With an election only nine months away, the once-mighty Scottish National Party is facing hard times. The loss of some 8,500 dues-paying members since 2023 has left First Minister John Swinney struggling for funds to finance next year’s Holyrood campaign. The latest accounts show a deficit of £455,000 for 2024.

The party’s infamous campervan, seized by police as part of Operation Branchform, has lost nearly £60,000 in depreciation alone. It had been left in the driveway of the mother of former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, Nicola Sturgeon’s ex-husband, who faces a charge of embezzlement.

But cash is only part of Swinney’s summer of discontent. Sturgeon’s salty memoirs, Frankly, have been poorly received, not just by critics but by many Scottish nationalists. In stating that male rapists forfeit the right to choose their gender, in reference to the Isla Bryson case, the former first minister has reignited the trans controversy just as her party was moving on from its disastrous role in the gender wars.

Morale in the SNP has sunk as the party struggles to contain an opinion poll slide. The latest Ipsos/STV poll has the nationalists at 31% — a far cry from the 44% they were recording before Sturgeon resigned in February 2023. Swinney is now facing a grassroots revolt at the party conference in October over his failure to deliver a credible route to independence.

The late Alex Salmond’s breakaway Alba Party ,however, is not posing much of a threat. Instead, two newcomers to Scottish politics look likely to shred the SNP vote next year. Reform UK and Jeremy Corbyn’s new Left-wing party could not be more different ideologically, but they are both bad news for the nationalists.

Reform is expected to secure around a dozen MSPs in Holyrood next May, to the dismay of the Scottish Left. Over a million Scots voted for Brexit in 2016, many of them SNP supporters, so Nigel Farage’s party always had a potential electoral base among disillusioned nationalists. In June, Reform came within six percentage points of winning the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election.

Meanwhile, Corbyn’s party is likely to attract many Left-wing nationalist voters who regard Swinney as too conservative by. The former Labour leader has already been addressing picket lines in Glasgow and promising a second independence referendum. Also nibbling away at the SNP vote is the Scottish Green Party, which is promising to win 16 seats next May.

Ironically, Scottish Labour — which only a year ago was on course to replace the SNP — is experiencing much the same electoral misfortunes as the nationalists. Leader Anas Sarwar has been on the back foot over the UK party’s policies on everything from the winter fuel payment to Palestine. And things aren’t going to get better, with food price inflation rising by 5% from last year.

Scottish politics is fragmenting in extraordinary ways. The proliferation of parties makes the results of next year’s elections almost impossible to call. But that very fragmentation could, if the cards fall in the right way, allow Swinney to scrape back into Bute House despite the collapse in the nationalist vote. At least, that is what he hopes: that the losers could win again.

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Iain Macwhirter was political commentator for The Herald between 1999 and 2022, and is the author of Disunited Kingdom: How Westminster Won a Referendum But Lost Scotland. He was Rector of the University of Edinburgh from 2009-12.

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