The Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) has suffered perhaps its worst year since the Holyrood parliament in Edinburgh opened its doors, losing the support and trust of thousands of members and voters.
Once towering over Scotland, the party is now in a position where it has to scramble together whatever it can to maintain its lead over Labour.
The economic and political foundations of the party’s dominance have completely fallen away, while Humza Yousaf, SNP leader and Scottish First Minister, sleepwalks his way towards a cliff edge.
Dead end
In an interview with the BBC’s arch-hack Laura Kuenssberg, Yousaf could only regurgitate the tired old formulas of the Sturgeon years, expressed in the most philistine way possible.
In denial about the complete dead end that the independence cause finds itself in, he insists that the SNP is “creating the conditions” for independence, while building a “sustained majority” in favour of Yes.
In truth, while support for Scottish independence remains high, support for the SNP has dropped off rapidly.
This decoupling has left the party neck-and-neck with their old enemy: Labour. Yousaf’s insistence that independence is the party’s priority – and not clinging onto power in Scotland – rings completely hollow.
The SNP continually churns out more material for its ‘Building a New Scotland’ series of spurious pro-independence reports. But this is clearly a construction project without bricks, builders, or a budget – and as yet no date for when the ground will be broken.
The result of this cynical complacency is that the party fails to rally support through the independence cause in the way it did even a couple of years ago.
Labour
Despite the First Minister’s sleepy statements about independence, he was right about one thing: Keir Starmer will be the next prime minister.
Yousaf insists that he wants to have a “productive relationship” with Starmer, while warning that Scotland doesn’t need to vote Labour to get Labour. There will be a landslide in England, he assures, so Scots need to keep their nerve and keep voting SNP.
In reality, nobody is lining up to vote Labour for any other reason than they are not the Tories (though Starmer is doing everything he can to convince us otherwise).
Sir Starmer’s stalwart ‘Red Tory’ status ought to be a gift to the SNP, allowing them to effortlessly outflank Labour from the left, as the party has done throughout the history of devolution.
Instead, the Scottish government has little to show for its seventeen years in power, with plans in place for brutal cuts and counter-reforms to satisfy the capitalists’ need for austerity.
Revolution
In the short term, Yousaf’s drowsy demand for a ceasefire in Gaza is the only thing keeping his head above water, contrasting strongly with Starmer’s sheer inhumanity.
The newest Scottish Labour MP, Michael Shanks, is public enemy number one in Glasgow, due to his tacit support for Israel’s mass murder. This will probably not be a factor in a general election, however. The SNP’s long list of broken promises, meanwhile, will put it at a disadvantage that cannot be remedied by more empty pledges.
Young Scots have only ever known the SNP in power. They have gone through the school of the SNP’s failed reformism, and have suffered its all-bark-no-bite independence strategy.
A decade ago, the party’s leaders projected an anti-establishment image. Now, the SNP is the establishment, having lost all of its lustre.
2023 was a year of shocks and upsets for the SNP. And 2024 will be no different. Seeing no way forward with the party, working-class voters are abandoning it in droves. But all the parties have betrayed them.
Those who wish to fight against the decay of British capitalism, against the pessimism of the bourgeois nationalists, and for a radical break with the status quo must regroup around the only consistently revolutionary programme in this epoch: the communism we offer.
