By any yardstick the Scottish National party commands the politics of Scotland. As they gather for their annual conference in Glasgow, Nicola Sturgeon’s party can look back on another year of major victories. After sweeping 56 out of 59 Scottish Westminster seats in the 2015 general election, the SNP was re-elected in May for a third term in government in Holyrood. A week ago, its candidate swept Labour aside in a Glasgow council byelection, perhaps foreshadowing wider SNP gains in the 2017 Scottish local elections, where control of Glasgow is the greatest prize. In the opinion polls, the SNP regularly commands the support of about, or just under, half of Scottish voters, as it did in the 2015 and 2016 elections.
In these circumstances, it may seem perverse to talk of the SNP having problems. Yet problems there are, though they should not be overstated and Scotland’s struggling other parties would kill to be faced with them. The SNP, after all, lost some ground in the Holyrood contest in May, compared both with its 2011 triumph and with the 2015 Westminster election. It has lost recent council byelections to Labour too (in North Lanarkshire and North Ayrshire, where Ms Sturgeon’s father was defeated) as well as winning one. Ms Sturgeon remains popular, but her approval ratings have fallen significantly (her net approval in Scotland is currently lower than both Theresa May’s and Ruth Davidson’s). And while Kezia Dugdale’s Labour remains in eclipse, both Labour and Ms Davidson’s revived Scottish Tories regularly point to the truth that the SNP talks a more radical game than it actually delivers.
The lurking and deeper problem, skilfully highlighted by Willie Rennie, leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, at a local government conference last week is that the SNP’s dominance and culture risks turning Scotland into something akin to a one-party state, in which government is not properly held to account. Scotland has not reached that point yet, and there are plenty of people inside the SNP as well as outside it who are aware of the dangers. But it needs to be held to account, not least by independent media and the BBC.
The sharper and more immediate problem for the SNP is how to respond to the UK’s Brexit vote. Ms Sturgeon has never satisfactorily resolved the dilemma of whether to hold a second independence referendum in the wake of Scotland’s vote to remain. If the path to reversing the 2014 referendum was clear, she would go for it. However, Scottish opinion has now reverted to opposition to independence after a brief contrary shift in July. Ms Sturgeon does not want to lose a second vote. But nor does she want everything to be dominated by the issue of whether to hold one. The conference will debate a motion from Edinburgh West on Friday that calls on the SNP “to prepare” for a second referendum while stopping short of actually demanding one.
This seems fated to be the SNP’s position. Ms Sturgeon is caught between activists who crave a second vote and her own more cautious instincts. The reality for the SNP, hard though it may be to accept, is that the public remains sceptical about the independence prospectus, for good reasons. Ms Sturgeon’s best course is to ease off about a second referendum and to follow the advice of her former minister Alex Neil, who argues that the Brexit process provides many opportunities to devolve EU-level powers to Holyrood, including farming, fishing, employment and the environment. What Mr Neil calls “neo-independence” is probably the best on offer right now. The conference’s theme of “Stronger for Scotland” suggests that Ms Sturgeon agrees, even if she is wary of disappointing her activists by saying so too directly.
