What next?
The Salmond-Sturgeon era of 2004-2023 is over and the confidence trick they pulled off has been broken. Now what?
This article first appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail, 18th February 2023.
THIS week in Scotland, a nineteen-year long political era, dominant for so long, was dumped into the dustbin of history.
The era had begun in the summer of 2004 at a posh restaurant near Edinburgh. It ended in the equally elegant surroundings of Bute House, the official residence of the First Minister of Scotland, where Nicola Sturgeon chose to announce her resignation on Wednesday. For nearly two decades, she and her predecessor Alex Salmond dominated Scotland like nobody before or since. But this weekend, we can declare that the Nationalist Age of 2004-2023 which they crafted together is no more. It is over. Finished. We’re in a new age now. The lock grip that the Salmond-Sturgeon era has held over Scotland has been shattered. Suddenly, Scotland has entered a new world, with fresh opportunities and risks attached. What might it bring? And what might we learn from the spell they cast over these last two long decades?
That now finished era which ended so unexpectedly and abruptly on Wednesday can be traced back to a lunch one June afternoon at the Champany Inn restaurant outside Linlithgow. A favourite of Alex Salmond’s, it still serves up expensive high-end cuts of beef, and boasts one of the finest wine cellars in the country. That day back in 2004, Mr Salmond invited his young protégé Nicola Sturgeon to see if she’d like to join him carving up something else entirely - the Scottish National party.
John Swinney had just quit the party as leader. Mrs Sturgeon had put herself forward to replace him. But Mr Salmond – who had relinquished the top job dramatically a few years earlier – had a radical plan. He would come back. She would be his deputy. Together they’d form a nationalist dream team and fight the 2007 Holyrood elections together. Mrs Sturgeon asked for 48 hours to think it over. She came back to say yes. It was to prove a historic decision.
It is hard to recall now but back in 2004, the SNP was a rag bag operation. Mr Swinney’s leadership had flailed and flopped. Riven by internal division, it was mocked by the all-powerful Scottish Labour party. “Devolution will kill nationalism stone dead,” Labour’s George Robertson had famously predicted. Few in the summer of 2004 would have said anything other.
The plan Mr Salmond and Mrs Sturgeon began to formulate that afternoon outside Linlithgow changed everything. Together they installed a new iron rod of discipline to the SNP. They planned meticulously ahead. They sought to shed the SNP of its hostile wild-eyed image. And with a complacent Scottish Labour party utterly unprepared for such a professional assault on their power, the pair carried all before them. Evidence of the tightness of the operation came in the aftermath of the 2014 referendum, after the pair suffered their biggest loss. Salmond agreed to stand down immediately. Sturgeon took over unopposed. That seamless ascendancy to replace him as SNP leader meant that, just a few months later, the SNP had soared to unimaginable heights, winning all but three of Scotland’s Westminster seats, and seizing total control over Scotland’s political high ground.
For so long, the Salmond-Sturgeon playbook seemed unbeatable. Incredibly, it even survived Mr Salmond’s defenestration and the pair’s falling out after his trial in 2020. It was tough, it was uncompromising, it swatted aside facts and opponents alike. It continued to reap political rewards.
But now it’s over. It finished just after 11 on Wednesday. For proof, consider the contrast between Mr Salmond’s departure in 2014 with Mrs Sturgeon’s last week.
Back then, a succession plan was in place and the handover was executed quickly. Today, far from planning ahead, Miss Sturgeon’s decision was reached without consultation with her cabinet ministers and taken almost on the spur of the moment: she just decided earlier in the week that enough was enough, and decided to pack it in. So much for forward thinking.
Consider the battle to come. Far from settling on a chosen successor, as happened back in 2014, Mrs Sturgeon has walked out leaving behind her a handful of mid-rank politicians, some more capable than others, but none of whom can be said to be ready for the top post. In a poll at the weekend, asked who they thought should succeed Sturgeon fully 69% of respondents replied that they didn’t know. In a few weeks’ time one of them will be First Minister of Scotland. It is quite the task that awaits them.
And consider too the SNP’s once professional machine: far from purring onwards without changing gear, the SNP’s slick backroom operation, run by Mrs Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell, is now the centre of a potential police investigation amid allegations of a missing £600,000 in donations. The Holyrood gossip mill is rife with speculation about what will happen next: it could be that this scandal has more to run yet.
Furthermore, those divisions which Mrs Sturgeon and Mr Salmond spent so long trying to get rid of are back. The party is riven top to toe by the Gender Recognition Reforms that Mrs Sturgeon recklessly championed. Despite being a fringe issue of little or no importance to the general public, it has pitted SNP figure against SNP figure in a battle that permits no compromise.
Likewise, the party is similarly divided over how to take forward its raison d’etre, Scottish independence. On Thursday evening came confirmation that Mrs Sturgeon’s “de facto” referendum plan has now been dumped. Moderates argue it is time to take it slowly. But that risks only infuriating the party’s enormous activist base still more.
