Peter Murrell may be a convicted felon, but he is not the only senior SNP figure left tainted and exposed by the scandal that bears his name.
At the top of the list is John Swinney. The First Minister has had a difficult few weeks since Murrell pleaded guilty to stealing more than £400,000 of party funds. Swinney may have been dealt a bad hand, but he also played it badly. Despite admitting, with some understatement, that “there were not, in any respect, adequate controls” when it came to the governance of the SNP’s accounts, he is stubbornly refusing to allow an independent investigation into the matter, insisting that “an extensive police investigation that established serial criminality and a whole range of different actions” was to cover that diverse range of actions. There have been various possibilities for a proposed investigation: the Electoral Commission; a KC from outside Scotland; a joint inquiry by the Westminster and Holyrood committees. Swinney has nothing. The all-powerful NPSH will do whatever it wants and that’s the end of the matter.
So much for the place before the party. His slide is transparently self-serving, a desperate attempt to avoid revealing more details about why efforts by some SNP peers to open the accounts to scrutiny were shut down by Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership team, of which he was a key part.
Swinney is also playing fast and loose with the facts about the status of £650,000 donated to the party during online fundraisers in 2017 and 2019. Promises at the time that the money would be “circulated” for a second independence referendum were not kept. Most of it was spent on the election campaigns of the SNP. Swinney now insists that “the money is part of the resources that are available to the SNP and support its independence objectives, and the SNP is the independence party, and we just campaigned for Scottish independence in the Scottish Parliament elections.” This is also a perversion of the language and the spirit in which the money was raised. It all brings to mind Bill Clinton’s infamous defense during the Monica Lewinsky affair: “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”.
You can drive a bus through the holes in the SNP’s reasoning. Angela Constance, the party leader and health secretary, gave a disastrous interview to Radio Scotland on Thursday morning (June 4). Asked about money allegedly raised for a second independence referendum, she said that “all reason to be of the Scottish National Party is to advance the cause of independence. We do it day in and day out. All our activities are about advancing the cause of independence.” You can expect that last sentence – an admission that literally everything the Scottish Government does is designed to further the break-up of the UK – to be thrown around by opposition parties in the future.
Having spent £650,000, how would the SNP fund another independence referendum campaign, she was asked. This brought a moment of arrogance and smugness, as she asserted that “our members are very generous and continue to donate to the party. In the event of a referendum on independence, I have no doubt that the party and the movement will galvanize around it.” These are the words of an organization 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 in the way NPSH does its business and responds to scandals and has for years.
Murrell isn’t the only example this week either. The Scottish Government has also been found in contempt by the Court of Session for delaying the release of files relating to whether Nicola Sturgeon breached the ministerial code while handling complaints against Alex Salmond. The court admonished the government and ordered it to pay the legal costs of its information commissioner, David Hamilton, who had ordered the files released.
All governments are questionable in their own way – and the Mandelson affair hardly shows Labor in a good light. But the SNP’s complete dominance of Scottish politics for so long, despite a terrible track record, its ability to clean up the cesspools of corruption that usually cling to old administrations and eventually sink them, is shocking.
We are just weeks into the new parliament, which was elected with a low turnout amid growing voter disillusionment with Holyrood and the main parties. Almost the first act of the returned Nationalist administration was to hold a debate on independence. Since then, she has been immersed in the Murrell line. Swinney gave an early speech pledging to support business and wealth creation – on Thursday his government held a debate on wealth taxes, on top of the higher income tax Scots already pay compared to the rest of the UK.
Is it wiser or even possible to believe a word that comes out of NPSH’s mouth? Is there any fixed and definable meaning in ministers’ statements or is it all to be reformulated as and when it suits them? The debasement of language and its connection to meaning by our political leaders undermines the health of our democracy and any confidence we may feel that we are being led by people of integrity, by people for whom there is a moral line that must not be crossed. If this is going to be John Swinney’s legacy, then what, really, is the point?
(Further reading: What Makerfield believes)
