Rutherglen and Hamilton West: Only populism can save SNP now

Inevitably, depressingly, the SNP has started the excuses.

It was turnout, it was apathy, it was the weather. Sorry SNP, your brutal defeat in Rutherglen was down to none of those factors. It was you. Your party, your government, your failure. Own it.

But where did failure really start? It wasn’t with Humza Yousaf. The inadequacies, chaos and infighting since his administration began certainly helped deepen defeat. But for the root of the problem, we must look back to Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation.

Sturgeon was perhaps the slickest political operator this country has ever seen. The force of her personality and rhetoric covered up for the party’s consistent failures in government and managed to hold together a movement of conflicting wings and beliefs.

Once Sturgeon quit she left a vacuum that nobody could fill. Without her, the SNP’s weak policy ambitions became apparent to anyone but the most blinkered partisan. Her departure led to a leadership contest that appalled the SNP’s progressive supporters: often former Labour voters who came to back independence not through nationalism but in the belief a Yes vote might build a better, fairer society.

The leadership contest showed these progressives that behind Sturgeon lay a seething mass of social conservatives and outright populists. Frankly, the sight sickened them. It was this, much more than the subsequent police inquiries and arrests, which ruined the SNP.

So the SNP proved itself both incapable of governing well, and to be something – at least to progressives – other than it seemed. The Labour Party under Keir Starmer may offer the weakest draught of social democracy imaginable, but in the face of a Conservative government that seems to have lost all sense of proportion, and is today travelling to the hard right, Scottish progressives clearly now feel that getting the Tories out is a far greater priority than lending any more trust to Yousaf.

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Rutherglen signals a strong Labour win at Westminster. The SNP will have zero influence over a Starmer majority government. The SNP’s only hope now is clinging onto power at Holyrood in 2026.

That may now be an impossible hill to climb, though. The knives will be out for Yousaf, and split parties don’t win elections. The SNP is quite likely to cut its own throat so catastrophically over coming months that it guarantees its own defeat in 2026.

The only real chance of success depends on the SNP doing something rather unpleasant: an appeal to populism. Having failed at governing, all the party has left is independence. Support for independence remains buoyant with roughly half the nation still Yes voters. 

SNP candidate Katy Loudon's loss to Labour's Michael Shanks shows the only way to go for the SNP is strong populist rhetoric and action (Image: Newsquest)
To maintain power, the SNP has to play the indy card like it has never played it before, and that could mean ramping up the rhetoric of grievance and antagonism. Evidently, an out-of-control Tory Party would play into the SNP’s hands if it chose this course.

Has Humza Yousaf got it in him to get down and dirty? Probably not, as he seems, at heart, a progressive. Even if he tried such antics, it would appear phoney. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of characters in the party who would more than happily make politics even uglier than it is today.

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And of course, Yousaf may find himself dethroned if Labour hammer the SNP in Scotland at the UK general election, leaving the door open to a much more ruthless and disreputable leader… taking the party who knows where?

Perhaps, the SNP should look at what’s happened to the Tories for the fate of parties that run out of road, ideas and hope. It’s a dark, cautionary tale.