Scotland’s SNP just had a horrible year — 2024 could get even worse

LONDON — Call it an “Anas horribilis.” After a terrible 2023 for Scotland’s nationalists, 2024 may bring even more pain, thanks to its rival Scottish Labour Party helmed by Leader Anas Sarwar.

The long-reigning Scottish National Party faced the shock resignation of its popular leader, Nicola Sturgeon, an escalating police probe into its finances and a steady decline in support last year, amounting in the words of one former adviser to something of an “annus horribilis” — a phrase coined by the late Queen Elizabeth to describe a particularly difficult spell for the royal family.

Worryingly for the SNP, they are all factors that continue to hang over the party as it heads into a tricky general election contest later in 2024.

“Frankly, 2023 was the year from hell. But we’re still ahead in the polls,” said an SNP MP, speaking off the record to discuss internal politics. They could have added the word “just.”

The pro-independence SNP, led by Humza Yousaf since Sturgeon’s departure in March, has dominated Scotland’s raft of seats in the House of Commons since winning all but three of the 59 seats up for grabs in 2015.

But opinion polls for the next election, which will be held on the same day across Scotland and the other nations which form the U.K. and is widely expected this fall, persistently show a resurgent Scottish Labour Party closing the gap on the SNP’s lead. In some polls, Scottish Labour, sister to the main U.K. opposition Labour party, is even in the lead, meaning SNP losses are effectively priced in.

Though the police probe into the SNP’s finances — which began after concerns were raised about the use of donations — derailed Yousaf’s party, it was already facing a slip in the polls as voters questioned the SNP’s record in government following 16 years in power.

The ill-tempered leadership contest which followed the resignation of the-then still popular Sturgeon hurt its position further, while pro-independence Scots have grown disillusioned following little progress towards its goal of separation.

Yousaf will fire the starting gun on the party’s election campaign Friday, with a short speech to activists in Glasgow alongside the party’s Westminster boss Stephen Flynn.

The event is Yousaf’s second major set-piece in a week as he tries to shift the narrative on his struggling party. In a speech that struggled to cut through on Monday, he talked up the potential of an independent Scotland — something that seems a distant prospect with polling deadlocked and the two main Westminster parties, Labour and the Conservatives, refusing to countenance another referendum.

“The way that 2023 panned out was, you know, annus horribilis for the SNP — and inevitably they’ve got a tough year ahead,” the party’s former head of communications Fergus Mutch told POLITICO.

“The SNP will be hoping and praying that it’s no worse than the year that is just gone, but it still doesn’t look like they’re on the front foot,” he added.

Existential — for cause and man

The once dominant Scottish Labour’s return to supremacy has been predicted before — but a string of failed leaders in the 2010s failed to put a dent in the SNP. A key by-election in October raised Labour hopes that current leader Anas Sarwar may be the real deal.

Scottish Labour achieved a thumping win in that Rutherglen and Hamilton by-election, in a major boost for Sarwar’s credentials as the man who dreams of ending SNP hegemony.

Sarwar’s Scottish Labour has recruited well-known figures including former U.K. Cabinet ministers to stand against the SNP across Scotland — and hope that a good result this year will set up Sarwar as a genuine contender to be the next Scottish first minister when Scotland’s devolved parliament holds elections in 2026.

The relative spread of the SNP’s vote across Scotland means that, thanks to Britain’s first past the post voting system, a raft of SNP-held seats across Scotland’s central belt could be lost with only a small shift in the vote. According to a senior Scottish Labour figure, who declined to speak on the record so they could freely discuss electoral politics, since the Rutherglen result the party no longer has any “ceiling” on the number of seats it hopes to win from the SNP — and thinks that winning more than 25 of the 57 up for grabs is realistic.

For the SNP, any result that sees it avoid major losses will be seen as better than expected, even if this means losing a few MPs.

“I think if I was an SNP strategist right now, I would be thinking: where can we stem the losses? Where can we minimize, where can we consolidate areas of support that we already have?” the former SNP adviser Mutch said.

“That task is not made particularly easy by some of the mistakes that have gone before,” he added.

A change in the balance of power would also be a major blow to the cause of Scottish independence, which has slipped off the Westminster political agenda with no second referendum — the SNP lost the first in 2014 — currently in sight.

“The danger is that if there is a big advance by Labour in the election they will pretend the constitutional question is off the table. It will embolden them to essentially say ‘nothing to see here, move on’,” the SNP MP quoted above said.

It is for these reasons that major losses could spell trouble for Yousaf’s leadership. Eyebrows were raised when his rival in last year’s leadership contest, Kate Forbes, ended 2023 as the feature of a major — and largely sympathetic — profile in the New Statesman magazine.

She maintains a large base of support within the SNP, particularly among a growing centrist faction which has been critical of Yousaf since he took the job — and has major concerns over the SNP’s coalition agreement with the left-wing Scottish Greens.

“There are enough murmurings of discontent around the parliamentary party and the membership saying ‘hey, this isn’t working’,” the well-connected former SNP adviser Geoff Aberdein told the Holyrood Sources podcast this week.

The coalition with the Greens has already spelled trouble for the Scottish government this year, after the Green minister Patrick Harvie offered some modest criticism when POLITICO revealed Yousaf had worked with a controversial businessman, Brian Souter, last year.

The great unknown

The looming prospect of movement in the police probe into the SNP’s finances is an extra headache for Yousaf — who spent much of his first few months in the post responding to the arrests first of ex-party CEO Peter Murrell, who is Sturgeon’s husband, and then Sturgeon herself.

Both were released without charge pending further investigation, which remains ongoing. SNP figures universally accept that the scandal — in particular an image of a blue forensic tent erected in Sturgeon’s garden — has damaged the party, though it did not lead to the wholescale drop in support that the SNP’s opposition hoped for.

It remains to be seen if detectives will bring forward any charges against those involved — or when they will decide either way.

In the meantime, Yousaf will look to control what is still within his gift.