FTI Consulting Public Affairs Snapshot: Scotland after Sturgeon – Where next for the SNP?

Despite the division caused by the 2014 referendum campaign, which ended in disappointment for the Scottish independence movement, ‘Yes’ voters rallied behind the SNP, leading to a significant post-vote bounce. SNP membership numbers accelerated at a rapid pace as a new generation of activists who had found the independence movement during the referendum joined the party. This was the context in which Nicola Sturgeon took over as First Minister, before the 2015 General Election just eight months later provided her first real test as SNP leader.

The leaders’ debates during the election were Sturgeon’s big introduction to the wider UK public and were generally seen as a triumph for the First Minister. The search query “Can I vote SNP in England?” trended on Google during the debates, and the party went on to secure a landslide result, taking 56 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats and leaving Labour, the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats with just one Scottish MP each.

The period following the election was a transformative period for the SNP as they found themselves, much to their own surprise, the third-largest party in Westminster. With Sturgeon’s main internal competition and predecessor, Alex Salmond, now sitting in Westminster as an MP, the circumstances had never been better for a new First Minister to make their mark on Holyrood and reshape the party in their own image.

Sturgeon’s leadership shifted the SNP to the left, with the 2016 Scottish election manifesto promising to focus on issues such as tackling the educational attainment gap, making sure the NHS is fit for the future, and delivering more and better paid jobs. It was also during this election that Sturgeon made her first pledge to review and reform the gender recognition legislation that has brought so much scrutiny and controversy in recent months. Despite the SNP remaining the largest party at Holyrood throughout her premiership, critics would argue that all three of these policy areas have largely stagnated, or even regressed.

For all of Sturgeon’s successes as a campaigner and a communicator, tangible and impactful policy was often found wanting. Sturgeon excelled in First Minister’s Questions and in televised performances but had few real legislative successes.  Importantly though, and despite difficulty delivering meaningful change at home, Sturgeon had completed the SNP’s transformation, from a fringe party with a handful of elected representatives, to the dominant force in Scottish politics and its main party of government.

While Sturgeon’s core legacy is the SNP’s newfound dominance at the ballot box, her time as First Minister was not without attempts to shape the legislative agenda. Her leadership was a departure from the direction the party had taken under her predecessors, with a heavy emphasis on welfare policies that looked to northern Europe for inspiration, diverging from the approach taken by the UK Government at Westminster.

Her introduction of the Scandinavian-inspired ‘Baby Box’ was applauded by some as an attempt to decrease infant mortality, ensuring newborns across Scotland are provided with basic necessities and supporting new parents. Opposition politicians criticised the cost of the measure, which grew far beyond original estimates, as well as its universal nature which provided free goods to middle class parents who could afford to pay for them.

The new Scottish Social Security System, passed in 2018, was another milestone as Sturgeon tried to instill the ‘principles of dignity, fairness and respect’ into Scotland’s welfare state. These principles underpinned the new Child Disability Payment and Adult Disability Payment, which diverge from the UK-wide benefits system. But even this flagship reform was met with difficulties, with the roll-out of the new system being marred by delays and cost overruns, including a £39 million overspend on IT.

Undoubtedly, Sturgeon’s most important moments as First Minister came during the initial year of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Sturgeon copied the daily briefings given by Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock during the pandemic, often taking to the airwaves early to announce slightly different Scotland-only versions of policies that would be announced in England later that day. This approach was certainly fruitful for the First Minister as she consistently polled above the other UK heads of government, with four in five Scots indicating in 2020 that they felt she had handled the viral outbreak well.

However, while she undoubtedly outmaneuvered her political opponents and appeared decisive to the public, critics claimed that she undermined the pandemic response, with former Boris Johnson advisor Dominic Cummings telling a committee of MPs that information could not be properly shared at COBRA meetings Sturgeon attended as a result.

She was also credited for her introduction of a rent freeze and eviction ban during the opening year of the pandemic, which are set to expire on 26 February. No such measures have been forthcoming from Westminster despite rents hitting record highs during the cost-of-living crisis.

While Sturgeon is generally praised for her handling of the pandemic, her administration faced its own controversies. The Chief Medical Officer for Scotland, Catherine Calderwood, was forced to resign in April 2020 after it emerged that she had visited her second home on consecutive weekends during the first lockdown, and Sturgeon was forced to suspend SNP MP Margaret Ferrier after it was revealed she had travelled from London to Glasgow following a positive COVID-19 test. Ferrier remains suspended to this day, reflecting just how damaging Sturgeon felt her actions had been to her government’s pandemic messaging and her party’s reputation.

However, despite the First Minister’s efforts, the worst horrors of the pandemic were to be seen in Scotland’s care homes, where thousands of vulnerable people died after patients were discharged without first being tested for the virus. In many respects, Sturgeon’s COVID-19 legacy will be written on the back of the Scottish pandemic inquiry, as answers are provided for why Sturgeon and her Cabinet Secretaries got these decisions so badly wrong.

