Uh oh. It’s been a while since we got any update from Operation Branchform, the police fraud investigation into what happened to a pot of donations to the SNP supposedly ring-fenced for the next independence campaign. Presumably, the missing £600,000 hasn’t turned up yet.
Yet it now turns out that the Nationalists may be in even more financial hot water. The Daily Express reports that the party faces fresh scrutiny over two donations from Peter Murrell, Nicola Sturgeon’s husband and then chief executive of the SNP, which were made in 2018 but not declared until last year:
“On March 22, 2018 Mr Murrell loaned the SNP £7,500 which was then paid back just weeks later on April 4. And then, later that same month on the 25th he handed them the same amount, before this was then refunded just two days later. This was not declared to the Electoral Commission until October 30, 2023.”
Perhaps this was simply an oversight. However, previous donations by Murrell have come under scrutiny as part of the fraud probe, both because they were made anonymously and because Sturgeon denied any knowledge of them, despite such large sums presumably being something husband and wife would normally discuss. We shall see.
In the meantime, the political vice continues to close around Humza Yousaf as the general election looms, as the Nationalists continue to grapple with what losing ground will mean for the independence cause.
This week, one SNP MP admitted that it’s “over” if the party loses. Such an undeniable loss of momentum would, as I outlined last week, force a reckoning for the Nationalist leadership with their independence strategy, or lack thereof. For years, Sturgeon and now Yousaf have tried to hold their increasingly fractious coalition together with the fraying pretence that the next big push is just around the corner. Absent that discipline, the infighting could be ugly.
Staving off that outcome also requires making some tough decisions about the SNP’s electoral strategy. Most of their post-2015 gains were at the expense of Labour, and the First Minister has (sensibly) decided to focus on that battlefield rather than shore up the much smaller number of battlegrounds where the Nationalists face a plausible Tory challenge.
This is good news for the Scottish Conservatives, who are projected to win up to half-a-dozen new seats even during a very bad election for the party nationally. Yousaf’s refusal to pass on tax cuts is something they can exploit.
But it puts the SNP in a tricky spot, and not just because of the disquiet this strategy understandably causes to Nationalists such as Kate Forbes who represent the party’s old Tartan Tory tendency and rural seats.
For years, the Nationalists have tried to claim that Scottish voters are side-lined at Westminster. This has of course only really been true to any extent since 2015, when the SNP scooped nearly all Scotland’s seats and marched off to sit with the Others; prior to that, Scottish MPs served in both Labour and Conservative governments.
Then, whilst it looked as if 2019 had heralded the start of a long Tory ascendancy, the Nationalists could claim that there was no point voting Labour because the Opposition had no chance of taking power in London. Scottish voters could, therefore, safely trust the SNP with their vote in order to hold Westminster to account.
(Naturally, the regular insistence before an election that people could vote SNP without endorsing independence was always forgotten immediately afterwards.)
Yet now Labour is contending for power, and Anas Sarwar, its leader in Scotland, is pitching hard for people who voted Nationalist in the past to help kick the Conservatives out. Labour’s collapse in Scotland was a major barrier to it forming another government, and were it to win 20 seats north of the border, that’s 20 large Tory majorities Sir Keir Starmer can afford to miss.
Thus, all of a sudden, the SNP have had to make a 180-degree pivot. Voting Labour is still pointless, not because the Conservatives’ grip on power is secure but because Starmer is certain to win anyway! Scottish voters should therefore… trust the SNP with their vote in order to hold Westminster to account.
Already this is a much less persuasive pitch, given the very different relationship the Scottish electorate generally has with Labour versus the Conservatives.
It also means abandoning any claim that there might be a hung parliament in which the SNP could use their leverage to secure a second referendum; that the SNP have nonetheless chosen to try and present a Labour victory as inevitable says much about their reading of the electorate’s priorities.
Without that carrot, illusory as it might be, the Nationalists’ pitch cannot but rest much more heavily on the party’s own merits and implausible promises. It is also unlikely to garner much enthusiasm or cash from the separatist faithful – bad news when donors are reportedly drying up.