Dissenting SNP voices will destroy the divided party

As the Scottish Nationalists gather in Aberdeen for their annual conference there will be some notable absences. Kate Forbes, the Highlands MSP who narrowly lost her leadership bid against Humza Yousaf earlier this year, has a more pressing engagement, in the US.

Meanwhile, the veteran SNP politician Fergus Ewing, who was suspended from the party, will be missing too, opting to spend the time with constituents rather than colleagues in the SNP, which he warns is in “serious decline”.

The former Nationalist MP Lisa Cameron won’t be there either, because as of this week she has left the SNP, defecting to the Conservatives in disgust over her party’s “toxic and bullying” behaviour.

But even more worrying for the separatists than these high-profile snubs is the desertion by Scottish voters, who appear to have lost patience with the Nationalist regime.

The by-election in Rutherglen and Hamilton West just over a week ago saw a more than 20 per cent swing to Labour and has fuelled Keir Starmer’s hopes of an election victory, driven in part by winning back swathes of the electorate north of the border.

A poll by YouGov this week shows tens of thousands of SNP voters switching to Labour, while psephologist John Curtice predicted Labour could take 40 out of 59 seats in Scotland if the party’s swing in the by-election is replicated nationally.

A strong leader might be able to overcome what is evidently a crisis for the SNP but first minister Humza Yousaf has neither the authority nor the ideas to mount a rescue of his beleaguered party.

His conference pitch will focus on staging another independence referendum, though illegal without Westminster backing. This might play to the dwindling party faithful but will not address internal divisions that have exposed a culture both morally noxious and politically out of touch.

The decision by Cameron to jump ship to the Conservatives, reportedly encouraged by a sympathetic Rishi Sunak, followed a period of desperate unhappiness for the MP for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow, during which she was ostracised by her fellow Nationalists in Westminster because she stood up for the teenage victim of sex pest SNP MP Patrick Grady.

Grady, who was suspended from the Commons and the SNP, which later readmitted him, made unwanted sexual advances to a young male staffer but that did not bar him from returning to the party fold.

He is clearly considered a more acceptable face of Scottish nationalism than Cameron, who was about to be deselected for defying party bosses covering up for Grady.

Although Cameron’s move to Tory ranks is unprecedented for an SNP MP, and she will have to drop her support for independence, the switch in allegiance is not that surprising.

Increasingly, the SNP, and its partners in the Scottish Greens, are at odds with mainstream public opinion and their obsessions do not reflect the priorities of ordinary voters.

Cameron came up against party orthodoxy back in January when she wrote to Scottish Secretary Alister Jack of concerns over then first minister Nicola Sturgeon’s gender-self-ID reforms and their impact on equality rights for women in Scotland and across the UK.

Another Nationalist MP, Joanna Cherry, was also sidelined by her party for challenging its transgender policy, which under Sturgeon led to the farcical situation of a male rapist being imprisoned in a women’s jail.

Ewing, too, though a lifelong Nationalist, has found his small ‘c’ conservative values out of sync with his party. He has urged Yousaf to abandon unpopular policies, including on gender ideology, and concentrate on issues that matter to voters, such as the economy, health and education.

Forbes is even more of a conservative, with her Christian beliefs putting her on a collision course with the party establishment and costing her the leadership contest. Both Forbes and Ewing represent a return to more traditional Nationalist (or ‘Tartan Tory’ as they were once labelled) thinking, not least with their commitment to rural interests and business.

It is a significant departure from the far-left position of the SNP under Sturgeon and, in particular, the Greens, who must surely be the cause of much of the present alienation.

The uncompromising Green agenda, which opposes economic growth and discards women’s rights, reached its nihilistic nadir this week with the outlier (even for the Greens) MSP Maggie Chapman blaming Israel for the Hamas terror attack.

If more astute, Yousaf – who, to his credit, wasted no time in denouncing Hamas, although his in-laws remain trapped in Gaza – would use his conference to distance the SNP from the Greens, but the subject is not even up for debate this weekend.

He and his ministers seem to be in denial about the scale of their defeat in Rutherglen and the ongoing implosion of their party. But voters in Scotland have woken up to the broken record of SNP promises and can now see that the independence crusade has led the country nowhere.

How galling for the SNP hierarchy that collapse, when it inevitably comes, will have been largely triggered from within by its own people.

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