Wings Over Scotland

The SNP’s latest accounts are out.

And the zombie shambles on for another year.

The headline figures sound reasonable – the party has turned a 2024 deficit of nearly £400,000 into a surplus of just over £500,000. Unfortunately that’s only had the effect of increasing its bank balance by around £110,000 to £384,320.

And that should be a big worry, because 2025 was a “fallow year”, with no general election to contest. Spending figures for this year’s Holyrood vote won’t be out for a while yet, but the SNP spent £1.5m on the last one and anything remotely similar in scale will have blown a huge hole in the coffers.

And there’s no safety net left to fall back on. The party has emptied every last piggy bank, cupboard and cardboard box under the bed to survive to this point, rummaged down the back of every sofa and used up its best tricks. It’s slashed the staff budget by a third, for example, saving half a million quid a year.

The unfortunate branch offices, which have been plundered for the last few years to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds, have taken another couple of sucker punches, with the “branch dividend” (membership fees returned from the central party to local branches) slashed by 40% and insult added to injury with the imposition of a £56,000 levy to unsuccessfully fight the Hamilton by-election.

The average SNP branch now looks like Aberdeen FC at the turn of the century.

The “Miscellaneous income” table above shows that the party is also still heavily reliant on the Grim Reaper – almost 60% of its £500K surplus was thanks to legacies from the deceased. Rumours that national treasurer Peter Grant, desperate to ensure a continuing income stream, has been seen skulking around the back of the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (aka The Death Star) in a dark cloak are unconfirmed at time of writing.

The party could certainly do with a bunch of wealthy supporters popping their clogs, because significant support from the living was all but non-existent. The below is the entirety of reportable donations in 2025.

There was £132,000 from the ever-generous UK taxpayer, but less than £10,000 in total in reportable donations from anyone else: £7,200 (in non-cash, premises-based contributions) from Cor Unum Ltd – a company which is itself deceased – and £2,600 to the Portobello branch from an Andrew Mackie, and that was it.

(Cor Unum appears to have been owned by lottery winners Chris and Colin Weir, although the nature of its business is somewhat opaque.)

Smaller contributions which don’t have to be individually recorded under electoral law provided rather more, but still well under half 2024’s figure.

There were some poignant notes. The infamous campervan is now as invisible to the accounts as it was to Nicola Sturgeon when she visited Peter Murrell’s mum.

But it’s the underlying story that’s really bleak, because ultimately the SNP is a party that just can’t afford to live. With Westminster, Holyrood and council elections three years out of every five (Brexit was actually a life-saver for the party, sparing the cost of European elections), and membership still falling steadily, the arithmetic is merciless.

(The figures for 2025 were given only as “around 51,000” in the accounts, a decline of around 10%, with the precise number apparently being too painful to relate and Humza Yousaf’s promise of six-monthly updates long forgotten.)

Averaged out over the five-year political cycle, the SNP is intrinsically a money-losing business and it’s running out of Hail Mary plays. Losses are bigger, and more frequent, than profits. Gravity is irresistible. Its plaintive cries about recovery of the money stolen by Peter Murrell would at best represent a stay of execution.

It’s been quite conspicuous that the party’s been uncharacteristically quiet on the subject of Andy Burnham’s coup against Keir Starmer. Normally when a new Prime Minister takes office without there having been a general election, opposition parties make a big song and dance about a vote being required in order to give the new PM a proper mandate.

But as far as we’ve noticed there hasn’t been a peep from the SNP on that subject, because if Burnham – the UK’s seventh PM in the last decade – reneged on his pledge NOT to hold a snap election it’d be a financial disaster of cataclysmic proportions.

Absent that, unfortunately, the independence movement must wait patiently for the slow erosion of time to do its work before there’s any hope of the SNP shuffling off this mortal coil and a vacancy for a serious indy party opening up. The good news is that on these numbers, that shouldn’t be too many years off now.