Whiff of defeat at an SNP conference devoid of star quality

Imagine a rock festival where the headliners didn’t show: Woodstock ’69 without Janis Joplin, the Isle of Wight ’70 without Jimi Hendrix or, to get down with the latter-day crusties, Murrayfield next year without Oasis. It would be a pretty dried-out affair.
So it is in Edinburgh at day one of the SNP conference, where the big noises of a decade ago are a distant memory and star quality is sadly lacking.
Back in the summer of ’14, the party was marching ever onwards to the promised land, but in the aftermath of last month’s disastrous election defeat, the record has changed to a dirge and most of the best acts have quit the stage.
Obviously, there is no Alex Salmond, still at war with the party he quit over the legal action taken against him by the government led by Nicola Sturgeon, his successor as party leader. Sturgeon, who caused a stir when she pranced into the same event last year, was conspicuous by her absence, so too her husband, Peter Murrell, the party’s former chief executive and orchestrator, charged with embezzlement and awaiting trial.
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Even Humza Yousaf, until four months ago the most powerful man in the party, had absented himself, although at least his name could be mentioned from the platform.
Good old Humza, the deputy leader Keith Brown told his credulous audience, was a leader of “grace and integrity” with qualities “so sadly lacking in Westminster”. That would be the boss man who exploded the coalition with the Greens, and with it his own job, almost bringing down the administration. It was probably what the country needed, but Brown didn’t mean it that way.
This was a nationalist conference like the conferences of old, idealistic but kind of clueless. It lacked any of the energy lent to it by those young activists who carried the SNP forward in its recent glory years.
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Instead, the half-full hall was peopled mostly by the white-haired, pale-skinned stalwarts of a more distant past, veterans who long ago learnt what it is like to lose. At this conference they have come face to face with that old reality: defeat.
Going into the general election, the nats claimed a majority of seats would give them a mandate for independence. The result, winning 9 out of 57 seats, dropped that plan over a cliff. Public confidence in the party had “eroded” the normally ebullient Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s Westminster leader, told the cameras.
The new political road map was unfolded by Brown. The objective at the 2026 election, he explained, would be to persuade the electorate to vote for the party because it would back a constitutional convention of MPs, MSPs and councillors, “regardless of party”.
That motley crew will then get together with the lads and lasses of “civic Scotland” and … well, Brown didn’t quite specify what would happen next but it’ll probably sound great when he explains it on the doorstep in a couple of years’ time.
Other remnants of the old SNP could be found in the fringe meetings, scattered around the vast, echoing Edinburgh International Conference Centre.
An event hosted by the Scottish Police Federation brought some of the worst traits, those niggling comparisons with our “nearest friends and neighbours”, as Angela Constance, the justice secretary, described them, unable, it seemed, to pronounce the words “England” or “English”.
There’s something infuriating about these endless comparisons. Everyone in the room sympathised with Aileen Orr, a councillor form the Borders, who recounted her terror when, recently, her farm was violently attacked and she had to wait, weeping in fear for 29 minutes, before police responded to her 999 call. (Police later said they had attended within 20 minutes.)
Shocked as she was, by way of reply Constance managed to scrape up the recent riots in England and Northern Ireland, a comparison demonstrating how “cohesive” communities in Scotland remain, even when, as Orr attested, violent young criminals are on the loose.
But even Constance drew the line when the party veteran Graeme McCormick asked whether she knew what questions had been asked during the job interviews for chief constable, a post awarded to Jo Farrell, out of the Wirral via Durham.
Knowing these questions, maintained McCormick, was an issue of constitutional importance, since “we are a nationalist party, seeking independence” and need to know whether “we will be impeded by the civil authority” when the revolution comes.
Constance “utterly disputed” the validity of the question, while David Kennedy, of the Scottish Police Federation, cut to the chase. “Only two people applied for the job anyway,” he said. “Just because the chief constable is English, and Scotland becomes independent one day, that will not affect the police.”
“I never raised nationality,” blustered the questioner. Aye, right.
Back in the main hall, Westminster was also on the mind of Fiona Hyslop, the transport secretary, who made a mercifully brief tub-thumper with a random, inexplicable attack on the UK government for its approach to railways.
Then she played what she appeared to think were trump cards. These were pledges to invest in CalMac and make the ferries float again after 17 years of SNP misrule and to complete the dualling of the A9, a promise first made as far back as the 1745 manifesto.
If that’s the best she can do, like “the backbone of Scotland” in Hyslop’s imaginative phrase, it promises to be a long road back for the SNP.