STEPHEN DAISLEY: Murrell embezzled cash, but the SNP have robbed the public of trust in politics. We are all poorer for this

By STEPHEN DAISLEY, SCOTTISH DAILY MAIL SKETCH WRITER Published: 20:06, 31 May 2026 | Updated: 20:07, 31 May 2026 When an SNP wave crashed into Scotland’s electoral map in 2015, all but wiping out Labour on a campaign accusing that party of having betrayed its voters, I was the gloomy pundit who predicted that the SNP was likely to fall into the same trap. The Nationalists had not reinvented the political wheel. They enthused about fresh starts and new approaches but showed no signs of wanting to change the culture of spin, tribalism, partisanship, and presidentialism. They had defeated Labour but not the cynical politics that had made Labour so unpopular. The SNP was destined to become Scottish Labour with a yellow rosette. Same dominance, same arrogance, same consequences. Eleven years on, the Peter Murrell embezzlement scandal has confirmed that Scotland hired new managers in 2015 but the style of management remained the same. Eight years prior, in 2007, the Nationalists parlayed public dissatisfaction with New Labour over Iraq and sleaze into the first ever SNP victory at Holyrood. Alex Salmond hoped to restore trust in the governing process but after two decades of the Nationalists in power, public confidence in politics and institutions is lower than the mood of an Arsenal fan after Gabriel Magalhaes missed that penalty. There have been sundry scandals along the way, not least what appears to have been a concerted effort to remove Salmond from public life, but it is the theft of £400,000 in SNP funds which has injected the most pungent cynicism into the electorate’s outlook on politics. At least part of that sum will have originated with members and small-denomination donors, people of modest means but so committed to the independence cause that they were willing to pour their coin into it. Peter Murrell abused his position as chief executive to dip into party funds  They have been repaid with lurid headlines about £2,000 pens and £4,000 watches, salt and pepper grinders with four-figure price tags, coffee machines that cost more than the monthly salary of the average Scot, and the low-brow comedy of a luxury camper van which, depending on whom you ask, seems to have been invisible. Murrell abused his position as chief executive to dip into party funds and pay for a bizarre array of purchases which anyone could see were not legitimate expenses. He treated the SNP’s bank account as his own slush fund. No cost-of-living crisis for him. While the rest of the country has been scrimping and scraping, Murrell has been living large. There could scarcely be a more open expression of contempt for the SNP rank and file than robbing them blind while serving as their chief executive. The impact of these revelations will sour not only Nationalists but voters of all persuasions, who will take it as confirmation that politicians really are all the same, that the whole enterprise is sordid and rotten, and that the 47 per cent of Scots who didn’t show up to vote in May’s Holyrood elections had the right idea. But while Murrell is a crook, he is not the only one, for there are varieties of crookery that go beyond the theft of money and into a deeper kind of theft, a theft that can never be repaid because it involves the stealing of hope, optimism, and belief. For SNP members and supporters, the keenest-felt loss is that of their independence movement. That movement is largely moribund. It was subsumed by the Nationalist party machine after the 2014 referendum and under their watch it has been drained of all passion and creativity. Instead of growing the movement and allowing it to speak in its varied voices to varied audiences, the SNP deploys the independence cause whenever funds are running low or whenever a spot of theatrics are needed to calm their restless grassroots. The upshot of this is that independence is no further forward of where it was 12 years ago, when 55 per cent of Scots voted to remain in the Union. By exploiting rather than tending the national cause, the SNP has hollowed out its campaigns, organisations and even the intellectual case for separation. Independence is nothing more than a vehicle for the SNP, a party which has no ideas and no answers as to how it can be delivered or funded. There is no prospect of independence, or even a referendum on the matter, in the near future. The Nationalist hierarchy knows this. It knows that 2014 was likely its one and only shot; that Westminster has neither the interest nor the appetite for risk required to grant another vote; that fiscal, security, energy, and other hurdles stand higher today than they did over a decade ago. The deception will continue, however, because it is all the SNP has. It cannot retail itself on policy outcomes, for those are dire, or competence, for that is non-existent, or hope, because it has comprehensively tarnished that. All it can hold out is the prospect that another Nationalist victory, and perhaps another after that, will collapse the resolve of the British state and force a constitutional confrontation that ends with Scotland regaining its sovereignty. Most voters understand, on some level, what is going on here, and those who don’t see it yet will eventually come to a realisation. Independence, under the SNP, is a con.  Not simply the idea or the claims made for it but the pretence that it is still a live prospect in British politics today. It is not going to happen because it poses an existential threat to the UK state and because the SNP no longer pursues it with the energy and urgency seen during the Salmond years. Salmond famously asserted that ‘the dream shall never die’, but it did die, at the hands of the party which exists to carry it forward, and it has been replaced by a strategy of senior SNP figures talking about independence every once in a while even as they have made their peace with devolution as their day-to-day reality. They do not love the status quo but they have learned to live with it in the hope that, one day, by some mechanism, independence will be revived as a possibility. Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP have peddled empty hope It might be tempting for Unionists to take satisfaction in their opponents’ defeat. None of us is above a bit of schadenfreude. But the betrayal here goes far beyond any one constitutional ideal or political party.  The SNP has encouraged optimism only to snatch it away. It has peddled empty hope among people with a profound need to believe that things can get better for themselves, their families and their communities. This affects all of us. It leaves us a more cynical, less trusting, less hopeful people, a nation divided without a purpose ahead of a second referendum that will not come. The civic spirit of a country has been fed on and drained of its faith in a better future. Peter Murrell embezzled cash but the rest of the SNP, at the most senior levels, have robbed the public of their ability to trust in the political process. We are all left poorer by this. Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney are more guilty than anyone else. They have promised and pledged far beyond their ability to deliver or their capacity to imagine. Neither was capable of leading Scotland to independence and so instead they have led it up the hill and back down again, with nothing to show for it. They have stolen both the possibility of independence and the hope that it can be left behind. No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual We will automatically post your comment and a link to the news story to your Facebook timeline at the same time it is posted on MailOnline. To do this we will link your MailOnline account with your Facebook account. We’ll ask you to confirm this for your first post to Facebook. 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