Political stability in the aftermath of the pandemic was hard to come by south of the border, but Sturgeon and the SNP enjoyed favorable polling that was then reflected in the 2021 Holyrood Election by an increase in the SNP’s constituency vote of 240,000. While this only delivered the SNP one additional MSP and they failed to secure a majority in the Scottish Parliament, a coalition deal with the Scottish Greens secured Nicola Sturgeon another five years in Bute House, a tenancy she has now cut short.

When digested in these terms, it is obvious that the fall from grace in the past year has been significant. 2022 proved to be a challenging year for Sturgeon and her administration, and this took a heavier toll on the First Minister than many realised at the time. Things got off to a bad start, with her government picking (and losing) a fight with the UK Supreme Court over whether it was legally competent to legislate for a second referendum on independence.

The day job of running Scotland’s services was also not going well. The educational attainment gap has more than doubled since 2021, with little improvement since Sturgeon cited it as a key policy focus in 2016. Even three years on from the height of Covid, Scotland’s NHS lies in tatters with the pandemic’s ripple effects still being felt. Sturgeon’s flagship recycling policy – the deposit return scheme – looks to be heading for catastrophe with her own MSPs calling its implementation reckless. And then we have gender reform, which has polarised so much of the Scottish electorate and turned rational debate into personal attacks, with one SNP MP citing personal safety concerns as a reason not to attend SNP Annual Conference after she criticised the bill.

For these reasons, and more, it should not come as a surprise that Sturgeon has been considering her position for some months. But the timing remains curious. In less than a month the SNP were set to hold an Independence Strategy conference, which now looks to be postponed, or likely cancelled under a new leader with their own ideas on strategy. So where does the independence movement go next?

With Sturgeon’s departure, the SNP will need a new leader and Scotland a new First Minister. Sturgeon’s dominant position within the party over the last two decades has meant that other than her predecessor Alex Salmond, many of the key contenders to replace her remain relatively unknown to the public at large.

Nominations for the leadership opened at 23:59 on 15 February, the day Sturgeon announced her departure, and will close on 24 February. Should there be more than one candidate, the contest will proceed to a ballot of SNP members, which opens on 13 March and closes at 12:00 on 27 March. The National Secretary of the SNP, Lorna Finn, will announce the result shortly afterward, and the winner will succeed Nicola Sturgeon as First Minister of Scotland following nomination by the Scottish Parliament.

Several key party figures have ruled themselves out as contenders, including Depute First Minister John Swinney, SNP Westminster Group Leader Stephen Flynn, former SNP Westminster Group Leader Angus Robertson MSP, and high-profile Sturgeon critic Joanna Cherry KC MP.

At the time of writing, the declared candidates include:

Kate Forbes MSP (Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch)
The first woman to deliver a Scottish Budget, 32-year-old Finance Secretary and Sturgeon protege Kate Forbes has served as Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy since 2020. Forbes sits on the right of the SNP and critics highlight her personal views on social issues as a potential obstacle to a successful leadership bid. A member of the evangelical Free Church of Scotland, Forbes was the only SNP MSP to not vote on the final voting stage of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill in December 2022, being on maternity leave. Forbes has also made anti-abortion comments in the past and has said that she would not have voted for equal marriage had she been an MSP at the time.

Ash Regan MSP (Edinburgh Eastern)
Edinburgh Eastern MSP Ash Regan announced her candidacy at the weekend. Regan, who resigned as Minister for Community Safety in October 2022 over the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, is another candidate on the right of the SNP and will be competing with Forbes for a similar constituency within the SNP. Notably, Regan supports a strategy of pursuing Scottish independence without holding a referendum vote, proposing to use a simple majority won at a general or Scottish election as public consent to initiate independence negotiations.

Humza Yousaf MSP (Glasgow Pollok)
Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care, Humza Yousaf is also standing for the leadership. A former aide to both Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon, Yousaf became the youngest MSP elected to the Scottish Parliament in 2011, aged just 26, before quickly climbing the ministerial ladder under both the Salmond and Sturgeon administrations. Yousaf has accumulated a significant number of high-profile endorsements and is seen in some quarters as the continuity Sturgeon candidate, sharing her position on the left of the party and, like Sturgeon, representing a Glasgow constituency.

As with any change of leadership, the premiership of whoever eventually succeeds Nicola Sturgeon will be what they make of it. But outside of a forced departure of the kind the Conservative Party experienced twice in 2022, it is difficult to imagine less envious circumstances. The new First Minister will take office amid a raging cost-of-living crisis and ongoing strikes, with crumbling public services and the controversial Gender Recognition Bill (which not all the candidates support) making its way back to the Scottish Parliament.

The contest exposes three key fault lines in the SNP, which the new First Minister will need to work quickly to address.

Firstly, and most importantly, the new they will need to establish a firm public presence and build public trust. Nicola Sturgeon has dominated Scottish politics for almost a decade, having been front and centre through the 2014 referendum, two Scottish elections, three general elections, the Brexit process, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The public are used to seeing Sturgeon on their screens, but even her most senior deputies are relatively unknown figures to most voters. For the SNP to have a serious future post-Sturgeon, this will need to change very quickly.

