The Scottish National Party is a proper, grown up, infantile, deranged party, just like all the other proper political parties in the democratic world. Splits, factions, rows, personality differences, opposing wings, strategic and tactical differences and ideological barnies are the very stuff of party politics. Indeed, it’s all those things that have led to the near destruction of the Conservative and Unionist Party. In the case of the Tories, it is the obsession with Europe that has brought it close to the knacker’s yard.
The Conservative Party now looks like a poor man’s Reform. Its core strength as the democratic world’s oldest continuing political party was its ability to attract votes from squires, country lawyers, the urban middle classes and blue-collar workers. In the years immediately after the Second World War it was pro-Europe and supportive of the post-war consensus of the big state in health, welfare and education. Until 1979, all Tory prime ministers – Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Harold McMillan, Alec Douglas Home and Edward Heath – followed the same path.
Thatcher’s legacy
Margaret Thatcher changed all that, shifting the UK to a free-market economy and cutting the size of the state, mainly through privatisation. But she kept the UK firmly in Europe, while staying loyal to the alliance with the USA. She won three general elections, mainly because she had the votes of “Worcester Woman” and “Mondeo Man”.
What those terms meant was that she captured ‘ordinary England’. An England of mortgages, two kids at state schools, a dad who was an area manager for a building company and a mum who worked part time as a senior nurse; of holidays that were two weeks in Spain and family Sunday lunches of roast beef and grandad playing cricket in the garden with the children. Margaret Thatcher won their trust.
It was Thatcher’s grip on ‘Middle England’ that kept her in the top job for a 20th century record-breaking, 11 years and 208 days. She was undone when she introduced the Poll Tax, a local government tax that favoured the well off but not ordinary families. Her most important instinct had deserted her. Her party then deserted her.
Tony Blair’s New Labour
Central to Tony Blair’s strategy of making the Labour Party electable, was the realisation that Labour’s post-war success in creating a healthier and better educated working class had built a huge, once working class, demographic. Then as now, that demographic aspires to middle class life, home ownership, financial security, white collar work and decent schools for their children. The NHS was considered sacrosanct. Blair won three general elections in a row.
Scots are little different
Why might all this be of relevance to John Swinney and the SNP’s dream of independence? Well apart from the likelihood that grandpa and the kids will be playing football in the garden and not cricket, Scotland’s ordinary people are little different from their southern equivalents. They too have mortgages, middle-ranking jobs, kids at state schools and Spanish holidays. They aspire to a better life and a better life for their kids. Win them, give them confidence and trust in government, and winning independence becomes easier.
According to current polling, the SNP will be the biggest party at Holyrood after the 2026 Scottish general election. It’s likely that it will be the senior partner in a coalition with the Scottish Greens or Scottish Lib Dems. Being the government again, after 18 years at the helm would be a remarkable achievement. It might even secure an outright majority and negotiate a new independence referendum. In that case, it would be wise to give voters permission to believe that not only would Scotland be a new sovereign land, but that its political standards would lead the world.
SNP in Holyrood and Reform in Westminster?
Might the SNP win again in 2030? It’s possible that by then the UK has a Reform Government led by Nigel Farage. The SNP in Edinburgh and Farage in London will not be comfortable bed fellows. Scottish voters may well be turned off by his overt English nationalism, thus delivering the SNP yet another term or a big mandate for independence.
But Farage is no fool. He will use carrot and stick to keep Scotland in the Union. He might succeed. He will have many of the levers of economic control and there can be little doubt that most media, on left and right, will take the Unionist side. He’ll have the nuclear option of legislating to close Holyrood, though simply blocking Scottish legislation and starving Holyrood of money will be his first instinct. It’s also possible that Scotland’s voters will have grown tired of the SNP and find the Union a more conducive immediate future for the country.
All this leads to the contention that the Scottish Government term from 2026 to 2030 may be the SNP’s last chance for years or decades to secure independence.
New legs for independence
To keep the independence case alive and in an effort to give it new legs, John Swinney’s government has recently published, A fresh start for independence. The paper puts forward a perfectly rational case for independence and a range of policy proposals, the most prominent being the strong emphasis on European Union membership. In the paper, the SNP proposes a written constitution for Scotland.
