John Curtice says SNP ‘facing biggest internal rift since 1980s’

Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University, said this week’s sacking of Joanna Cherry as the SNP’s home affairs and justice spokesperson at Westminster, which led to an angry backlash among her supporters, represented the most dissension in the party since the 1980s, when Alex Salmond was expelled. Curtice added that the current power struggle looked set to continue.

“It’s clear that the biggest risk that Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP seem to face, vis-a-vis these May elections is not really their political opponents, who, for the most part, have struggled to land much of a blow on the SNP during the course of the last 12 months, but rather the internal tensions and disputes within the party,” Curtice said in an interview yesterday.

“It’s perfectly clear that the relationship between Ms Sturgeon and her predecessor, Alex Salmond, has indeed completely fallen apart.

“And one of the ironies of the situation we face is that when the SNP look to potentially be closer to delivering that aim of independence than the party ever has been since its foundation in the 1930s, it is actually certainly facing its most internal dissension and rift since the early 1980s, which was an occasion when Alex Salmond got thrown out of the party.”

Professor Sir John Curtice

Asked by Sputnik News whether he believed there would be further dismissals, Curtice said there was limited extent for a “purge”.

“What is certainly true is that the three MPs who are known to be most sympathetic to Alex Salmond are the three MPs and the only three MPs in the SNP group who are currently not being given role as spokesmen for one subject or the other,” he said.

“One of those others is Kenny MacAskill, who has long been critical of Nicola Sturgeon’s stance on the indyref. But there’s a limit to the extent to which Nicola Sturgeon can necessarily purge.

“I mean, it so happens that in internal SNP elections that took place last autumn, Joanna Cherry herself got elected to the principal party ruling body, as did a majority of people who are thought to be sympathetic to her position.

“A continuing power struggle may be more appropriate, but of course, much will now hinge on two things.

“One, on the fact that the parliamentary inquiry into the way in which the Scottish Government treated disciplinary proceedings against Alex Salmond, disciplinary proceedings, which were eventually thrown out by the court; how that ends up and Mr Salmond is now going to appear next week and Ms Sturgeon the following week.

“That’s pretty important to the reputation of both politicians and how things, therefore, fall out on that fault line. And secondly, assuming Ms Sturgeon does survive all of this, if she does indeed deliver an overall majority in the Scottish parliamentary election in May, inevitably her position is going to be strengthened vis-a-vis those who are unhappy about some of her stances, so much probably does now depend on a train of events that’s probably going to keep Scotland quite interested in what’s going in the SNP for quite a while.”

Curtice also went on to say that for most Scots the pandemic and Brexit were over-riding issues of importance and not disputes inside the SNP.