Even the Murrell scandal can’t humble the SNP
Peter Murrell may be the convicted criminal, but he is not the only senior SNP figure who has been left looking tainted and shifty by the scandal that bears his name.
Top of the list is John Swinney. The First Minister has had a torrid few weeks since Murrell pled guilty to stealing more than £400,000 from the party’s funds. Swinney may have been dealt a bad hand, but he has also played it badly. Despite admitting, with some understatement, that “there has not been, in every respect, adequate controls in place” when it came to the governance of SNP accounts, he is stubbornly refusing to allow an independent inquiry into the affair, insisting that “an extensive police investigation that has established serial criminality and a whole range of different actions to cover that up” was sufficient. There have been various options for an inquiry proposed: the Electoral Commission; a KC from outside Scotland; a joint investigation by Westminster and Holyrood committees. Swinney is having none of it. The almighty SNP will do whatever it wants to do, and that’s an end to the matter.
So much for country before party. His slipperiness is transparently self-serving, a desperate attempt to avoid more detail emerging about why attempts by some SNP colleagues to have the accounts opened up to scrutiny were closed down by the Nicola Sturgeon leadership team, of which he was a key part.
Swinney is also playing fast and loose with the facts around the status of £650,000 that was donated to the party during online fundraisers in 2017 and 2019. Promises at the time that the cash would be “ring-fenced” for a second independence referendum were not kept. Much of it was instead spent on the SNP’s election campaigns. Swinney now insists “that money is part of the resources that are available to the SNP and support its independence objectives, and the SNP is the party of independence, and we just campaigned for Scottish independence at the Scottish Parliamentary elections.” This is both a perversion of language and of the spirit in which the cash was raised. It all brings to mind the notorious Bill Clinton defence during the Monica Lewinsky affair: “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”.
You could drive a campervan through the holes in the SNP’s reasoning. Angela Constance, the party chair and Health Secretary, gave a disastrous interview to Radio Scotland on Thursday morning (4 June). Asked about the supposedly ringfenced money raised for a second independence referendum, she said that “the whole raison d’etre of the Scottish National Party is to further the cause of independence. We do that day in, day out. All of our activities are about furthering the cause of independence.” You can expect that last sentence – an admission that literally everything the Scottish Government does is designed to advance the break-up of the UK – to be wheeled out by the opposition parties in future.
Having spent the £650,000, how would the SNP fund another independence referendum campaign, she was asked. This brought a moment of jaw-dropping arrogance and complacency, as she claimed that “our members are very generous and continue to donate to the party. In the event of an independence referendum, I have no doubt that the party and the movement will galvanise around that.” These are the words of an organisation that has been in power for too long and has come to treat accountability as something that is for other, lesser people. There is an almost pathological secrecy to the way the SNP goes about its business and responds to scandal and there has been for years.
Murrell is not even the only example of that this week. The Scottish Government has also been found in contempt by the Court of Session for delaying the publication of files related to whether Nicola Sturgeon breached the ministerial code when handling complaints against Alex Salmond. The court admonished the government and ordered it to pay legal expenses to its own information commissioner David Hamilton, who had ordered the files be released.
All governments are dodgy in their own way – and the Mandelson affair hardly shows Labour in a good light. But the SNP’s complete dominance of Scottish politics for so long, despite an awful track record, its ability to clean off the barnacles of corruption that usually stick to long-standing administrations and eventually sink them, is staggering.
We are only a few weeks into the new parliament, which was elected on a low turnout amid growing voter disillusion with Holyrood and the mainstream parties. Almost the first act of the returned Nationalist administration was to hold a debate on independence. Ever since, it has been mired in the Murrell row. Swinney gave an early speech promising to support business and wealth creation – on Thursday his government held a debate on wealth taxes, on top of the higher income taxes better-off Scots already pay compared to the rest of the UK.
Is it wise or even possible any longer to believe a word that comes out of SNP mouths? Is there any fixed, definable meaning to the statements ministers utter, or is everything up for reframing as and when it suits them? The debasement of language and of its attachment to meaning by our political leaders undermines the health of our democracy and any trust we may feel that we are being led by people of integrity, by people for whom there is a moral line not to be crossed. If this is to be John Swinney’s legacy then what, really, is the point?
[Further reading: What Makerfield believes]
