October 30, 2023 - 4:40pm
A new force is emerging within the Scottish political landscape: meet the Grumpy Nat. On their grouchy and sullen shoulders hangs the balance of numerous Westminster seats at the next general election. They could, if their mood doesn’t improve soon, end the SNP’s Scottish hegemony.
The Grumpy Nats are making their mark. At the weekend, former SNP leadership candidate Ash Regan joined their number, announcing she would be quitting the SNP for Alex Salmond’s rival nationalist party, Alba. Today, South Ayrshire SNP councillor Chris Cullen announced that he would be following suit.
Their reasons are the same: they’re fed up with the SNP. For Regan (who memorably used her leadership campaign to propose that the SNP erect an “independence thermometer” in Glasgow to set out the extent of support for separation) it’s a party that has “lost its focus on independence”. Cullen echoed her comments, declaring that many nationalists, including himself, “only now are facing the dawning realisation that they have been strung along by the SNP, who have failed to deliver on independence”.
Speculation is mounting that other leading SNP grumps, including veteran MSP Fergus Ewing and Western Isles MP Angus MacNeil, may soon tear up their party cards too. Salmond, who came within a jury’s verdict of having his career ended three years ago, is having the time of his life, once again upsetting the Scottish political apple cart.
The key question, however, is whether these defections to Alba amount to a few bruised egos wanting their moment in the sun, or whether their disaffection with the SNP is representative of a larger and more significant electoral shift in Scotland. Polling evidence has, in truth, been limited up till now: while the SNP’s poll numbers have fallen since Nicola Sturgeon’s departure, the party continues to cling onto its lead in Scotland, a few points ahead of Labour. Meanwhile, Alba has flopped electorally so far, registering only 1.6% of the vote in its first election in 2021.
Nationalist grumpiness is undoubtedly now a problem for the SNP, though. The result of the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election last month suggested that many core supporters decided not to bother coming out to vote. A combination of disillusionment over the party’s plans for independence and dissatisfaction with its record in government is taking its toll. Humza Yousaf has sought to coax these doubting voters with some red meat — declaring that if the SNP wins a majority of seats in Scotland at the general election, he’ll begin independence negotiations the day after.
But do they believe this stuff anymore? These people spent a decade listening to Sturgeon telling them independence was just round the corner and that they had to vote SNP to get it. They then watched on open-mouthed as she decided in February that she’d actually had enough. They are entitled to feel at least a little sceptical over whether Yousaf’s brand of reheated Sturgeonism will turn out to be anything more substantial.
Rather ungraciously, responding to Regan’s defection at the weekend, the First Minister declared that her departure was “no great loss”. In a parliament where he rules with a majority, that may be so. But Yousaf cannot be quite so sanguine about the voters who may follow Regan, either by shifting to Salmond’s Alba Party, or by refusing to come out and vote next year.
The SNP’s supporters are rightly narked at the moment. It’s not at all clear whether their leader has the political skills to cheer them up.
Eddie Barnes is a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail and director of the Our Scottish Future think tank.
EddieBarnes23
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SubscribeGrumpy Scots? Now I’ve heard of everything.
SCOTCH.
Make mine a double.
It’s not difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with grievance and a ray of sunshine.PG Woodhouse
If anything because the latter is in short supply in Scotland.
Cancel the Barnett formulae (£41 billion) and let them have something to be really grumpy about.
Hear hear!
No fan of the former FM, but this is a strange way of saying he was found not guilty in a court of law.
Are any of the Nats actually promising to govern Scotland properly?
I think that the Scottish and Welsh assemblies are more concerned about quotas of trans-people in their respective administrations, than actually governing.
I recently joined Plaid Cymru to find out more about them, especially their environmental policy. I received an email in return (effectively) saying that they had subcontracted their views to the Green Party.
It seems to me that the politicians we have around today are busy fighting for things but if they actually won, they wouldn’t have a clue what to do.
Imagine a policy where you have an aim of buying a small island in the Atlantic. You fight for money, you persuade other people about potential wonders in the future, you will be your own bosses, grow your own food, an idyllic existence. You buy the island, move out your possessions and just as you settle in a few crooks with weapons move in as well. End of idyllic existence!!
If you truly believe in Scottish independence, don’t allow EU technocrats to run any part of your lives or your nation.
If the SNP really loved Freedom, they could start by declaring independence from the Greens.
The correct English plural noun for persons unfortunate enough to be living north of Hadrian’s Wall, is, according to the late ‘Dr’ Johnson, the SCOTCH.
And according to the later, late Hugh Trevor-Roper.
“There is in Scotland a diffusion of learning, a certain portion of it widely and thinly spread. A merchant has as much learning as one of their clergy.”*
(*’Dr’SJ.)
That’s quite a lot. I remember visiting the tiny village church where my uncle was an elder, and about half the Ministers had been DD, which is a higher doctorate by publication.
The pithy quote from Dr Johnson might be alluding to the very narrow learning of the clergy in the 18th Century. Back then, many in the Kirk would have disapproved of poetry, drama, music, novels and even classics. Their education and training was almost exclusively Bible-focussed and they were ruling parts of Scotland like an Iranian theocracy. Under Scots law, each parish church was a court of law and itsKirk Elders acted as a morality police.
A typical minister of the Kirk, even with a DD would have struck Dr Johnson as a dullard.
I carry no candle for the Church of Scotland, but that description of it in the eighteenth century is simply rubbish. As much as anything else, a four-year Scottish Honours MA, which was and is much like an American liberal arts degree, was the prerequisite for admission to the BD programme, which itself took another four years. All of the Ministers had been at university for eight years, only four of them reading Theology. All of them.
I am a member of the Church of Scotland and I have studied the Church of Scotland in the 18th Century very carefully.I have published peer-reviewed papers on the subject, as well as giving papers on the subject at specialist conferences. For all of your abusive remarks, you clearly are not well acquainted with the period. If you really are interested (which I doubt), a good starting point for you would be:
“An educated clergy. Scottish theological education and training in the kirk and secession, 1560-1850” by Brown, Stewart J; Whytock, Jack C. The Journal of Ecclesiastical History; Cambridge Vol. 59, Iss. 3, (Jul 2008): 568-569. DOI:10.1017/S0022046908004995
You will discover that theological training in the 18th Century was not like at all like “an American liberal arts degree”.
My post was about the 18th Century, so a bit before your uncle’s time. Please read posts a bit more carefully and please don’t resort to abuse of fellow readers. Fortunately, Unherd readers tend to show more tolerance for competing views than is found in other platforms. Let’s keep it that way.
Well said Sir!