9) The myth of SNP election machine

This blog documents some of the difficulties faced by SNP candidates and activists during the 2012 election campaign in Edinburgh. It was a long time ago but it’s important because the SNP is now and was then widely understood to be an election-winning “machine” and many of those involved at the time (the candidates, the membership, the public, the media, etc) shared this understanding.

The truth was that the SNP national leadership was largely ambivalent about winning control of all or any of the 32 various local authorities except perhaps Glasgow for whatever reason. Comments after the elections from Alex Salmond here and here, echoed by the campaign leader Derek Mackay, indicated that they were happy enough to have won the most seats overall in Scotland and that this augured well for the SNP’s other, more important, national goals. As far as I can see, at no point did Salmond, Mackay, or anyone else say publicly that “our target is to become the biggest party in Edinburgh council” even though this was perfectly possible with a bit of hard work and focus. Not surprisingly the local party in Edinburgh weren’t particularly energised about winning either. The national manifesto is here and the two top priorities were the council tax freeze and ruling out compulsory redundancies – two centralised policies.

To be fair to him, Mackay did have a flawed plan for victory which is outlined below but what was missing apart from a clear target was a very public message that an SNP victory would be beneficial for the welfare of Edinburgh residents, i.e. a reason to vote SNP. There are a lot of reasons for the culture of apathy that prevailed nationally and locally in that election but there are only so many negative features of the SNP that can be recorded in one blog before it just looks gratuitous. But it is sufficient to say that local government was never really a top priority in Alex Salmond’s SNP.

This lack of a clear goal meant that during the campaign several senior figures were able to exercise and arguably even abuse their power with impunity while others simply impeded any chance of success with unnecessary mistakes. There were then and are now numerous perfectly competent people in the SNP in Edinburgh who knew exactly what needed to be done if they could just be left alone to get on with executing an agreed campaign plan, although some high level assistance would have been appreciated with, for example, insisting that wards were split promptly. This is all explained below.

Councillor Tom Buchanan’s candidacy

It’s not easy to write a critical account of Tom Buchanan’s candidacy at the 2012 elections but eight years have passed since he tragically passed away and as I’ll explain the truth is that he should not have been allowed to stand, though he was certainly not at fault personally. If any of his close friends or family find this offensive or distressing then I regret that but this blog is about impropriety and weak governance and it can’t be left incomplete because of such sensitivities. The Code of Conduct requires councillors to “take decisions solely in terms of the public interest. You must not act in order to gain financial or other material benefit for yourself, family or friends”. This means that the needs of the city must always come before the needs of the councillors themselves. In allowing Tom to stand, this stipulation was ignored.

I had known and worked closely with Tom Buchanan for many years prior to 2012 and liked him well. As Economy Convener from 2007 he had a reputation as one of the more energetic and decisive councillors and after he died several senior staff told me that they had greatly enjoyed working with him. Obviously he planned to stand for re-election in May 2012 but tragedy struck when he was diagnosed with a brain tumour around February 2012.

What was disconcerting was that his fellow SNP candidates received no information about his prognosis. Personally I had grave concerns which were validated the first time I saw Tom after his operation out on the streets in the Fernieside area of his ward. I was shocked that this energetic guy, still only in his mid 50s, could now barely shake hands. It started to dawn on me that the reason we’d not heard any prognosis was that he was nowhere near well enough to contest an election and should have been convalescing at home. Like everyone else, I wanted to support Tom in any way that was needed but it appeared, in the absence of any reassuring information, highly unlikely or even impossible that he could ever make a full recovery and perform his council duties.

In short, in order to permit him to stand for election, the seriousness of his condition had to be withheld from his colleagues and the electorate and none of us could be honest about what was going on. This was unethical for multiple reasons. No blame can be attached to Tom, he had everyone’s sympathy, but I’m an accountant and am obliged by my code of conduct to be “direct and honest” in everything I do. I’ve been censured in the recent past for my involvement in unethical SNP salary/allowance practices, see here.

There were a number of motives for this decision. Ostensibly it was the honourable and loyal thing to do; to show faith in and seek to assist a valued public servant at his time of need. However Tom and his family would also have been left with a much reduced income had he stepped down at the election and if re-elected he would be paid at least £16k per annum. Not only would this make his life significantly more comfortable, it also meant that the other councillors and party members didn’t have to raise any money for him or put their hands in their own pockets.

In fact the culture of the grassroots SNP is that they look after their own and we could easily have had a fundraiser at National Conference or somewhere in Edinburgh. Personally I’d have been good for a few hundred pounds. My branch in Newington sold a property for £25,000 shortly after Tom was re-elected and we could easily have diverted several thousand to an appeal for him. Most of us enjoyed running the party ethically and compassionately.

