SCOTLAND
DECIDES
The SNP splits that could still derail Scottish
independence
Scotland’s first minister is in a safer position, but
deeper rifts run through the pro-independence movement.
BY JAMIE
MAXWELL
March 25,
2021 4:05 am
A
tumultuous week in the long-running feud with her predecessor as Scottish first
minister, Alex Salmond, has left Sturgeon more secure in her job. Yet splits in
the movement for Scottish independence remain, and crucial Scottish elections
could still determine whether the cause founders.
On Monday,
Scotland’s First Minister was cleared by independent investigator James
Hamilton of breaching the country’s ministerial code following her government’s
botched handling of sexual harassment allegations leveled against Salmond in
2018.
Twenty-four
hours later, a separate investigation, conducted by a committee of Scottish
parliamentarians, found that Sturgeon did potentially break the ministerial
code – although its findings were dismissed by the Scottish government as
partisan and incomplete.
Sturgeon
then survived a vote of no confidence brought by Conservative MSPs in the
Holyrood chamber, Scotland’s devolved national parliament in Edinburgh.
Sturgeon
leads the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP), and, while Salmond
looks set to keep making noise — he said he would take the Scottish government
to court again on Wednesday — senior nationalists are elated with the Hamilton
ruling. They acknowledge that, had the verdict been different, Sturgeon would
have been forced to resign.
“We’d gamed
it on the basis of what the various outcomes might be,” one high-ranking party
official said. “This was at the top end of what we expected.”
Yet the
fallout from the Salmond affair may not end here. More than two years of bitter
infighting between the pair – historically Scottish nationalism’s two most
dominant figureheads – have exposed sharp divisions in the independence
movement.
Anger over
Sturgeon’s strategy for securing a second independence referendum, her bunkered
approach to policy-making and her centrist economic platform is visible among a
once tightly unified nationalist base.
These
tensions are heightened by the fact that the country is only weeks away from a
pivotal national election that could determine whether or not Scots get to vote
again on their independence from the U.K.
The margins
are agonizingly tight. Surveys suggest the SNP is either on course for an
outright victory on 6 May — or could fall just short of winning an absolute
majority of Holyrood seats.
The first result
would bolster Sturgeon’s political authority and ratchet up pressure on U.K.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson to grant Scotland a second referendum. Yet the
latter could drain momentum from nationalist politics and further unsettle the
SNP internally.
At the
heart of the Salmond controversy lies the former first minister’s insistence
that a close-knit team at the top of the Scottish government conspired against
him after the accusations of sexual misconduct first came to light. Sturgeon
denies this claim and, for the most part, SNP voters agree with her.
In
February, a poll conducted by YouGov found that 49 per cent of Scots who
support the SNP believe Sturgeon’s version of events, compared to just 13 per
cent who don’t.
Those
numbers were almost exactly reversed for Salmond. Likewise, according to party
insiders, no more than a fifth of the SNP’s 100,000 plus members subscribe to
Salmond’s belief that Sturgeon sought to “drive” him from Scottish public life.
But the
Salmond-Sturgeon rift has mapped on to broader ideological fault lines.
Fundamentalists
vs. gradualists
Traditionally,
the most enduring political divide within the SNP has been between nationalist
‘fundamentalists’ – those who believe independence should be the party’s sole
campaigning focus – and ‘gradualists’ – those who believe independence will
only be won after a long march through the U.K.’s devolved institutions.
Sturgeon is
an arch-gradualist. She wants any future independence vote to be legally and
democratically water-tight from both a domestic and international perspective.
That means
securing a clear political agreement with Johnson in advance of a new vote and
building strong ‘para-diplomatic’ ties to the EU and Washington.
Westminster
MPs such as Joanna Cherry, Angus Brendan MacNeil, and Kenny MacAskill, however,
are not convinced that Johnson will agree to a second independence poll and
want the SNP to pursue more adversarial routes to Scottish self-government,
including by testing the legality of a non-sanctioned referendum in court.
“Underpinning
all the discontent has been a growing despair at the failure of SNP HQ to
prepare for Indyref2,” MacAskill, who served as justice secretary in Salmond’s
cabinet, wrote in September 2020.
The failure
to develop a so-called ‘Plan B’ for independence was “not just negligent but
criminal,” he argued.
Despite the
fact that Salmond himself shares Sturgeon’s gradualist instincts, the
fundamentalist wing of the party has grown close to the ex-SNP leader over the
course of his stand-off with Sturgeon.
Since 2018,
it has also seized on other contentious political issues — including, notably,
transgender rights and the reform of Scotland’s gender recognition laws — as a
way of amplifying internal opposition to her leadership.
Alyn Smith,
the SNP MP for Stirling and a strong Sturgeon ally, sees this grouping as a
“Trumpian” faction inside the party determined to dislodge the current
leadership structure, even if it means undermining the wider credibility of the
nationalist movement.