In short, the Salmond-Sturgeon confidence trick has cracked – and everyone can see it. The playbook of relentless assertion, cast-iron belief, and arrogant dominance of the political terrain had worked so well (across the UK, fewer than a third of people said they expect Scotland to remain in the UK over the coming decade). But on Wednesday, with the First Minister’s departure, it quite simply broke apart. In perhaps the most jarring moment of Mrs Sturgeon’s resignation statement on Wednesday, she tried to repeat the old lines once more, claiming with the old certainty that she believed her successor would take Scotland to independence. It fell so, so flat. Once, when Mrs Sturgeon asserted the facts like this, it felt she could bend reality to her will. Last week, she just looked a little silly.
It comes to everyone eventually. No matter how professional and determined, the iron laws of gravity and reality catch up you. And the Sturgeon-Salmond era collapsed last week because, finally, the pitiless light of reality had exposed the bluster on which it had been based.
One era ends, and another is about to begin. The question therefore turns to what is next for Scotland and our eternal debate over the country’s constitutional future?
In the immediate term, the SNP will now spend the next six weeks electing a successor. And while much attention will focus on the personalities involved, just as important will be over the strategy the winning candidate adopts.
The party could, of course, try to revive the old era, and blow wind into the corpse. It could keep going with the grievance. It could wheel out its party president Mike Russell to shout bromides at opponents and froth at the mouth at Westminster. It could try and hide from reality again and retreat to its comfort zone: assuring its 100,000 supporters that independence is just about to happen; that the dream is on its way; that the tide is in its favour.
But the lesson of the Sturgeon-Salmond era is that way lies humiliation for the SNP. Even as skilled a political operator as Mrs Sturgeon was unable to talk past the gaping holes in its current case for independence: if she couldn’t do it, what chance Humza Yousaf? And while Nationalists may well enjoy banqueting on the comfort food of grievance, the evidence of the last year is that most Scots simply aren’t buying it. Scots didn’t see the UK Government’s opposition to Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reforms as “a naked assault” on democracy as Mrs Sturgeon claimed; they simply saw it as a common sense attempt to find a better way forward. They didn’t see opposition to a second referendum as a “democracy denial”; instead a clear majority opposed Sturgeon’s timetable. The brutal truth for the SNP is that it wasn’t Westminster intransigence that brought Mrs Sturgeon’s agenda crashing to a halt, it was the mood of the Scottish people, who had grown tired and weary of the same old songs. Perhaps that was what Mrs Sturgeon’s just couldn’t handle.
She refused to listen – and her career is now over. Will her successor? The SNP has never had a proper post-mortem following its comprehensive 2014 referendum defeat. But if the party is to truly rebuild from the wreckage left behind by this week, then it needs to bin the evasion and the dishonesty and the false confidence it has come to rely on. It needs to have an honest reckoning about why its strategy has failed. It was not because the electorate are stupid. It had nothing to do with Westminster. It was because severing Scotland from the United Kingdom is an economic disaster zone, and far from setting out a plan to sort it out, the SNP has still not even admitted as much.
In its constitution, the SNP’s constitution has two purposes: promoting independence and promoting the interests of Scotland. Nobody expects the Nationalists to abandon support for independence but, after 15 years of failure, it is time to focus on the latter. Scotland’s growth prospects are dismal. The NHS is on its knees. Educational standards are slipping. The incoming SNP leader must find the courage that Mrs Sturgeon lacked and tell SNP supporters that independence is off the agenda for the foreseeable future. They must acknowledge that the nation’s economic future must take precedence. They must explain that it is time for the party to wean itself off the short-term hit of grievance and rage that Mrs Sturgeon perfected, and instead focus on a bigger prize – of taking a united country forward.
Of course, the opposition parties must do so too. Both Labour and the Conservatives have a fresh opportunity to set out their own agenda in the post-Sturgeon era. It is surely past time that Scotland had an alternative. For Labour’s Ana Sarwar, the opportunity is particularly striking. Thousands of left-leaning SNP voters supported the nationalists because they liked Nicola Sturgeon. Thousands of them are now up for grabs. A focussed campaign which seeks to win over these voters could see Labour gains across Scotland in the Westminster election next year. It was clear from his speech yesterday to the Scottish Labour conference that he has already spotted the opportunity.
Meanwhile, the UK Government must continue to play its hand wisely. The strategy of working and engaging with Sturgeon over the last 18 months denied her the points of grievance she so desperately wanted. It blunted Mrs Sturgeon’s desperate attempts to weaponize democracy as a tool to secure independence. As she railed against Ministers who were trying sincerely to cooperate with Edinburgh, it was her who looked the fool. There is a danger that many Tories will now want to take the fight to the SNP in the belief the nationalists are vulnerable. But the lesson of Sturgeon’s fall from power is not to give the SNP the fight it wants, In his short time in office, Rishi Sunak has already displayed a steady hand on the Union tiller. His team should ensure that, when a new First Minister arrives, Mr Sunak has a long list of projects on which it wants to work with the SNP to deliver.
Amid the drama of these last few days, a glimmer of hope can be detected. Scotland under Nicola Sturgeon had become stuck. She had run out of road, trapped by her own falsities and evasions, left with nowhere to go. Whether the SNP has the courage to say it or not, her departure means that independence is, for now, off the agenda. Scotland can focus instead on rebuilding from the pandemic, and the cost of living crisis left in its wake.
A chance has opened up for a better future for Scotland. The Sturgeon-Salmond era can be forgotten. Let the new era commence.
ENDS