SNP imploding? I thought that Alex Massie Times article from the other day summed the position up very well.
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/alex-massie-sturgeons-trans-action-puts-her-credit-at-risk-0qvd2jk3d (there's a share token for this on a thread about it, I think)
As a catch-all party with only one condition for admittance — a belief in independence — the SNP typically goes to great lengths to avoid disappointing anyone. So long as you keep the faith on the national question, other matters are up for negotiation. The party has a strikingly limited intellectual or philosophical hinterland. As such, it lacks first principles upon which to base its world view and, being devoid of these, it finds itself lost when warring principles or positions collide.
Excellent article also in The Spectator today by Stephen Daisley, which concludes::
Announcing ‘his’ reshuffle today, Sturgeon’s Westminster footman Ian Blackford said ‘team working and cooperation are key to ensure results’, a statement that doesn’t require much reading between the lines. It speaks to an intolerance of dissent inside the SNP, a party which once prided itself on its love of a good rammy. The SNP under Sturgeon is infinitely more presidential, managerial, and clique-driven than New Labour under Tony Blair. (At least New Labour believed in — and, more importantly, did — things.)
We might have to borrow similar phrasing when talking about Nicola Sturgeon’s party (and it decidedly is her party). The Old SNP (1934–2014) went through major upheavals and ideological pivots under the ascendancy of one faction or another, from sovereigntism to ‘Independence in Europe’, economic and social rightishness to economic and social leftishness, but it remained a party in which the grassroots still mattered and internal debate was (grudgingly) tolerated.
Under Sturgeon, the New SNP (2014-present) is personality-led, elite-driven, and ruled by a doctrine that cannot be found anywhere in the party’s constitution (yet) but which holds more sway than fusty old rulebooks drawn up in fusty old conference halls and voted on by fusty old delegates.
It is a doctrine I call ‘coercive progressivism’ and is a total ideology of identity, culture and values that places these matters, rather than economic or social affairs, at the heart of politics and seeks to enforce its marginal orthodoxy on the mainstream by way of law, social pressure and institutional capture. It is, at root, a post-liberal and post-democratic movement. And it brooks not a peep of disagreement, which is why the foremost talent on the SNP frontbench is no longer on the SNP frontbench.