Secondly, Sturgeon’s successor will need to unite a divided party which is only unified by one thing- a belief in, and pursuit of, Scottish independence. The leadership contest has already thrown up some of these divisions, most visibly over the Gender Recognition Bill, but also in the approach the candidates propose to secure independence. It is important to remember that the SNP do not currently have a majority of seats in the Scottish Parliament and are coalition with the Scottish Greens, placing restrictions on the direction a new leader may choose to take. Already, there have been warnings from the Greens over the policy positions that might be taken by some of the candidates on the right of the party, such as Kate Forbes and Ash Regan, largely over their approach to social issues.

Thirdly, it remains unclear what a new First Minister could do differently to secure independence. An uncharitable interpretation of Nicola Sturgeon’s decision to stand down might be that she has simply run out of road and has no remaining avenues left to pursue- this uncomfortable reality will not change under a new leader. The UK Government has steadfastly refused to grant a Section 30 order for a new referendum and has no incentive to do so. The Conservatives, formally the Conservative and Unionist Party, are ideologically opposed to a second referendum and their fortunes have improved in Scotland under this approach. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has formally ruled out a deal with the SNP and stands to profit immensely from a decline in the SNP’s electoral fortunes.

Sturgeon’s plan, as outlined at the SNP Annual Conference in October, was to go into the next General Election with a single policy manifesto demanding a referendum, the goal being to treat the election as a de facto referendum on the issue of holding a referendum. Despite the pursuit of independence being the SNP’s central cause, this is not usually the approach the SNP takes to elections. The party has enjoyed considerable success by saying the exact opposite to voters- that a vote for the SNP is not necessarily a vote for independence.

This has allowed Sturgeon to accrue support from voters who are uncertain about independence but believe that she and her party sincerely want what is best for Scotland. In 2019, the SNP’s national campaign focussed not on independence, but on Brexit, with Sturgeon travelling the country in a bus covered in “STOP BREXIT” livery.

This ‘de facto referendum’ approach has not been taken in the past because it carries with it its own risks. Firstly, and most obviously, it may fail to deliver the desired result. Not only would a failure to achieve a majority of votes for a campaign of this nature show that there is no mandate for a fresh referendum, but unionist parties would also point to it as evidence of the opposite.

Secondly, the strategy incentivises tactical voting. Not only would the SNP’s campaign make it easy for unionist voters to justify crossing party lines to frustrate nationalist ambitions, it would also squeeze the nationalist vote to the detriment of the SNP’s coalition partners, the Scottish Greens. While there is no requirement for an SNP leader to consult the Greens on their election strategy, an approach that seeks to totally monopolise the independence movement behind the SNP is unlikely to strengthen the relationship between the two parties.

Despite these weaknesses, it is difficult to see a realistic alternative approach. The UK Supreme Court determined, in November 2022, that the Scottish Parliament does not have the power to legislate for a new referendum. Despite protestations that this violates the principle of self-determination, it is a widely accepted international legal norm that constituent parts of states such as the UK, in a non-colonial context, do not have an automatic right to secession.

One alternative proposed by some SNP figures, including leadership candidate Ash Regan, is that of a unilateral declaration of independence (UDI). This would essentially consist of the First Minister simply declaring that Scotland is to become an independent country without a referendum, or as Regan proposes, following the SNP winning an outright majority of Scottish votes at either a Westminster or Holyrood election. The obvious flaw with this strategy is that there is no legal basis for it and the UK Government would be under no obligation to take such a declaration seriously.

There’s no escaping that Sturgeon’s departure is a pivotal moment for the SNP. Without her track record as a proven election winner, there will be real concern among SNP MPs that their seats could be in danger as we edge closer to a General Election. The SNP face a bullish Labour Party who look increasingly like a government in waiting, and an emboldened Scottish Conservatives who will be eyeing closely the seats they won in 2017 but lost in 2019.

To add to their troubles, the SNP is facing an investigation into its finances, with around £600,000 of party money reportedly unaccounted for. The new First Minister will be starting off not in the advantageous position Nicola Sturgeon entered the job with in 2014, but will be taking over a divided party, with an empty war chest and wolves at the door.

And then there is independence. The SNP’s planned conference on its independence strategy has been postponed while the leadership campaign plays out, and its new leader may have their own ideas on how to pursue the party’s ultimate goal. Nicola Sturgeon did not run out of options to pursue independence due to a lack of determination or creativity- she exhausted every realistic option available to her before resigning. Looking at the battle that lies ahead for her successor, it is difficult not to empathise with her decision.

When someone leads a party for so long, the party itself can become a reflection of their character and this bond is difficult to break. Scotland’s next First Minister will need to be bold and decisive to ensure that they are not stuck in Nicola Sturgeon’s shadow, even if they are destined for the same ending.