BY PAUL T HORGAN

It is usually crass to compare something in modern life to the Nazi Party. And yet its parallels with the SNP are compelling.

The SNP, or rather the National Scottishist Damning Anglos Party, has followed the Bohemian Corporal’s playbook ever since it took power in 2007, and certainly since Nicola Sturgeon became Leader. Firstly, the SNP is a blatantly nationalist party, obviously. However, while there would be media concern should the BNP or a hypothetical organisation called the English National Party win seats in Westminster, no such alarm is raised when their Celtic equivalents dominate, as if the absence of historic subjugation by the Roman Empire confers some kind of immunity from the kind of extremism that suggests horror. And yet nationalist governance, rather than governance in the national interest, is provably disastrous. Just look at the history of nationalist governments on the continent for the last two centuries. When every policy is twisted by a secessionist chauvinistic agenda and the inevitable confrontation this causes, tax-paying Scots (and the English, using the Barnett Formula of subsidy) are short-changed while their elected representatives find excuses to bicker rather than deliver on policy. Nicola Sturgeon enjoyed a personality cult amongst the party faithful. The party’s runish symbol, easily drawn, is in contrast to the more illustration-like logos of its mainstream UK rivals but seemed to take inspiration from crude extremist forms used by totalitarian regimes in the last century.

While the SNP were beneficiaries of devolution, they have not seen fit to devolve power themselves. Instead they have concentrated it, brownshirt-style. All of Scotland’s regional police forces have been amalgamated into a single national organisation, and Scotland’s equivalent of the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Lord Advocate, sits with SNP politicians in the Scottish Cabinet. Like their 1930s German counterparts, the SNP announced grand projects with fanfares of publicity, but see the projects, unusable new hospitals and unlaunchable new ferries, fail miserably. The concentration of power extends to the party itself, where the Leader was married to the Chief Executive. Imagine that Sir Keir Starmer was married to David Evans (Labour’s General Secretary), or Rishi Sunak was married to Greg Hands (The Conservatives’ Chairman), and you might see why this coupling is quite unusual in British politics.

The NHS was a socialist creation, but the socialistic nationalists of Holyrood have transformed their devolved Scottish NHS it into a failing organisation over which Scottish Labour has deliberately neglected to capitalise. It has to be borne in mind that while the Labour Party in England constantly attacks the Conservatives over the NHS (“for sale to Donald Trump”, “24 hours to save the NHS”, etc.), they are as mute as a haggis on this North of the border, seemingly trying to hoodwink Scottish voters into electing Labour MPs to ‘save’ the NHS in England while the Scottish sick continue to suffer. Alcoholism and drug deaths are seen as public heath issues, and the SNP’s record on both is among the worst in Europe. Yet the SNP manage to deflect criticism by somehow blaming Westminster and fostering the belief that everything would magically get better if Scotland was independent. The paradox is that this is only independence from Westminster, as the SNP seek to change perceived chafing vassalage in the UK to actual straightjacketed vassalage in the EU

Sir Ian Kershaw, Britain’s foremost historian of the Nazi period in Germany, identified the informal way that policy was generated in a country ruled by decree that was based on a leadership principle. He described it as “working towards the Führer”, where ambitious officials and party members seeking preferment would devise measures they believed were in line with the Führer’s thinking, presumably based on a close reading of Mein Kampf. We saw an example of this when the Scottish prison service instantly altered their policy on housing male rapists who now stated they were women in women’s prisons within minutes of the SNP’s leader responding to questions from the floor of the Scottish Parliament. Thus professional experts in prisoner safety, or just plain ordinary decent people in positions of responsibility for these matters, had to take their cue from an exigent spoken decree made by Scotland’s most powerful politician before implementing fundamental change.

Rather like how the Nazis blamed the influence of Jewish Germans on economic, social and political life, so the National Scottishists twist and turn every circumstance into an excuse for independence by blaming English politicians for all of Scotland’s problems. Nicola Sturgeon’s final trick before she quit was sponsoring a Gender Recognition Reform Bill which was vetoed by Westminster, and this, just like every preceding issue such as Brexit, was used as a pretext to demand a new referendum on independence. Unfortunately for Sturgeon this was widely ridiculed and damaged her credibility at a time when the SNP began to face what could become an existential crisis.

The current ongoing collapse of the SNP seems to echo that of its German counterpart. Rather than tanks approaching the leader’s bunker, we have had police vans parked outside Nicola Sturgeon’s private residence. Instead of defeat at Kursk and the start of a thousand-mile retreat, it was the 2021 refusal of Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell, to allow the SNP’s treasurer to see the party’s accounts. The treasurer resigned, and the police started their investigations into a suspicious black hole in the SNP’s finances.

