Wings Over Scotland

You’ve got to admit, that’s a zinger.

Craig Whyte is a man who knows all about financial doom looming on the horizon of a once-powerful institution. But it doesn’t take an expert to see what’s coming down the line for the SNP.

There are nine months still to go before the party’s 2024 accounts will be published. But they’re going to be abysmal. 2024 was a general election year, and even though the party was parsimonious in its spending compared to previous years (the figures haven’t yet been published by the Electoral Commission, but every SNP officeholder we’re on speaking terms with says they were working on a budget of crumbs), that’s still likely to put a seven-figure hole in a bank balance that was already barely above the waterline.

The last published accounts, for 2023, showed a surplus of £662,000 which was in most senses imaginary, because it was achieved by essentially stealing money that was owed to branches in the shape of the “branch dividend”. But that still only left the party with £42,000 in the bank.

That’ll barely be enough to cover a redundancy payoff for Chief Operating Officer Sue Ruddick, who Wings is told is one of the victims of the purge of HQ staff. The publicity-shy Ruddick has been with the SNP for 16 years, and given her pivotal role in burying the bodies of the Sturgeon era, we very much doubt the party will be keen to make an enemy of her by trying to cheap out on her golden handshake.

Meanwhile the party’s membership, and the income derived from it, continues to fall. The Sunday Post piece above notes that staff costs swallowed up 81% of membership income last year compared to just 35% in its halcyon days of 2015. But the shorter-term trends are also alarming.

Sam Taylor of Unionist propaganda outfit These Islands noted in a series of tweets yesterday that the equivalent figure last year was just 64%.

Now, Wings readers will know that there’s a curious lack of correlation between the number of members the SNP has and the amount of income it reports receiving from them. The party made MORE money from membership fees in 2022 than it did in 2019, despite member numbers having fallen by around 45,000 over that period.

Of course, the SNP’s claims over its membership figures are not to be trusted – the party has lied about them for years and years, finally being caught out publicly in 2023 when its then head of comms Murray Foote had to resign for denying a drop of 30,000 that had been accurately reported by the Sunday Mail.

(Although Wings readers had known the numbers were a lie since 2020.)

There is no compelling reason to believe that the current claimed figure of 64,000 or so bears any resemblance to reality. But it appears that at a minimum, if it does, then those members are handing over less money each. Whichever explanation is true, the amount of income from membership fees is falling.

It certainly isn’t being replaced by donations, either.

The party has struggled to attract major donors for years, since Nicola Sturgeon (and later Humza Yousaf) scared off its wealthier benefactors from the world of business.

The problem has been especially acute more recently, because who in their right mind would donate money to a party whose finances have been under a seemingly endless and intensive police investigation on numerous grounds, and whose former CEO has already been charged with embezzlement?

And whose accountants – a tiny Manchester-based firm employed at extortionate expense after the party had spent six months searching for anyone willing to do the job – litter the annual accounts with disclaimers saying “Look, to be honest this could all be complete rubbish, we can’t verify quite a lot of it and we’re just going by what the party has told us”.

You’d be as well setting your cash on fire.

The SNP’s battering at the general election will also cost it around £1m a year in Short money from the UK government, as well as other funding. So it’s really going to be struggling. Could it borrow or get an extended overdraft facility to fill the gap?

Unlikely, because for all the reasons above and more, it’s a complete financial basket case, being kept barely afloat by robbing its own branches and piecemeal bailouts from the dead, which are of course intrinsically unpredictable, since you don’t know who’s going to die.

(The SNP still owes £60,000 to the man accused of embezzling from it, a sentence which all by itself would send many lenders running for the hills.)

And barring another lottery winner or a sudden lethal virus pandemic primarily affecting wealthy SNP supporters (hey, maybe THAT’S why they stuffed the care homes with COVID patients), there’s no salvation anywhere in sight. Nothing’s going to get better. Membership will keep falling. There’s a costly Scottish general election due in a year and a bit, which will be like firing a torpedo into the Titanic.

Sacking 10 people might conceivably save maybe £500,000 a year (and especially if they include a smattering of highly-paid execs like Sue Ruddick), which is a non-trivial sum, but it’s not even half of what’s going to be lost in Short money alone, and the SNP’s underlying fundamentals are about as healthy as those of Rangers Football Club in 2011 when Craig Whyte rocked up with his pound coin.

Remind us again how long the club lasted after that.