The Turning Point
We don’t have much to say about this graph that it doesn’t say for itself.
The arrest of Peter Murrell on 5 April 2023, just a couple of weeks after his wife realised the game was up and walked away before the cops came round and put a big blue tent up on their front garden, changed everything in Scottish politics.
There can’t have been many starker sliding-doors moments. Before the resignation there was a vast gulf between the SNP and their nearest challengers – fully 26 points in early December 2022, a fortnight before the SNP infamously steamrollered the Gender Recognition Reform Act through Parliament in a series of late-night sittings.
That began a slide, but after the resignation the lead collapsed entirely, and by the summer Labour were neck-and-neck with Humza Yousaf’s beleaguered administration, and duly almost wiped the SNP out of Westminster in July’s UK election.
Unfortunately for Labour, that led to Keir Starmer being Prime Minister and their support instantly fell off a cliff, leaving a gap into which mainly Reform but also the Greens surged. (We’ve left the Tories and Lib Dems out of the graph to keep it clean, as both of them barely moved during the period and are largely irrelevant forces.)
The Parliamentary arithmetic barely changed at the 2026 Holyrood election due to the electoral system giving the SNP a grossly disproportionate number of seats, but it’s plainly visible how much the wider political picture did. The SNP, which had only fleetingly dropped below 40% since the 2014 indyref and had peaked at 62% (a breathtaking 42 points ahead of Labour), has only momentarily brushed that line again.
As recently as two months before Sturgeon’s resignation (and for most of the preceding three years), the combined SNP and Green vote would have been enough to surpass the 50% mark in an election being used as a de-facto referendum. But the SNP did nothing, and this May that combined vote fell far short, with Unionist parties taking 60% of the ballot. When her husband was read his rights the window of opportunity closed, probably forever.
For those three years, Sturgeon knew that the Operation Branchform cat was out of the bag and that the clock was ticking. But she stalled and stalled until she ran out of time and the chance was gone. In terms of independence, the second half of that graph may as well be a flatline at zero.
The pro-independence vote used to be solidly behind the SNP and the unionist vote was fractured. Increasingly, the unionist vote is solidifying behind Reform and the pro-independence vote is fractured.
Far too many independence supporters distrust the SNP and will never vote for them again. I am one of that number. The sooner the SNP are wiped from the political map of Scotland, the sooner the independence movement can re-group and recommence the drive towards independence. In the meantime, the movement is hopelessly divided and stalled. It has no credible leadership or strategy to achieve our goal.
I would only complain about your use of the word ‘stalled’ in the last paragraph, when we all know she had no intention of doing anything. She didn’t stall and miss the chance. She simply ignored it because it didn’t fit her agenda.
« Data from: Scotland, Great Britain »
I would say the graph is precisely what Sturgeon and Swinney wanted these two never wanted Independence. I’d go even further and say they wanted to destroy the SNP and it might just happen under Swinney’s leadership unless the membership takes action now.