The speedy demise of anti-free speech Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Humza Yousaf; police charges against Peter Murrell, former SNP chief executive and husband of former head of the Scottish government, Nicola Sturgeon; even the worrying decline of Scotland’s education and health systems.
Everything is going wrong for the hard-left SNP, which polling now suggests will pay for its failures at the next election.
But more significant than this is that the wider cause of Scottish independence from the UK appears to have taken a beating, too.
Pro-UK Scottish broadcaster Andrew Neil wrote in Tuesday’s Mail that the fall of the nationalists “symbolises the demise of the SNP’s defining goal of Scottish independence.”
That is now dead for a generation, if not longer. The Union is safe for the foreseeable future.
One ‘well-connected SNP observer’ also told Politico that Yousaf’s decision to terminate the governing coalition deal between his party and the Scottish Greens—which quickly led to his own downfall—was “probably one of the biggest acts of self harm the independence movement has ever done itself.”
Former SNP leader Alex Salmond—who also served as Scotland’s first minister, before taking on his new role as leader of the nationalist Alba Party—disagrees that this month’s events signal a temporary halt to the pro-independence movement. He told TalkTV on Monday:
I heard the deputy chairman of the Tory party saying “all this disarray in the SNP was going to damage independence.” If political disarray damaged causes, then the cause of unionism would have been sunk by disarray in the Tory party years and years ago.
Salmond did, however, share his deep concern that “the cause of independence hasn’t been articulated or put forward with any force or vision for some time” by the SNP, which has instead been “immersed in this … woke agenda, or culture wars, or identity politics—whatever you want to call it.”
Indeed, SNP officials can hardly blame anyone bar themselves for all the recent negative press on draconian ‘hate crime’ restrictions, punishing climate mandates and ‘woke’ legislation.
Pro-union Scottish writer Effie Deans told The European Conservative that Yousaf’s resignation, and the events leading up to it, “confirms the lack of seriousness in Scottish politics.” She added that the whole affair “confirms that the era when things tended to go right for the SNP is over. It will no longer dominate as before. It has become unlucky.”
Given that the SNP has long been the primary driving force behind the campaign for Scottish independence, unionists may now have to wait some time before their cause is taken seriously again.
