Swinney is not the agent of change his party seeks

John Swinney is no caretaker leader. We have his word for that. Yet as the SNP gathers in Edinburgh for its 90th annual conference, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that this is the party’s unhappiest gathering in a generation. Since, in fact, the last time Swinney led the party. Unkind colleagues note that, over two laps of the leadership course, Swinney has lost every election he has fought. Increasingly, even loyalists — of whom there are plenty — fret that the 2026 Holyrood election will continue that unhappy trend.
A party that once prided itself on its discipline and which enforced a code of political omertà — criticism may be acceptable in private, but never in public — is now riddled with discontent. All losing parties are unhappy but, like the Tories in Westminster before them, the SNP is unhappy while still being a party in government. That is a very dangerous state of being.
Last week Alex Neil, the former health secretary, told the podcast I host with Bernard Ponsonby that the Scottish government has in recent years delivered little more than the square root of not very much at all.
Neil is easily dismissed as another of the SNP’s old guard, impatient for change precisely because they have reached their twilight years, and embittered by what they perceive as the squandering of the opportunities the party once almost took for granted. He is yesterday’s man and tomorrow must belong to other folk. Yet, still, consider what he said: “If you look back over the last ten years and you ask what major changes and improvements to Scottish life has the SNP made, you’ll get an answer like baby boxes and stuff like that. But quite frankly, you won’t get anything really big.”
Now even I think Neil’s analysis sells the SNP a little short — though only a little — but, allowing for generalisation, he is broadly and obviously correct. There is a sense in which it now feels as though much of the past decade has been spent treading water. Outside events — Brexit, Covid, the Nicola Sturgeon-Alex Salmond affair followed by the Sturgeon-Murrell entertainment — have played a significant part in all that but, nevertheless, a charitable verdict on the era might conclude, “So much potential, so little delivery”.
I am not sure the party yet understands this. On Friday, it held a struggle session that was closed to the media but, helpfully, leaked to The Times nonetheless. This was an opportunity for the membership to vent and for the leadership to confess its own past failures. On both counts, there was plenty of material with which to work.
The key insight was delivered by Marco Biagi, the former junior minister, who presented the members with the findings of the party’s election inquest. “It wasn’t that the people who still liked us but they voted Labour to get the Tories out,” he said. “It was that there were fewer people liking us or that people liked us less intensely.” This was partly a consequence of policy failures and partly because of the way in which the SNP has conducted itself recently.
All true, no doubt, but there is also a sense in which non-aligned voters appreciate that the SNP, obsessed with the constitutional question, is more comfortable in its own bubble than in talking to people who are not already paid-up foot soldiers for independence. Party conferences are almost always self-indulgent but this is a strange time for the SNP to wallow in solipsism all over again. The idea that voters will return to the fold as soon as the SNP sorts itself out is an optimistic view indeed.
Every so often there is a hint that senior figures within the party understand the problem. So Swinney told the party’s “private” honesty session on Friday that the party has for too long spent too much time focusing on the “process” by which independence might be achieved and not enough on, well, independence itself. There is something in this. Every six months, Sturgeon would tell the punters another referendum was in sight and twice a year the poor saps would believe her. Now the sound you hear is the clatter of pennies dropping: that game is lost, at least for the time being.
But then Swinney told the conference delegates that he will use his speech today to “explain the substance of independence, the advantage of independence, the possibility of independence”. It tells you all you need to know about the myopia with which the SNP is afflicted that this is seen, internally, as a “shift” in approach. Because, look, from the outside it is quite obviously just more of the same.
Voters unpersuaded by independence draw no distinction between talking about the “process” of independence and its “promise”. To them, it is all the same and there the nationalists go again, banging on about independence even though the plainest lesson to be drawn from the election is that the party which made independence the “page one, line one” issue received a fearful battering at the polls. Perhaps, just perhaps, voters are not very interested in hearing more about independence right now?
“I’m not standing in front of you in denial,” Swinney says and I am sure he is sincere in thinking that. I suspect he does understand that there is little space and even less appetite for further income tax increases and he is surely correct to note that the SNP has lost its grip on aspirational, middle-class Scotland. Those activists who yearn for a sharp shift to the left the better to combat a revived Labour party are not likely to find Swinney a receptive listener.
All this may be true but it is also true to note that Swinney, a cabinet secretary for 16 years, signed off on or assented to everything the SNP has done in government. If you are disappointed by that government’s record you are also, unavoidably, disappointed in Swinney.
If, as he says, “government performance” is an “issue” then Swinney must be a portion of that issue too. To that extent, his leadership is a case of new wine in a very old bottle. Voters may think him an upgrade on his predecessor and they may respect the first minister as a worthy fellow but they also understand that Swinney is an implausible agent of change or transformation.