“It’s
legitimate to ask questions but when the questions are answered, move on,”
Smith told POLITICO. “The ‘Plan B’ stuff was never about ‘Plan B’, and it’s the
same with the gender recognition stuff. They were cyphers [to get at
Sturgeon].”
Another
major fissure within the SNP is Sturgeon’s perceived lack of economic
radicalism.
In 2016,
Sturgeon appointed Andrew Wilson, a corporate lobbyist and former PR man for
the Scottish financial sector, to draw up a new economic blueprint for
independence.
Wilson’s
‘Sustainable Growth Commission’ report was published two years later. The
Growth Commission recommended a decade of spending constraints after a ‘Yes’
vote for independence. It argued that Scotland should continue using Britain’s
pound sterling in the absence of a formal currency union with London, and
instead of establishing a separate Scottish central bank and currency.
These
proposals provoked fury among activists on the nationalist left — including
those associated with the SNP Common Weal Group (CWG), an influential internal
party faction that believes Wilson’s plan would impose severe constraints on
Scotland’s economic sovereignty.
Rory Steel
is the National Secretary of the CWG and a Glasgow-based SNP member. He views
Sturgeon’s decision to outsource the party’s economic policy as indicative of
her technocratic leadership style. And he highlights what her regards as a
reluctance among party chiefs to engage with basic rank-and-file demands.
“Even
people who you would call Sturgeon loyalists, when you speak to them privately,
are critical of the way party is governed,” Steel said. “All the internal
democratic mechanisms are completely shut off.”
The COVID
effect
Yet, even
after the bruising and divisive experience of the Salmond affair, the bulk of
the SNP remains committed to Sturgeon and the ultra-cautious direction she has
taken the party in.
This
culture of loyalty encompasses both the MSPs group at Holyrood – Sturgeon’s
de-facto power base – and the MPs group at Westminster.
The party’s
leader in the UK parliament, Ian Blackford, is a staunch Sturgeon supporter, as
is Scotland’s deputy first minister John Swinney and the SNP’s deputy leader
Keith Brown.
Most SNP
activists see the first minister as a hugely effective political leader who has
presided over a period of unprecedented electoral success for Scottish
nationalism and who is slowly but surely coaxing the country towards the U.K.
exit door, said Mhairi Hunter, a Glasgow city councillor who has known Sturgeon
since the 1990s.
Hunter
attributes at least some of the simmering frustration among competing
nationalist groups to the claustrophobic impact of the COVID crisis, which has
made it impossible for SNP members to push the case for independence on the
doorsteps.
“You can’t
understand what’s been going without taking into account the past year of
political inaction,” she said. “It has had a weird effect in terms of party
activity, because there hasn’t been any.”
Sturgeon
will likely hold the confidence of the SNP base for as long as she keeps
winning elections and pressing Westminster for another independence referendum.
The
relentless stress and pressure of the Salmond feud is now – largely – in the
rearview mirror, but the May election is a short distance down the road.
“If you
want to remove me from office as first minister, do it in an election,”
Sturgeon told opposition politicians in the Holyrood parliament Tuesday
afternoon.
As the last
14 years of Scottish nationalist dominance have shown, that may be easier said
than done.
SNP
factions
Sturgeon
loyalists — Opposition to Nicola Sturgeon within the SNP is diffuse but
shallow. The majority of party members and office bearers support Sturgeon,
share her vision of Scotland as a liberal, independent nation-state inside the
EU, and think the first minister has governed Scotland competently throughout
her six-and-a-half years at the head of the Holyrood parliament. Having been
cleared of breaking the ministerial code by James Hamilton, the future of
Sturgeon’s leadership rests on whether Sturgeon continues to be an election
winner — and the perception, among rank-and-file nationalists, that Scotland is
making progress towards independence.
Constitutional
fundamentalists — High profile ‘fundamentalists’ within the SNP include senior
MPs like Joanna Cherry and Kenny MacAskill. They want Sturgeon to set out a
roadmap to independence that doesn’t rely on the largesse of Boris Johnson’s
Conservative government in London. Of all Sturgeon’s internal critics, they are
most likely to have sided with Salmond during the inquiry process. Some
Sturgeon supporters have privately mooted kicking hardline fundamentalists out
of the SNP — a proposal rejected by Sturgeon’s team.
Left
nationalists — The SNP has traditionally cast itself as a social democratic
party. Under the leadership both of Salmond and Sturgeon, however, it has
pursued a staunchly centrist economic strategy. The left of the party is
centred around the influential ex-MP George Kerevan and the SNP Common Weal
Group (CWG), an internal party faction. They argue Sturgeon has failed to live
up to her early social democratic promise and has grown far too close to
private sector interests. Left nationalists are critical of Sturgeon’s
leadership, but not necessarily aligned with Salmon
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