Fifth term for SNP looks likely but John Swinney does not deserve it: Euan McColm

As Scottish nationalists prepared to gather in Aberdeen this weekend, First Minister John Swinney promised a “fresh start” for the country if voters chose to break from the United Kingdom.

And – in a move which, to be generous, blurs the boundaries between party and government action – he did so while brandishing a copy of a new civil service-produced document, highlighting the ways in which an independent Scotland would flourish.

Unsurprisingly, this paper – in common with others produced by the Scottish Government in recent years – is heavy on claims and light on detail. As ever, the SNP position is that all will be well if only we believe.

When Swinney succeeded Humza Yousaf as party leader and First Minister last year, he inherited a mess. After years during which the SNP had appeared an unstoppable force and independence an inevitability, things had started to go very badly indeed.

The resignation of Nicola Sturgeon – out of road on the independence question and haemorrhaging popularity over her monomaniacal support for gender ideology – in 2023, followed by a chaotic 13 months of Yousaf’s leadership saw the nationalists lose their poll lead for the first time in years.

It was hardly surprising, then, that Swinney – just a couple of months into his new role – steered the SNP to defeat in last year’s general election. Having taken 48 of Scotland’s 57 seats in 2019, the nationalists returned just nine MPs while Labour took 37, a considerable improvement on the single victory recorded five years earlier.

But things move quickly in politics and John Swinney, who had been preparing to retire from frontline politics before Yousaf’s resignation, is now the leader of a party on course to win its fifth consecutive Holyrood victory.

Whether the SNP deserves almost quarter of a century in power is quite another matter.

The latest Scottish Government paper on independence may have been trumpeted by Swinney as visionary but the truth is that it is the thinnest of gruel, containing no new thinking on the big barriers to secession.

Eleven years after the late Alex Salmond led the Yes campaign to defeat in the independence referendum, the SNP still has no answers on currency or on EU membership and no way of compelling any UK Government to green-light Indyref2.

Central to the SNP’s messaging for decades has been the idea that theirs is a different type of nationalism, open and welcoming rather than exclusionary, progressive rather than authoritarian, intellectual rather than emotional.

But making these claims and substantiating them are two separate things. While senior SNP figures may talk about “civic nationalism” (a serious political ideology or a rebrand of exhausting them-against-us politics, depending on your appetite for sophistry), the reality is that its plan for independence is still no more detailed than “everything will be brilliant”.

Interviewed days before this weekend’s gathering in the North East, Swinney said that – should the SNP win a majority at May’s Holyrood election – the Prime Minister would have to quit Downing Street.

“I think,” said the FM, “Keir Starmer is in enormous difficulty with the strength of SNP support in Scotland.

“The return of an SNP majority in Scotland… would demonstrate the weakness of the Prime Minister.”

Is Swinney’s position really that, if Starmer can’t even beat the SNP, then he’s a busted flush? It does sound awfully like it.

This new rule applies only to the PM. When Swinney lost to Labour at last year’s General Election, there was no suggestion he thought his own position untenable. That would have been as ridiculous as the idea Starmer would leave office over the result of an election to a devolved parliament.

Starmer’s problems are well-documented. After Labour’s landslide victory last year, the PM made a series of judgements – perhaps best represented by that early announcement of an end to the universal Winter Fuel Payment to pensioners – that swiftly eroded his popularity and cleared his accounts of political capital.

But Swinney’s mistakes are many, too.

His belief in the erosion of women’s rights through the introduction of self-ID for trans people sets him apart from the vast majority of voters (60 per cent back this year’s Supreme Court ruling that, in law, sex is a matter of biology rather than feelings while fewer than 20 per cent oppose it) and his failure to put in the work on those independence questions means his current pitch is pure blood-and-soil “we’re better” nationalism, which is a very Nigel Farage-esque view of the world.

Asked if his position on Starmer meant that he would resign if the SNP fails to win a Holyrood majority next year, the First Minister was less sure of the new rules he’d just invented. He was, he said, here for the “long haul”. He had pledged to his party that he would lead an SNP able to deliver independence.

By his own metric, Swinney is failing.

But the SNP faithful, currently in Aberdeen, have shown, over the past decade, their willingness to ignore the obvious flaws in the claims made by their leaders.

For nine years, nationalists bought Nicola Sturgeon’s repeated – and entirely nonsensical – promises that a second referendum was just one last heave away.

Swinney is no more clear than she was about how that might be achieved.

With Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership already shaky and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK looking like serious contenders to win the next General Election, the SNP’s chances of winning that fifth term in power grow stronger.

But John Swinney, a First Minister without a plan, will not – should it materialise – deserve that triumph.