The SNP raised £600,000 a few years back from donors for a fund to fight a new referendum campaign. The reason for this is simple. Unlike other major parties, the SNP does not receive money from well-heeled backers such as trades unions and businesses, which says rather too much about how large organisations that are flush with cash regard Scottish independence. There was a time when the party received money from a couple who had won the Euromillions lottery, but that was a one-off, rather like the lottery win itself. The fundraising for a new referendum started when Theresa May had lost her Commons majority and the Conservative government was on the ropes as its own MPs rebelled against the government’s proposed exit deal with the EU. The increasing possibility that a ‘rainbow coalition’, or ‘Government of National Unity’ fronted by Labour and supported by the SNP loomed, and the party did not want to miss out on the opportunity.

By 2019, under a change of Prime Minister, the government had lost control of the Order Paper that determines business in the House of Commons. The SNP’s price of supporting Labour would naturally have been a fresh independence referendum. The only fly in the ointment was that Labour was then being led by a politician who was so toxic that no previous Labour leader in the past four decades had given him a front-bench position, and whose personal affinities to anti-Semites, dictatorial regimes, and terrorists were well-known, if not well-publicised before 2017. The money donated to the SNP should have appeared in the SNP’s accounts as a current asset on the balance sheet, yet in the last few years the party’s accounts makes no mention of it, cash in hand always hovering at about the £100,000 mark.

The prospect of a second referendum vanished at the 2019 General Election, so questions have been asked about where the money had gone, and whether it should now be refunded since the purpose for which it has been raised is no longer possible for several years or decades. The resignation of the party’s treasurer, an elected position promising a transparency that the incumbent could not deliver, was the first domino to fall. The fall of the SNP leader turned out not to be the last.

Nicola Sturgeon resigned at a time when she was unable to answer satisfactorily questions about where the money had gone. She faced the possibility that the questions would continue until she gave a proper response. The Lord Advocate has had to recuse herself from any involvement in the police investigations which had now reached a point where a file had gone to her office for advice on prosecution. The consequent leadership campaign resulted in the resignation of Sturgeon’s husband after misleading membership figures for the election were announced. The party’s chief spokesman had previously quit after his support of the inflated membership figure was exposed as untrue.

The most recent resignation has been the party’s own auditors, the people responsible for certifying that the SNP’s accounts are true and fair. The party has to find a new firm of accountants. It has to present its 2022 accounts to the Electoral Commission by the end of three months at the time of writing. There is now a distinct possibility that the existence of a black hole in the accounts may force the party to go bust, as the SNP may need to refund £600,000 that it does not have to its donors as the purpose for which it was explicitly raised and ostensibly ring-fenced has evaporated.

How does a political party go bust? It is not a business. It receives money, but it does not do anything to make a profit with the money. Or at least it should not. The SNP will have some kind of legal status outside of registration with the Electoral Commission for the simple reason that none of the SNP’s appointed or elected officials want to face unlimited liabilities. So the limited liability entity that held the missing money may be put into receivership and its assets liquidated to pay its creditors, which will include the independence fund’s donors, who will be at the back of the queue as secured creditors will have preference.

The financial collapse of the SNP will not necessarily mean the actual collapse of the party. All that would happen is that new entities would be created, but SNP Mk II would have to start from scratch financially, and this may pose challenges given the reputational harm caused by the collapse of its predecessor. People might be reluctant to donate money to party officials who have been proved to be bad at looking after it. We may hear fresh calls for campaign finance reform as well as new demands for increased state funding of political parties. The latter should be resisted. Political parties should be allowed to compete in a free market, rather than in effect becoming nationalised entities. And yet it is likely that SNP Mk II will be at the front of these demands, perhaps even for a state-backed startup loan, which will be echoed by numerous other groups that complain of a disenfranchisement that does not actually exist.

The impending implosion of the SNP is without precedent in the UK. But then we have not had such a successful nationalist socialist party in this country before. Scotland has been misgoverned by the SNP because the party has traded on sentiment rather than competence and placed ideology before pragmatism. Scottish Labour, the previous repository of anti-Conservative votes, has failed to challenge a nationalist party on its doorstep while in England it would be all guns blazing denouncing any hypothetical English nationalistic party as fascist.

The parallels between German nationalists of the 1930s and Scottish nationalists of the 21st Century are compelling in their respective styles style but not so far, we can but hope, in intensity. The conduct of the SNP in power suggests that all nationalist parties are cut from the same kind of cloth, but while some favour brown for the shirts, others prefer tartan. It is clear that rather like Germany from 1945, Scotland in 2023 needs externally-inspired political reform to move away from a disastrous excursion into nationalist socialism. The impending collapse of the SNP is an opportunity for this to take place.

Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.