The SNP civil war is an existential threat to Sturgeon’s party

The Scottish Play – that ersatz parody of the politics of the Greatest Wee Nation on Earth, penned by Wullie Shakespeare, the poor man’s Rabbie Burns from twee-sounding, half-timbered Stratford-upon-Avon –  is enjoying a spectacular run. Its success is attributable to the on-stage presence of the most convincing female lead in its theatrical history, Nicola Sturgeon; veteran thespian Alex Salmond is compelling too, in the role of Banquo’s ghost.

The official narrative of current Scottish politics, as laid down by the SNP, is straightforward. The nation is gagging for independence, with two recent opinion polls registering 54% support for a Yes vote, so that Scotland’s departure from the UK is blocked only by fascist Sassenach toff Boris Johnson’s undemocratic refusal to hold an independence referendum every month until the SNP gets lucky and the ball drops into zero. 

Covid is not a problem, thanks to the motherly care of La Sturgeon, whose wise policy of waiting to see what Boris does and then doing the same ten days later has signalled a sturdy independence and worked miracles in infection containment. An SNP landslide at next May’s elections is a universal axiom, unless events-dear-boy should cause the party’s poll ratings to slip, in which case the election will be cancelled as a sensible emergency response to the pandemic.

This narrative, whose template appears to be Soviet tractor production figures for the Caucasus circa 1952, is superficially plausible. The SNP has indeed been prospering in the polls, it is favourite to win next year’s election and Nicola Sturgeon has harvested a deal of credit for her handling of the pandemic, not based on any actual achievement but by monopolising Scottish television screens daily.

However, this patina of success and invulnerability could easily crumble. It is threatened on two fronts: the first is the unravelling of SNP public policies; the second, and more damaging, is the witches’ cauldron of dissent, hate and revenge boiling just below the surface of SNP politics, with the party in a state of internecine civil war.

The failure of SNP policies on education (on which Nicola Sturgeon asked to be judged) and health have been rehearsed many times before. To the inadequacies of SNP delivery in the workaday operation of healthcare there is now being added the emerging exposure of the flaws in its response to the pandemic. The chaos at Scottish universities, most notably Glasgow, at the very start of the academic year, was a predicted and avoidable disaster.

Why did the Scottish government not prevent greedy university administrations from putting students in harm’s way by herding them into halls of residence that were laboratories of infection super-spread, in order to milk them of money paid in rent for accommodation? Almost every anxious undergraduate interviewed by the media has volunteered the information: “My course work is all online, I could have done it from home.”

Why did the independent-minded Scottish government not take a decision to keep universities and colleges closed until the New Year? It is evident this could have been done without significant detriment to academic careers. Instead, as across the UK, where a million students have criss-crossed the country, potentially acquiring and spreading infection, Nicola Sturgeon’s government stood back and let a disaster unfold. Its panicky, incoherent reaction when it realised the damage was a caricature of the very incompetence of which, not entirely unjustly, the SNP accuses Boris Johnson’s administration.

Few governments, in the long term, emerge creditably from a pandemic and the SNP is unlikely to prove an exception. Yet what is more likely to sink this party, riding so high on the political tide for the time being, is its subterranean internal dissensions. Some of those are discernible even at the surface level of policy. 

For three years the SNP has been convulsed by contentions over its proposals to alter the Gender Recognition Act to allow people to “self-identify” as whichever sex they select, without any medical intervention. Also in the pipeline is a new “Hate Law” so totalitarian as to beggar belief. It would carry a maximum penalty of seven years’ imprisonment for the elastic offence of “stirring up hatred” (look out, J K Rowling!) and would penalise the possession of “inflammatory material” (open season on bookshops and libraries). Welcome to North West Korea.

It is claimed that a coterie of young “woke” activists who have gained control of the SNP’s national executive committee is driving this agenda. If so, the mainstream activists are right to be concerned that such extreme policies will alienate voters. The similarly dictatorial Named Person scheme, which would have eliminated the authority of parents over children in favour of the state, met with determined public resistance. The only reason it did not impact the SNP vote was that the party reluctantly abandoned it after the UK Supreme Court had struck down its most tyrannical provisions. 

That happened before any alleged coup by woke fanatics on the executive committee, which indicates that the totalitarian instincts of the SNP run deeper than a mere faction. So does the internal schism that is now an existential threat to the SNP: the Salmond/Sturgeon vendetta. 

When Alex Salmond was acquitted on 14 charges of sexual misconduct last March, under normal circumstances that event would almost exclusively have dominated Scottish news schedules for a month. But circumstances were not normal, due to the escalating coronavirus pandemic, so that it received almost perfunctory attention. That was a great relief to the SNP leadership, but that relief may not prove enduring.

It is common currency that Alex Salmond left the High Court in Edinburgh nursing sentiments that make the vengeful resolution of Edmond Dantès on his escape from the Château d’If seem anodyne by comparison. Salmond’s supporters are determined to take revenge on Nicola Sturgeon and her faction: if one encounters a Scot defying the official consensus by expressing reservations regarding Nicola Sturgeon, that is probably a unionist; but anyone voicing venomous hatred of the First Minister is undoubtedly a member of the SNP (Salmondista Tendency).

The consequences of this blood feud are increasingly visible. Joanna Cherry, fellow litigant with Gina Miller on prorogation, fancied standing for Ruth Davidson’s vacated seat at Holyrood. But Cherry is a Salmondista, so the Sturgeonite-controlled NEC invented a rule requiring MPs to give up their Westminster seats if nominated to contest a Holyrood constituency. Cherry backed down, leaving the way clear for Angus Robertson, of the Sturgeon faction. 

The NEC overreached itself in decreeing women-only short leets for all Holyrood seats where a sitting SNP MSP was standing down. James Dornan, in Glasgow Cathcart, decided to stand again and saw off the NEC. Although the Salmond/Sturgeon feud is fundamentally personal, it has assumed an ideological tone whereby the Sturgeon camp is more woke on social issues, but more realistic on the timing of a second independence referendum, while the Salmond faction is less culturally Marxist and more fundamentalist in demanding a second referendum yesterday. 

Currently the Salmondistas are attacking Sturgeon through her husband, Peter Murrell, who is also chief executive of the SNP. Kenny MacAskill, former justice minister (“Free the Lockerbie one!”) and grand vizier to Salmond, received anonymously a document containing WhatsApp messages allegedly showing Murrell pressing for police action against Salmond, which are becoming a core issue in the investigation into the Scottish government’s handling of the Salmond case.

Alex Cole-Hamilton, Liberal Democrat MSP, who sits on the Salmond inquiry committee and wants it to examine this evidence, said: “One of the key focal points of our committee’s work is whether there was a conspiracy to get Alex Salmond and to destroy his career.” If such a conspiracy were to be proved, it would blow the SNP apart. To nationalists, Salmond is the man who led them from a taxi-load of MPs at Westminster to being the natural party of Scottish government and to an independence referendum in 2014. To the faithful, he is anointed.

If people in the nationalist movement were proved to have conspired in an attempt to disgrace him, not even the gravitational force of the planet Jupiter could hold the SNP together. For Lady Macbeth, whatever the apparent strength of her position currently, there are underlying threats that make it extremely precarious in the longer term. She is haunted by the survival of Alex Salmond. “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.”