Kevin McKenna: How the SNP took Scotland for a ride

Ah yes, those trade links. I’m sure such trips are motivated by a genuine desire to spark interest in Scotland from global business leaders and foreign governments. Everybody says so. It’s just that, well … places like Possilpark, Wester Hailes and Shettleston can never quite access the benefits of the SNP flying club’s selfless devotion to international travel.

The wholesale meltdown that’s engulfed the SNP over the last three weeks indicates that, at the very top of the party, a sort of political Ponzi scheme has been operating.

This is how it works: you, the members, must give us your money and trust us to invest it in the struggle for independence. However, you must never ask us any questions about how your money has been deployed.

In the NEC footage obtained by the Sunday Mail, Ms Sturgeon says: “I’m not going to get into the details … but just be very careful about suggestions there are problems with the party’s finances, because we depend on donors. There are no reasons for people to be concerned about the party’s finances, and all of us need to be careful about not suggesting there is.”

So there we have it. In most well-run and honest enterprises, suggestions that there may be a problem with the finances usually meets with a pledge to investigate the matter and report back soonest. In the SNP you’re told to keep your mouth shut lest it interrupt the cash flow from the rank and file membership.

Henceforth, the phrase “taken for a ride” will link to this found footage of a serving First Minister of Scotland hectoring the body which is supposed to ordain proper financial governance of her party.

Several of us – both inside the SNP and out – have been casting doubt on its commitment to independence. For the handful of commentators asking such questions, responses rarely get much worse than being accused by the party’s gargoyle division of being Yoons and Red Tories. Occasionally, some of the leadership’s favoured lickspittles in the media will respond with suitably soothing and unctuous hagiographies of the former First Minister. Less truth to power, more soothe to power.

For those inside the party it can result in being bullied, intimidated and threatened. And all of it orchestrated by the leadership. In the leaked footage, Ms Sturgeon furiously seeks to close down discussion of the finances. Someone called “Alison” is targeted. The message is clear: “I know it was you, Fredo.” It’s the sort of behaviour which forced people like Joanna Cherry to resign from the NEC.

And so, we’ll ask again: has the party in the Sturgeon era ever been serious about independence? Even if the ongoing police investigation into the party’s finances concludes there’s nothing to see here, one thing is clear: whatever that missing £670k was spent on, it had little or nothing to do with independence.

In Ms Sturgeon’s nine years as SNP leader the independence movement has undergone a quiet metamorphosis. The ordinary members believed it to be driven by them through their cash donations and hundreds of hours of street-by-street, unpaid campaigning.

Yet, all the time, those in receipt of their largesse have been viewing independence as an enterprise zone based on a fiendishly simple business model: condemn the Tories; stand up for Scotland; win elections; give your friends and family key appointments to ensure loyalty and keep the gravy train chugging along.

And then hire dozens of spin doctors and researchers, costing £1m per annum (and rising) for the purpose of briefing against any of the awkward squad foolish enough to question the leadership’s real motives. Meanwhile, assemble an army of malevolent young misogynists in cheap suits and North Face duffel bags to issue threats against women who believe in the self-evident truth that fully intact men identifying as women “are at it”.

A feature of several conversations I’ve had with party activists, journalists and Yes supporters in recent weeks is that a spell in opposition will be good for the SNP and that it will result in a clear-out of all the bad actors. After all, independence is a long game and many who have passed on could never have dreamed that their cause could have come this far. Being a glass-half-full sort of chiel, I wish I could share their optimism.

The membership had a chance of slopping out the stables during the recent leadership election. But rather than elect either of the two women who had pledged to do just that they gave the job to a leadership glove puppet whose first action was to promote a division of like-minded political misfits and mediocrities into government.

This party has laid waste to the prospects for independence and exposed Scotland to international ridicule, a latter-day Freedonia presided over by politicians channelling Groucho, Zeppo, Chico and Harpo. It’s not a spell in opposition that’s required here, it’s a winding-up of the entire party.

If the SNP are voted out of government in 2026, then what? Scottish Labour is similarly full of inarticulate party hacks and led by a millionaire who sent his children to a fee-paying, educational facility. His family fortune derives from a business that didn’t pay its lowest-paid workers a real Living Wage and refused to recognise trade unions.

This Scottish branch takes its orders from another millionaire who has decreed that members caught in possession of Socialist tendencies risk expulsion and who has been in lock-step with the Tories over immigration policy. He’s banned his elected members from supporting trade union strike action, somehow believes that empowering Big Business will improve the economic outlook for the masses and thinks that one Union Jack on his office wall is one too few.

Almost 200 years of something self-identifying as a democracy has given us a political class characterised by graft, mediocrity and exploitation.