Salmond: ‘brain dead’ SNP leaders lack fight for independence

Alex Salmond has accused the SNP of being rudderless and said it is unsurprising that “disillusioned” party members are abandoning the movement he once led to electoral triumph.
Salmond, who was first minister from 2007 to 2014, said members were haemorrhaging away because the party leadership now appears to lack the fight to secure independence for Scotland.
He also criticised their “brain dead” response to the general election debacle in which the party lost 39 Westminster seats.
“What has been totally absent is any sign of any analysis or serious questions about what actually went wrong, and most of the reasons given are trivial to the point of banality,” Salmond, who now leads the pro-independence Alba Party, said.
“The SNP [leadership] are giving the impression of being virtually brain dead at the present moment and that’s very worrying.”
Salmond told Scotland on Sunday that the SNP should be worried about its falling membership numbers.
“It’s not the lack of progress that demoralises people. It’s the lack of any strategy,” he said. “It’s not the winning and losing, it’s the lack of fight. It’s not to have fought at all, that’s the disillusioning aspect.
“It’s like being a football supporter. You go to a match — you don’t necessarily expect to win, but you expect the team to do their best, [not find] that they look like they’d all rather be elsewhere.
“That’s what the SNP looks like just now. Therefore, it’s disillusioning for independence supporters. Therefore people don’t want to stay as members.”
The SNP’s annual accounts show the party lost almost 10,000 members over the past year. It had 64,525 members as of June, down from about 74,000 the year before. At its peak in 2019, the party had more than 125,000 members, meaning the total has almost halved in five years.
Setbacks during that time have included the sudden resignation of Salmond’s successor, Nicola Sturgeon, the resurgence of Labour in Scotland, which culminated in electoral disaster for the SNP in July, and Operation Branchform, the police investigation into SNP finances.
Salmond argued that members were not quitting because of Operation Branchform but because there was no push for independence, the party’s core policy.
“They don’t want to be a member of the SNP because they don’t think the SNP are trying to get independence. I would have thought that you would want some fairly radical shifts to change that.”
Asked about the present leadership, Salmond said: “The SNP must only elect people who are capable of leading it to independence.
“That’s the key criteria for somebody, and they have to judge on that basis. John [Swinney, who first led the party between 2000 and 2004] was an excellent finance secretary, but he has now lost four elections as leader of the SNP.”