Source: The Conversation – UK
When historians of Scottish politics come to consider May 2026, two dates will stand out. On May 7, the SNP won almost half of the seats in the Scottish parliamentary election. If its minority administration makes it through the term, the party will have effectively been the government at Holyrood for 24 years.
And then on May 25, the SNP’s former chief executive, Peter Murrell, was remanded in custody after pleading guilty to embezzling £400,000 from funds largely donated by party supporters – all of it while married to the SNP’s longstanding leader Nicola Sturgeon.
Sturgeon has consistently denied any knowledge of Murrell’s crimes and was not charged after a police investigation. Murrell will be sentenced in June. Readers of that history might be struck by an apparent contradiction.
The scandal, and the resignation of Sturgeon, and divisive leadership contests that followed, accelerated what was already a marked decline in the SNP’s approval ratings. By the middle of the previous parliament, the SNP looked set for the kind of collapse that typically befalls a party in power for so long.
As long ago as 1983, political scientists Tom Mackie and Richard Rose noted this tendency for incumbent governments to lose popularity over time. These “costs of ruling” might crudely be attributed to cock-ups, complacency, corruption and – in a disappointing break in the alliteration – internal divisions.
By the time more detail had emerged about “motorhomegate” (Murrell spent £124,000 of stolen money on the luxury vehicle) and all that surrounded it, it could fairly be suggested that the SNP ticked all four boxes during the 2021-26 parliament.
Yet it swept to power for a fifth term. How and why? In Scottish parliamentary elections, voters have two ballots. The constituency vote is won on a first-past-the-post basis, as at Westminster, electing 73 of the 129 MSPs.
The remaining 56 MSPs are elected on a regional (or “list”) vote, where they are returned to Holyrood on the strength of their party’s vote share. The first thing to say is that the SNP did pay some heavy costs of ruling between the two elections.
While the average cost of ruling is estimated at around 2.5 percentage points per parliamentary term, the SNP’s share fell by ten points on the constituency vote and 13 on the regional list vote. In the latter case it was down to 27%, the party’s lowest since 2003.
These much heavier losses are consistent with the turmoil of the term and the notion that the patience of many voters snapped. In that sense, the question is less about how the SNP performed so well and more about why its considerably diminished vote share was enough for a near-majority.
And there are three answers to that. One is simply that they were not overtaken, and the blame for that goes in considerable part to Keir Starmer. In the run-up to the 2024 general election, Scottish Labour was neck and neck with the SNP in Holyrood vote intention polls.
Once Labour had taken power in Westminster however, Scottish Labour suffered the same polling slump as Starmer’s party more widely. What had looked like a close race between the two parties suddenly became the familiar one-horse contest.
Read more: Anas Sarwar: why did the leader of Scottish Labour call for Keir Starmer’s resignation – and has the move backfired? One enthusiastic subscriber to the thesis that Starmer’s government was handing the Holyrood election to the SNP was Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar.
His evident frustration culminated in him calling for Starmer’s resignation in February 2026.
All about independence While Sarwar’s pleas for voters to refocus on the Scottish arena may have been in part self-serving, they were also consistent with the goals of devolution and the pattern observed in the first few Holyrood elections.
Back then, voters increasingly came to choose a government for Holyrood rather than passing comment on the administration at Westminster. That trend had now been interrupted. In the two elections since the referendum on Scottish independence, voting no longer seemed to have much to do with what was happening at Holyrood.
Instead it was largely an re-expression of voters’ positions on this all-powerful and polarising issue. In the 2021 election, seven years after the referendum, 92% of voters supported a party that shared their position on independence. And the second reason why the SNP won in 2026 has much to do with the fact that, according to the first data from the Scottish Election Study, that figure dipped only slightly, to 90%.
While the issue no longer dominates the agenda as it once did, it continues to dictate the way that voters think about the parties – much as Brexit has come to dominate the way that English voters think about their options.
Could the rise of the challenger parties sweep away Labour and the Conservatives? But this is only a route to SNP victory because of the very different menu of choices facing pro- and anti-independence groups.
The SNP is clearly the larger of just two options on the Yes side (the other being the Scottish Greens), whereas 2026 gave No voters a choice between four significant players: Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and Reform UK.
While 54% of regional list votes were cast for one of the four, the leading unionist option Reform took just 17% – miles adrift of the SNP. The third reason is related to this. The Scottish Greens’ absence from all but six seats gave the SNP a clear run at the constituency votes of the vast majority of Yes supporters.
To defeat them in most of Scotland would have required tactical coordination on an epic scale. Labour and Reform supporters were always unlikely to lend votes to each other given their mutual hostility, however much both disliked the SNP.
The skew of the Holyrood electoral system means that more than a majority of seats are available through the constituency component. Because this is where the SNP dominates, the route to continuing nationalist hegemony is clear.
Rob Johns is one of the lead researchers on the ESRC-funded Scottish Election Study, 2026.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/29/peter-murrell-embezzled-snp-donations-why-do-so-many-voters-stay-loyal-to-the-party/