JOHN Swinney is yet to flesh out his political vision for the SNP with the Holyrood election just under a year away, party insiders have told the Sunday National.
Two SNP MPs said they expected the First Minister to set out his stall more fully at the party’s conference beginning on October 11, seven months before Scotland goes to the polls.
However, frustration among the party grassroots is mounting at the leadership’s cautious stance since Swinney took over just over a year ago.
He has avoided some of the major controversies which have dogged the party in recent years, most notably declining to do battle on trans rights as his two immediate predecessors did.
And the SNP have become quieter in Westminster of late, with one MP attributing this to the natural summer wind-down. The UK Parliament breaks for summer recess on July 22.
They said the summer holiday would provide a chance for greater consideration of the party’s future direction.
“We’re going into recess is one of the issues," the MP said. "So I would imagine there would be considerations about what we decide to do going forward from there."
Keeping quiet
THE party’s nine representatives acted more as observers in Labour's internal row over benefits cuts, with one MP saying: “This week has been very interesting to watch.”
Another senior figure who spoke to the Sunday National referred to the famous adage: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
An MP also attributed the SNP’s recent period of relative quiet to their greatly reduced stature since the election last year, where they lost 39 seats.
“I think also because we’re a small group of nine, you have to pick your fights very carefully,” they said.
“We’re not on the committees like we used to be, we don’t get to do third-party positions, Westminster Hall like we used to do.”
Stephen Flynn, the party’s leader in Westminster and one of the SNP’s most high-profile figures, quit his role on the Scottish Affairs Committee earlier this month, swapping in the relatively lesser-known Dave Doogan.
Flynn cuts a more retiring figure in Parliament since SNP high command clipped his wings over now-aborted plans to hold onto his Westminster seat, were he to gain a place in the Scottish Parliament next year.
Need for a vision
FRUSTRATIONS over the party’s lack of a positive message were expressed in the aftermath of the Hamilton by-election, which delivered a shock win for Scottish Labour, who most had assumed were out of the race, including Swinney himself.
Party activists raised concerns during the Hamilton by-election campaign that focusing solely on criticising Reform UK would not make up for the SNP lacking their own story to tell. They claimed these warnings were ignored.
Swinney has been praised across the SNP for “steadying the ship” – as insiders repeat like a mantra – but himself revealed during an interview with the Holyrood Sources podcast that a supporter wrote him recently asking when he would put the sails up.
Swinney said that was a “fair” assessment, adding: “We’ve got to get growing and expanding.”
Avoiding controversy
STEERING clear of the kind of controversies likely to provide fodder to the right-wing press seems to have informed much of Swinney’s thinking, including recent announcements that the Scottish Government would continue funding companies that had links with the Israeli military.
The party’s firm stance on Gaza was weakened significantly when it emerged last year that External Affairs Secretary Angus Robertson had held a meeting – kept under wraps until days later – with Israel’s deputy ambassador to the UK.
Robertson’s meeting infuriated the party’s Middle East spokesperson, Brendan O’Hara, who wrote to his Holyrood colleague to chastise him.
And, more recently, Swinney ducked out of a row about the proscription of Palestine Action, declining to echo Humza Yousaf’s condemnation of plans to ban the group under terrorism laws. Swinney said only that the decision was one for the UK Home Secretary.
But one MP said that the party should not mimic Labour’s strategy for the 2024 General Election, which saw the party attempt to steer clear of the most politically explosive issues, hoping that not rocking the boat would steer them to victory.
They said: “If we took any lessons from Morgan McSweeney, we’d be in deep trouble.”
And independence ...?
ONE recent attempt to reinvigorate the party’s base – after one source told The National the Hamilton defeat meant it was “time to hit the independence button" – came in the form of Swinney giving a speech in which he claimed that independence was “within reach”.
But the party’s plan for independence is to slowly and steadily build support for the prospect rather than any mechanism by which to achieve it.
A top party insider told the Sunday National they rejected Alba’s plans to treat next year’s Holyrood election as a “de facto” referendum, dismissing it as “arrogant”.
The de facto plan was Nicola Sturgeon’s backup if the indyref2 Supreme Court gamble failed, but in the event, it was ditched as SNP policy.
Polling offers some comfort to the SNP, with Swinney’s party consistently coming in first place. But it has decisively become uncoupled from support for independence, where in the past the two were linked.
Surveys are also consistently showing that support for Reform UK is solid north of the Border, with one poll last week showing the first predictions the party could gain Westminster seats in southern Scotland and Ayrshire.
One MP told the Sunday National they believed that while Reform UK have the chance to do well across Scotland in next year’s election, the party was mostly soaking up Tory and Labour voters over SNP ones.
However, it is clear that the entrance of Nigel Farage’s party will change the Holyrood scene, with some commentators expecting the myth of Scottish exceptionalism – which often sees anti-immigration sentiment as an English attitude – to be decisively punctured.
Insiders say that the process of crafting a fresh SNP message for the 2026 election is already under way, with one MP saying that “we’re already at the point of putting motions into conference” to shape party policy.
Another said that Swinney had always intended to deliver his strategy in three parts – bringing stability to the Government, then the party, then bringing forward his vision – and had not envisaged this process being interrupted by a by-election, triggered by the sad and untimely death of Christina McKelvie.
The Scottish Government appears in no way hurried to placate impatient activists who believe the SNP should hurry up in setting out their stall.
Asked whether the party could be expected to wait until October’s conference for Swinney to set out his vision, one aide said: “That would be natural and expected at the last conference before an election.”
