Why SNP faces historic defeat in 2026 Holyrood elections unless we change quickly

After our trouncing in the general election, John Swinney was frank about the need for my party to pause and engage in a period of soul searching. But where does the soul of the SNP lie?

The young Tom Nairn had a few ideas. In characteristically vivid prose, Nairn declaimed to the readers of the New Left Review that an “evil mélange of decrepit Presbyterianism and imperialist thuggery, whose spirit may be savoured by a few mornings with the Edinburgh Scotsman… appears to be solidly represented in the Scottish National Party.”

I share Nairn’s words not to traduce my own party or, dear editor, in an attempt to get myself bounced out of two jobs in one week. Rather I want to highlight how absurd his description sounds when one attempts to apply it to the modern SNP. Who today can do anything but laugh when they read his warnings of a Calvinist Scottish Parliament, and the “rough-hewn sadism that will surely be present in whatever junta of corporal punishers and Kirk-going cheese-parers Mrs Ewing might preside over one day in Edinburgh”?

After all, the character of political parties is not immutable. We have watched as Keir Starmer grabbed the horns of the Labour party and, through determined and deliberate force of will, changed it from the inside out in a few short years.

At the same time, we have seen how successive leaders of the Conservative party have – without noticing or perhaps without caring – presided over the slow transformation of “the world’s most successful political party” into a cabal of lunatics, incompetents and ne'er-do-wells interested in nothing further than their own noses. Political parties are in a state of constant flux. The central question is how that change comes to happen: by accident or by design?

In recent years, the SNP has changed by accident. Individual actions taken at the highest echelons of our party for short-term political gain – such as the concealment of falling membership numbers and the backing of a minister who misled Holyrood’s presiding officer – have slowly deformed the character of the SNP.

Restore lost reputation

From this death by a thousand cuts, to debacles like Humza Yousaf unwittingly kicking the political foundations out from under his own government, we have slowly lost our reputation for integrity and competence among much of the Scottish public. We need to face up to that. This has happened because all of us in the SNP have allowed our party to drift, and because too few parliamentarians – me included – spoke out as we watched it happen.

George Foulkes once took to the airwaves to condemn an SNP that was “deliberately” trying to create a situation where public services in Scotland are manifestly better than those in England, and we’ve spent years dining out on that without realising it misses the point: are they better than they were five years ago? In many cases they are not, and that’s what matters. Today, we run the risk of being consigned to irrelevance by voters who no longer see us as a serious party of government.

The warning signs have been flashing for some time. Our debates around issues that define the SNP have, over the course of successive years and successive leaders, been allowed to descend into fact-free fantasy football territory.

SNP fairy tales

Simple and central questions, like “would unionist voters accept the legitimacy of a de facto referendum?” or “what would the UK Prime Minister’s view on a post-Yes Trident removal timetable be?” are waved away. Our internal party culture has become warped over time as successive leaders have smiled benignly over these parodies of policy debates, preferring an onanistic, self-indulgent and wasted conference weekend to one newspaper headline about rifts or splits.

In the worldview that has been allowed to develop, paid-up members of the SNP are the central agents of political change; the idea that other constituencies and institutions might exist and have their own interests rarely gets a look in. Yet in failing to consider the world beyond the conference centre, we condemn the minutes of SNP debates to be mentally shelved by the voting public along with fairy tales and other works of fantasy.

A serious political culture in the party would not permit a second’s breath to be wasted on debates which do not in any way advance our political programme. It would not have allowed Humza Yousaf to be elevated to the office of First Minister without a clear policy platform or defining political vision, or for senior members of the SNP to stand in a circular firing squad and delude each other into believing that the Michael Matheson scandal was a “political bubble” issue. We have come seriously adrift.

Intellectual honesty and a clear vision

Unless addressed head-on, this problem will only metastasise. Unless there is a significant and defining political renewal within the party, we are in line for a generational defeat in the Scottish Parliament elections in 2026. To head this off now, we need to urgently rebuild a culture of intellectual honesty and develop a clear, pragmatic vision for Scotland's future that resonates with voters beyond our base.

We must rebuild our reputation for competence and integrity through our actions and align our priorities with those of the Scottish people. We must fight for the soul of the SNP and, as the noble Baron Foulkes once maligned us, we must do it all deliberately.

If such a task is possible, there is one person whom I trust above all others to carry it out. It is perhaps my only consolation that this person is currently the leader of our party and already stands in position to carry out the changes needed. John Swinney is a deeply thoughtful and fiercely political man whose devotion to public service and the people of Scotland is a known fact. What’s more, I know that nothing I have written above will come as a surprise to him. He must be ruthless in acting on it now.

Stewart McDonald is the former SNP MP for Glasgow South