Where Next For Vanquished Nationalists?
Many are being dubbed FILTH - Failed In London, Try Holyrood
The SNP has lost the battle at the general election, and the question now is whether it can avoid the civil war.
The early signs are not good.
As many as 20 recently redundant MPs are thought to be already considering how they can replace the green leather of the House with the IKEA plywood of Holyrood.
Some have dubbed these would-be nationalist MSPs as FILTH – Failed In London, Try Holyrood. Yet that is only true in the majority of cases.
There are a handful, such as the former Glasgow South MP Stewart McDonald, who are thoughtful and would be an asset to their party in Edinburgh.
Others, such as the outspoken Nationalist Joanna Cherry, would give the SNP whips sleepless nights and would certainly meet – the admittedly rather modest – test of enlivening the Holyrood chamber.
For the rest of the rejects, it seems unlikely that closer relative proximity to their constituents would do anything to address their anonymity or ability.
The tension arises, however, not over whether this new group of wannabe MSPs would be an asset, or even if they will stand – it is where and how they will get selected.
After all, even at the height of its pomp, there were only a finite number of Scottish Parliament seats the SNP could win, and that number is now diminishing by the day.
This presents the distinctly unedifying prospect of former nationalist MPs jostling for seats with other SNP parliamentarians, present and former.
As an illustration of how desperate this fight will become, the 20 MPs currently considering standing in 2026 represent almost a third of the seats the SNP currently holds in the Scottish Parliament, and even the most optimistic nationalist strategists concede a significant portion of those can no longer be considered safe.
Such a high-stakes internal conflict over the next 18 months is likely to further exacerbate existing tensions in the nationalist ranks.
SNP politicians had descended into recrimination and backbiting even before the disastrous general election defeat. Selection battles, where political careers hang in the balance, are unlikely to herald a new era of harmony.
Perhaps more troublingly for the SNP though is the spectre of the internal elections themselves.
It is the SNP membership, which is incidentally suffering a similar rate of attrition as the nationalists’ elected politicians, who will get to choose which candidates fight which constituencies or are placed at the top of the regional list, which is elected by PR and therefore the safest bet.
There is nothing wrong with this democratic process per se, but it does create a rather narrow and - in the case of the SNP in particular - single-issue electorate. And if we cast our minds back to the most recent SNP internal election, this does not bode well.
The race to replace Nicola Sturgeon was marked with many moments of hilarity, and the highlight was not just Ash Regan’s flagship proposal to build an “independence readiness thermometer,” but that she still went on to win the support of more than 11 percent of the SNP membership.
Little wonder, perhaps, that she left the SNP shortly after her defeat to become the only Holyrood representative of Alex Salmond’s Alba Party.
More seriously, there is little doubt Humza Yousaf’s ill-fated premiership was hamstrung in part by the commitments he felt compelled to make to SNP members during the contest to replace Sturgeon.
Even current SNP leader John Swinney, more than a year on, felt duty-bound to maintain Yousaf’s commitment that independence would be page one, line one of the nationalists’ manifesto, despite the obvious absurdity of that proposition at the general election.
When the SNP membership demands red meat, it rarely accepts anything less than T-bone steak.
An influx of former SNP MPs running for Holyrood will therefore not only further fray the nationalists’ fragile unity but will also potentially saddle the party and its politicians with further far-fetched policies and commitments.
For a party already struggling with credibility and reeling from defeat, that really is the last thing the nationalists need.
It may be a new Westminster parliament, but what’s left of the SNP group is still up to its old tricks.
Westminster leader, Stephen Flynn, tabled an amendment to the King’s Speech calling for the two-child benefit cap to be scrapped.
Given the new government has not publicly committed to scrapping the controversial cap, this was an attempt to put new Labour MPs in a tight spot (although its main consequence was actually to give Sir Keir Starmer an excuse to suspend half a dozen troublesome left-wing MPs in his own ranks).
Flynn’s amendment was, as Alex Massie has eloquently pointed out, gross hypocrisy. The SNP Scottish Government has the ability to mitigate the cap but chooses not to, for precisely the same reason that the UK Government chooses not to: that it cannot immediately afford to do so. His piece is well worth a read.
And finally… I hope you are continuing to enjoy Notes on Nationalism. I would love to hear from you if you have any comments, feedback, or ideas for pieces you would like to see, so do please get in touch:
Thank you, and until next time…
Please dont use right wing memes like FILTH even when reporting someone else’s words. Its so incendiary & unnecessary !
Gosh, the tone of this piece is rather ungracious. I guess you know your core audience…..