SNP conference: The hill Humza Yousaf has to climb

Somewhat surprised, I asked why. To be told that every day in Holyrood, Bashir would look up at the hill, which he could see from his office, and say to Humza that one day they would climb it.  

Bashir had died before Humza had to figure out how to help his significantly older mentor to the top. He was, he said, going to climb it for him, on his own.

Over this past week, as the now First Minister visibly wrestles with balancing his new role and responsibilities with the personal trauma of knowing his children’s grandparents have not yet been able to get out of Gaza, Humza Yousaf could be forgiven for feeling that there is no end to the hills he is both personally and politically being asked to climb.

Liz Lloyd is former chief of staff to Nicola Sturgeon (Image: Liz Lloyd)

Scottish politics is not however, known for its sentimentality and with the SNP conference looming there is no shortage of political hot takes available to the First Minister if he wants distracting from his difficulties.

What has been slower to emerge is calm, sober and dispassionate analysis of the party’s challenge as it heads toward the next Westminster and Holyrood elections. 

It may be obvious once it’s said, but the party has only won at Westminster, by which I mean a majority of seats in Scotland, under one SNP leader.  

That successive chaotic Tory governments delivered Sturgeon the chance to secure three wins in less than five years, helped create a picture of Westminster dominance that has been readily accepted, but doesn’t match reality.

Labour held the majority of seats in Scotland for decades. This coming election will determine if the SNP can manage that for just one ten-year stint.

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Equally, two deeply depressing Westminster elections in 2005 and 2010 where the party secured only six seats, were followed by unexpected levels of Holyrood election success which in the SNP, short of independence, is the hill the party most wants to climb.

No one in the SNP or Labour will ever forget that in 2011, on the run in to the election that would deliver the SNP an unprecedented majority in the Scottish Parliament, the party was at one point 20 points behind Labour in the polls.

These blasts from Scotland’s electoral past are not intended to either do down the SNP’s chances at Westminster or to negate the seriousness of the recent result in Rutherglen, but to simply remind those, outside the party as well as in it, that SNP success in a Westminster election remains very much the anomaly, not yet the rule.

That does not in any way mean that the SNP should, simply because Labour are beginning to look like they could credibly form a government, concede the election as a foregone conclusion.

Rather that the challenge from a resurgent Labour Party that Humza and his Westminster leader Stephen Flynn face as they come together for conference in Aberdeen, is one that no previous SNP leadership team has answered to the voters' satisfaction. 

Stephen Flynn, SNP leader in Westminster (Image: PA)

And to rely on constitutional preference alone to pull voters across the line would, both history and current trends tell us, be a mistake. 

In short, experience says not just that Labour should win in Scotland but that they should already be winning.  

So as the SNP searches for a way forward, the right path must surely be found in identifying why there is still a question mark over whether Labour or the SNP will succeed in Scotland.

On the Labour side, voters' memories of past disappointments undoubtedly play a part in it. The Scottish electorate are pump primed through years of experience, to see UK governments of all colours as ultimately letting them down.

The vagueness of Starmer’s offer, one that does not yet put a single extra penny in the pockets of a household struggling with the cost of living crisis, may be another part of the puzzle.

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However, just as voters are giving Labour a window of opportunity in which to fail, they also seem to be hanging back to give Yousaf and the SNP the space in which to succeed.

Voters have not yet heard a vision of how the SNP would work with the widely assumed Labour government.

They clearly want to see improvements in post-pandemic public services.

And while the electorate appears to welcome support on the cost of living, the actual putting of pounds into pockets, it is not yet getting easier for most households.

Perhaps most importantly, it seems the public largely continue to believe that the SNP, as a team, is on their side; a sentiment that played a significant part in those three special Westminster wins. 

Humza Yousaf speaking at a service of solidarity at Giffnock Newton Mearns Synagogue (Image: Eloise Bishop)

That vibe is part policy delivery and part personality. And if Yousaf wants to be the first to show that the SNP can win seats against a resurgent Labour Party, then he might want to start there.

Humza Yousaf cannot solve the party’s problems with one conference speech nor should he, this time, be expected to.

What he can do, and as a new leader he has to do, is to leave the voters and viewers feeling that the SNP is once again on their side.

If he does that, he may just begin the journey back up the hill.