There is though something vital missing in A fresh start for independence. I found no mention of the place of trust in the institutions of Scottish Government, in Scottish politicians and in the democratic process itself. This is a critically important issue. When governments and political institutions fall in public esteem, they are deemed less legitimate, their mandate to govern becomes weaker.
Falling trust in governments
The latest Scottish Social Attitudes survey, from the Scottish Centre for Social Research, shows a big fall in trust in the Scottish Government. It stands now at 47%, down from 61% in 2019 and from 81% when the devolution era started in 1999.
Falling confidence in democracy and its institutions is found across the world. Trust in business, media and NGOs is also falling. Burson Marstellar, the global public relations company, has for 25 years published each January the findings of its annual “Trust Barometer”.
In 2025, the survey found that 61% percent of people surveyed had a sense of grievance. The more people feel aggrieved, the less they trust. It also found that “when trust increases, economic optimism overpowers grievance”. Government was distrusted in seventeen of the 28 countries polled. The UK came 25th (last in 2024). The belief that leaders – across politics and business – ‘lie to us all the time’, was at an all-time high in Britain.
There was a 52% fall in trust overall in 17 countries. Burson Marsteller will publish its next Trust Barometer in January 2026. Given how politically tumultuous 2025 has been, it would be a brave person who forecasts a rise in trust in governments. Will UK trust have risen or fallen? Who would bet on the latter?
Decades of sleaze and scandal
Few would disagree that social media has contributed to the ceaseless chipping away of trust in government. In the UK, we’ve also had decades of sleaze and scandal, most recently around the Post Office, Hillsborough, Grenfell and the VIP lane set up by the Tories to procure personal protection equipment through friends and donors. In England, water companies pour raw sewage into rivers.
Some of our biggest newspapers were found to be engaged in mass, illegal, phone-tapping. In November, the former leader of the Reform party in Wales and former UKIP Member of the European Parliament will be sentenced for taking bribes from Russia. He used his positions of trust to further Russian interests. Nor can we forget that Boris Johnson and his friends partied inside No10 Downing Street during national lockdown.
Scotland has had its own scandals, the longest running being that around the ferries built at Port Glasgow, which were years late and many millions over budget. While there is absolutely no suggestion of criminality or financial impropriety, the issue has damaged the reputation of the shipbuilders, the ferry company and the Scottish Government, and public confidence in them all. Scotland’s reputation as a nation that built the world’s greatest ships has been damaged. In 2008, Scotland’s standing as a place of financial skill was globally exploded by the failure of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
What would a ‘new’ Scotland look like?
If the SNP is offering a ‘new’ Scotland, it might be wise to think about how citizens of the promised land might be persuaded that things really will be different; that politics and public life will be constitutionally held to a much higher standard than now. Building constitutional safeguards around how public life is conducted must be central to any discussion on how Scotland is to be governed post-independence.
There are some areas of political life that surely every voter would like to see tightened. They include: political party funding, think tanks’ charitable status, limits on funds from corporate or special interest groups, rules around foreign donors, corporate sponsorship of parliamentary interns and funding to support MSPs, real time recording of donations on a public website, and quarterly published reports on party spending and sources of money.
Every reader of this article is likely to have a list of their own. My own favourite is that anyone contributing to a political party in Scotland must have their permanent home in Scotland and pay Scottish tax on all their income, wherever it comes from.
EU trailblazing
In early October, the European Commission published new rules governing political advertising.
Scotland is of course not in the EU anymore and neither the Scottish Parliament nor the Scottish Government has any authority over media regulation and very little say in electoral law. However, I’d like to hear John Swinney announce that an independent Scotland would immediately adopt the new European rules, even before it applies for EU membership. He might even have his clever people look to see what, if any, aspect of the new rules could be made law in Scotland now.
In July, Swinney called for the setting up of a “Constitutional Convention” to marshal support for Scottish independence. Maybe there is a precursor to that; a ‘Commission on Trust’. Fifteen ‘good Scots and true’ to propose how public life is governed in an independent Scotland and how democracy can be made more legitimate and more resilient. Give it six months to report. No extensions.
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