SNP faces two big problems as it kicks off election campaign

The Herald Scotland

09-05-2025

At next year's Scottish election, his party will face two main foes: Labour, and voter disaffection. His latest Programme for Government, a ministerial to-do list for the next year, is a battle plan to address both. This, the last pre-election legislative plan to go before Holyrood, is about trying firstly to rebuild trust with voters by showing he can keep promises while, secondly, persuading them that the SNP will do better than Labour.
Read more Rebecca McQuillan
Mr Swinney is having a good go at point two. He is attempting to embarrass Labour on traditional Labour ground, by abolishing peak time rail fares and restoring the winter fuel payment after it was slashed by Rachel Reeves. It adds to a list of benefits and free stuff available in Scotland that can't be accessed down south. The UK Government's determination to be 'fiscally responsible' has forced it to cut benefits and slash the overseas aid budget, making it a sitting duck for wounding comparisons with the Scottish Government. How sustainable all this spending is for the Scottish Government is another question, but the politics is effective.
So will Mr Swinney's 'year of delivery' make people trust the SNP? Well, it's certainly cute politics to focus on this, as a relatively new leader trying to distance himself from his predecessors. The hint is clear: the SNP's failures are not my failures, I've moved back to the centre. Judge me by what I deliver as First Minister, not by what happened before.
And he will deliver on this short to-do list, probably.
But will it restore trust? That's much more doubtful.
Top of the list of Mr Swinney's promises is that pledge to deliver 100,000 more GP appointments a year across Scotland. It might sound like a lot, but as the British Medical Association has unsportingly pointed out, GPs in Scotland already provide 650,000 appointments a week, so the First Minister's promise will provide one extra day's worth of GP appointments across the year.
Put another way, it promises a whole two to three extra appointments per GP surgery per week. Deliverable? Yes. A good rejoinder to criticism by Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar? Yes. But the end of the 8am phone lottery? No.
John Swinney (Image: free) And that's the obvious problem. While these new policy pledges are fine as far as they go, they won't end the steady stream of reportage about public services in various stages of crisis. They won't help the SNP hide from its rather long list of ongoing failures, some of which date back years. It brings into focus the problem with targets and promises. Too ambitious and you miss them by miles, leading to disaffection. Too timid and they don't change how people feel on the ground.
The party has been haunted by its own shortcomings over the last five years, from failing to boost education standards and close the attainment gap to fuel poverty levels, homelessness and waiting lists. Those failures won't stop intruding upon the moment and no one's likely to forget that John Swinney as deputy first minister, finance secretary and education secretary was implicated in most of them.
And how much does delivering on any single promise really count anyway, when the underlying democratic malaise is about wider, more systemic discontent? SNP, Labour, Conservative: in the minds of too many voters, they're all the same – which is to say, none of the parties are seen as making a significant difference to people's lives.
Reform UK is not about policies or delivery. Reform is about sentiment. Nigel Farage's party took more than 677 seats in the English local elections last week in a show of anti-incumbency sentiment. Mr Farage's status as chief cheerleader for Brexit, which has damaged economic growth and delivered none of its promised benefits, has been no impediment to his success. So much for policy. Reform's policy platform is barely known to voters, the only policy he's ever helped deliver was a disaster but he's considered by a quarter of UK voters, and around a fifth in Scotland, as preferable to the mainstream parties. Why? Because those voters are desperate for change.
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Oh to be the change candidate. Mr Swinney might be positioning himself as Mr Delivery, but knows the limitations of that strategy, so he can't resist hedging his bets by telling people he's also the change guy. Just 24 hours after presenting his Programme for Government, the First Minister opined that there must be a referendum if a majority of pro-independence MSPs are returned in the next Scottish Parliament.
'Westminster has scarcely looked more distant from the people of Scotland and their everyday concerns,' was his somewhat contestable claim.
So we're back here again. It was inevitable, given the current atmosphere of voter discontent, that the SNP would dust off its old demands for an independence referendum, but Mr Swinney will need to take care. He doesn't want voters to start noticing unfavourable parallels between himself and Mr Farage. Brexit never did deliver on the promise of milk and honey. There's no sign voters have any appetite for another rammy about independence. And it doesn't wash to try and portray the UK Government of Sir Keir Starmer, with its 37 Scottish MPs, as out of touch with Scotland. This is just the sort of divisive nonsense that puts people off the SNP.
But put your tin hats on: we'd better get used to it.
Rebecca McQuillan is a journalist specialising in politics and Scottish affairs. She can be found on X at @BecMcQ and on Bluesky at @becmcq.bsky.social