads Reform has made into Labour and Tory figures are brutally apparent.
Labour has slumped from the mid-30s to the late-teens. The Tories are on 11% for the constituency vote and 12% for the regional. Reform's figures are 19% and 20% – all its gains are made at the expense of Labour and the Tories.
This may be a hell of a weird way to run a country – that a party of government need do nothing, even less than nothing to succeed – but you can't blame the SNP.
There is no Faustian pact with Mephistopheles, there's just free wins to be earned thanks to Westminster failure.
Neil Mackay is The Herald's Writer-at-Large. He's a multi-award winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics.