The Great Disruption of 1843 is widely considered the most significant event in 19th-century Scotland. In response to the changing nature of Scottish society—with the old moral economy of the rural parishes increasingly displaced by the modernising tendencies of the propertied classes—one half of the established Church of Scotland split to form a new, spiritually pure, and thoroughly democratic, Free Church.
A further schism occurred when the Free Presbyterian Church refused to join with the majority of their Free Church brethren, who by then had reunited with the established Church in 1893. The so-called “Wee Frees”, as they are sometimes called, claim to be the true heirs of the Scottish Reformation. They still practice Sabbatarianism and remain a significant presence in some of the most rural parts of Scotland, such as the Western Isles.
Though now a largely forgotten moment in history, the monumental schism of 1843 continues to provide a touchstone for big shifts in the way Scotland thinks of itself. In particular, the disruption underpinned the notion of the rural north as a spiritual heartland: where simple communitarian values can still thrive, free of the fickle and shallow concerns of “progress” and “modernity”.
While often cast as a singular, homogenous entity by British pundits, for most of its history Scotland has oscillated between patterns of national unity and profound internal division. As such, any party that seeks to present itself as simply “For Scotland” (as the SNP manifesto had it) will always eventually crumble in the face of contending social forces and disparate regional identities. The parish will always take its revenge on the centre.
The SNP’s astounding electoral achievement at the 2015 general election, when the party broke the BBC’s swingometer and won 56 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats on a 50 per cent share of the popular vote, placed its fortunes on a precipitously high perch. This time round, it has been reduced to a rump of 9 seats, on just under 30 per cent of the popular vote. Now the party cannot “speak” on Scotland’s behalf at Westminster so easily: the electoral map is messier, disunited. But perhaps that is also a truer reflection of the competing visions that were, in reality, always in play.
As in 1843, those competing visions are deeply rooted in specific ideas about what the nation is or ought to be. And in this is the SNP’s chief error: by trying to speak on behalf of the whole, it mistook “unity” for a vision of its own.
While the result of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum was closer than many anticipated, it was still ultimately a failure of the SNP to realise its long-held dream. It remains a moment the party never genuinely confronted or meaningfully analysed.
Instead, a rapid influx of new members—soaring past 100,000 by the 2015 general election—allowed the SNP to play the part of victor, telling its base that each electoral success was all that was needed for a second referendum, even as the UK government consistently refused to facilitate another legally binding poll on the issue.
Nicola Sturgeon had deftly used the closing months of the 2014 campaign to act as a figurehead for the anti-austerity politics of the pro-independence Yes movement, while also crafting a competent profile that appealed to Scotland’s large public sector workforce and white-collar middle classes. But, behind the scenes, her controlling instincts—likely the result of her formative years when the SNP was on the fringes of politics—led to an unsustainable expectation of party discipline that would snap as the promised conditions for another referendum failed to materialise. Her leadership ultimately came to an ignominious end, with a formal police investigation—sparked by a disgruntled pro-independence activist, no less—which saw her and her husband, the SNP’s former chief executive Peter Murrell, arrested. Although Sturgeon was later released, Murrell has since been charged with embezzlement of party funds; the investigation, still ongoing, remains an open wound for the party.
This is to say nothing of the other, not insignificant, issues the party has had to countenance. A series of legal challenges from Sturgeon’s predecessor as first minister, Alex Salmond, centred on sexual assault allegations of which he was acquitted, resulted in the creation of a new pro-independence party and a handful of defections from the SNP’s ranks. And in a decade featuring an unprecedented number of elections and referendums, the SNP’s finances have dwindled, its once impressive activist base now exhausted.
In the immediate term, the SNP’s problems will likewise be of a practical nature: the loss of 38 MPs will deprive an already cash-strapped party of much-needed public funds which help cover the operating costs of opposition parties at Westminster. The party's relegation behind the Liberal Democrats will also displace Stephen Flynn, by far the party’s most able communicator, from the prominent role he has occupied at Prime Minister’s Questions as the SNP’s Westminster leader.
But this newly divided electoral map of Scotland also presents longer term challenges for the party’s recovery.
Three bands of colour now divide that map along ancient geological fault lines.
The Southern Uplands, along the border, are a solid band of Tory blue (two of which are now listed among the party’s most resilient UK seats). The dense urban conurbation of the lowland Central Belt is Labour red, with a smattering of Lib Dem mustard. More remarkable still, there is not a trace of SNP yellow to be found in a constituency that lies south of the River Tay and the Grampian Mountains.
This implies a retrenchment to the times when the SNP first emerged as a serious electoral force in the 1970s. Back then, frustration with distant diktats from both London and Brussels allowed the SNP to build a base in the north among the ‘small c’ conservative, lower-middle classes of small town and rural Scotland. Despite the north’s immense energy riches, it’s this region that remains chronically overlooked by governments at both Holyrood and Westminster: much of its public infrastructure remains Victorian.
It was in her recent bid for the party leadership that Kate Forbes, a member of the evangelical Free Presbyterian Church, sought to steer the SNP towards the centre right and a rapprochement with this rural base. She was ultimately stymied by a relentless focus on her socially conservative beliefs, which party members deemed unpalatable for the leader of what is an increasingly less observant society. (The latest census had a majority of Scots citing “no religion” for the first time, making Scotland the least religious country in the UK.)
But if first minister John Swinney’s own “deep Christian faith” no longer provides a tangible link to the world of Scottish politics, some kind of profound—even spiritual—search to rearticulate what the SNP is for—beyond elusive and homogenising national unity—will be needed.
Given Scotland’s newly disrupted electoral geography, the temptation to retreat into a rural fundamentalism will now be strong within the SNP. But searching for a lost communitarian world that clings to outmoded moralities and dogmas risks further fracturing the popular progressive alliance that constituted grassroots, pro-independence sentiment in urban and postindustrial Scotland.
Scotland’s general election was also marred by turnout that dropped by 8.5 per cent and was particularly low in the most deprived constituencies where SNP incumbents lost out to Labour. As the SNP begins its search for the half a million votes it has lost since 2019, it will need to learn to walk alongside the dispossessed, the poor and the disaffected in order to offer them a future worth voting for. To begin this work, the SNP will have to acknowledge that independence—with its promise of democratic rebirth—is itself a matter of deep conviction, even belief. And all the more so, in a deeply secular nation.
