The SNP faithful gather in Edinburgh today to kick off their first post-defeat party conference in over a decade. It will open with an internal election review to be led by the First Minister and Leader of the SNP, John Swinney, but discussions of the party's General Election defeat and the path to the Holyrood elections in 2026 will not end there.

Instead, the weekend will be dominated by a handful of central questions: why did the SNP lose on July 4? Could a different strategy have produced better results? Can it win in 2026, and what strategy could deliver victory? And, perhaps most importantly, what should it do about independence?

Views on the reasons for the party’s defeat vary among SNP politicians and ordinary members. Personalities feature heavily, and some former MPs have explicitly blamed specific people, like Nicola Sturgeon, for their defeat. Undoubtedly, scandals and bruising leadership contests have eroded support for the SNP, but focusing on personnel will lead them to the wrong conclusion: that if they just get the right personalities in front of the public, they can return to winning ways. Their strategic challenges are much more fundamental than that.

Read more by Mark McGeoghegan

The landscape of Scottish politics has shifted under the SNP’s feet and the strategies that produced successive election victories between 2011 and 2022 no longer work. Its General Election victory in 2019, for example, was achieved with a voter coalition bound together by the support for independence and their opposition to Brexit. Those two issues dominated the campaign, with an Ipsos poll before the election finding that Brexit was a "very important" issue in deciding what way to vote for 55% of Scots, with 34% saying independence was. 42% of voters fell into a pro-independence plus pro-Remain camp, and the SNP provided them with a natural home.

In July, Brexit was a top issue for just 4% of Scottish voters and independence was a driver of vote choice for just 17%. The dominant issues of the campaign were the economy and public services, with the governing parties at both Westminster and Holyrood judged primarily on their records, not their constitutional politics.

That independence is on the back burner is obvious. The SNP didn’t put it there, and as frustrated as many in the independence movement are with the SNP’s lack of progress in pushing forward their cause, the party is not empowered to force the issue. It is the voters who deprioritised constitutional politics, and winning again will necessitate accepting that reality - at least for now.

This analysis and conclusion is fairly self-evident to me, and I’ve enunciated both in much greater detail elsewhere. But not everyone agrees, not least of all within the SNP itself. There are plenty of SNP activists and politicians who feel that the party, far from looking myopic in its focus on independence, should have pushed the issue even harder. There are two main versions of this argument that I am familiar with – that it is the SNP’s responsibility to permanently campaign for independence to drive up support, and that focusing on independence mobilises the 45% of voters (or thereabouts) who support secession.

John Swinney faces a major test this weekendJohn Swinney faces a major test this weekend (Image: PA)

Both of these arguments are flawed. In the first instance, the Scottish electorate is polarised on the constitutional question and there are few minds open to being changed by politicians and political parties endlessly pushing their point of view. Building a majority for independence is likely a very long-term task and one that a party which seeks to govern cannot focus on to the exception of the voters’ priorities.

The latter argument, I’m afraid, is nonsensical. Issues only mobilise voters who think those issues are pressing, and Scottish public opinion data is very clear that few voters prioritise independence right now.

Nevertheless, the notion that the solution to the SNP’s political problems is to adopt an even harder-line approach to independence will be a comforting one for the party’s members. Like The Simpsons’ Principal Skinner, they will be tempted to conclude that no, they are not out of touch, it’s the voters who are wrong.

Except the voters are never wrong, even when they are. The first step to winning any election is accepting that fact. The last thing voters want to hear coming from the SNP after this weekend’s conference is another wheeze to secure an independence mandate. What they need to hear is an acknowledgement of why the SNP lost  - the dissatisfaction with living standards, the failure of public services, the hunger for change - and a recommitment to addressing the pressing policy issues facing the Scottish Government.

If the SNP is to come out of its conference with a clear message in line with what voters want to hear, the leadership are going to have to confront the tendency within the membership to double down on independence and will have to deliver some home truths.

The most crucial of these is the fact that a second independence referendum is not going to happen soon - by which I mean, it will not happen in this decade - and will not happen until there is sustained, clear majority support for independence. The structures of power in the UK are such that the only path to a referendum is to demonstrate that independence has become the settled will of the Scottish people.

If Mr Swinney and his team do go down this path, they will have to deal with a difficult party management problem. Few SNP members will be pleased if they feel that the same leaders who have repeatedly marched them up the hill since 2016 are now telling them it was all for nought. It would be understandable, amid scandals, financial worries, and a plummeting membership, if Mr Swinney tries instead to strike a compromise - but that would still be a deadly error.

This is an argument that Mr Swinney has to make and needs to win if he is to begin the work of repositioning the SNP ahead of the 2026 Holyrood elections. Other opportunities to build support for independence will emerge in the long run – sooner than later if Scots sour on Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour. But now is not the time. Voters need the SNP to be a party focused on delivering for Scots, and that’s how it must position itself, no matter how painful the internal wrangling may be.

Mark McGeoghegan is a Glasgow University researcher of nationalism and contentious politics and an Associate Member of the Centre on Constitutional Change. He can be found on BlueSky @markmcgeoghegan.bsky.social