What we did instead was let the city council pick up this tab. And Tom was not just re-elected as a councillor, the SNP negotiated and agreed for him to keep his position as the Convener of the Economy Committee, earning something like £40,000 even though he was unable to attend any meetings or do any work. It may sound heartless but letting a gravely ill person stand for election wouldn’t be permitted in Holyrood or Westminster and shouldn’t have been permitted at Edinburgh council elections either. The public always have to come first. For example if (God forbid) a serving SNP minister was struck down with a brain tumour in February 2021, there is very little chance that they would be permitted to stand for election in May 2021.

Chairing the Economy Committee effectively was a vitally important role particularly for a city that was still reeling from the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Tom was supported in that important post in absentia until he stepping down in November 2012 to earn an ordinary councillor’s wage for the last five months of his life. But for around seven months from May 2012 (in addition to the purdah period) there could be no strategic leadership of the economy portfolio. He was replaced by Frank Ross who was permitted to hit the ground running a little early (see here) by developing plans for major projects such as the St James Centre development. But the SNP created a situation where huge investments (hundreds of millions of pounds) and thousands of job opportunities were delayed unnecessarily for many months.

The whole arrangement was just a financial one whereby the SNP put the welfare of the SNP group before our obligations as councillors. Not just unethical in itself but a terrible message to send to the SNP members, the other councillors, the senior staff and the public. This message was that the SNP council group always put themselves first.

In any conventional party there would have been numerous levels of oversight that would have prevented this from happening but in the SNP, although these different people and positions existed, apathy reigned. Indeed reporting governance issues to senior people in the SNP was not advisable.

Derek Mackay tries to “help”

Leading up to the May 2012 elections the SNP did have a plan to become the biggest party in the council. However some mischievous local SPAD types successfully lobbied Derek Mackay, the national campaign coordinator and local government minister to push through some revisions to our candidate strategy. The strategy outlined how many SNP candidates we would put up in each of the 17 wards to maximise returns of successful candidates. Out of the blue Mackay told us to stand one extra candidate (i.e. two candidates) in three Edinburgh wards where we had only planned to stand one.

One of them was the three member ward of Fountainbridge Craiglockhart. We had polled only 19% of the first preference votes in 2007 and that hadn’t been enough to win even one councillor. Yet McKay had been advised that our support was projected to rise to 44% of the first preference votes in 2012 and that we could go from zero councillors out of three to two out of three with this projected 130% increase in our vote. [I know because I treated SNP campaigning like a job and kept detailed notes of all these things at the time.]

Of course these projections were nowhere near realistic and yet it took days and days of work from me and one or two others to change his mind. In the end the SNP candidate David Key got 23.5% of the first preference votes (a reasonable increase) and was elected third of three by the skin of his teeth. Had we not acted we’d have got zero from two elected and so a huge embarrassment was avoided.

As part of the campaign to change Mackay’s mind I attended an SNP council group meeting in early February where the top priority for discussion was ferris wheels. The councillors didn’t agree that there was a danger in standing two candidates in Fountainbridge Craiglockhart and offered no assistance and I rather regretted having outed myself as a non-yes-man to the councillors and one senior MSP.

Mackay had also openly stated that he “hadn’t checked the numbers”. He expected us to agree a revised strategy based on the superior knowledge of his associates without checking anything. In my old job I would have been shocked had a first year accounting trainee been so complacent as to not make sure that important projections were checked and double checked. This was a politician who would be a Finance Minister a few years later, in charge of complex policies such as industrial strategy, yet he clearly had no idea that he was accidentally undermining our campaign.

In the Leith ward, the new two candidate strategy Mackay imposed also led to the popular Deputy Provost Rob Munn losing his seat to Adam McVey, mainly as McVey came before Munn on the ballot paper. Thankfully it didn’t affect seat numbers overall. The Fountainbridge Craiglockhart ward was the only real risk of that happening and we spotted and resolved it.

As well as creating problems where none existed, Mackay also ignored problematic situations that we needed his help with (to say nothing of our total lack of policies). The situation with Tom Buchanan was one but there were many more. In wards where we already (correctly) hoped to get two SNP councillors elected, several sitting councillors were refusing to split their wards with the second candidate to agree who would campaign where. Possibly they thought it would help them get elected if the second candidate was restricted from campaigning, especially if their surnames were low in the alphabet. There is a huge alphabetical bias in council elections which Mackay and his colleagues could have fixed since it became apparent in 2007 but have chosen not to. He also could and should have stepped in to demand that all the wards be split early in the campaign but he didn’t ask any of us what the real problems were and so he didn’t know about it and couldn’t help.

It’s only because of his fall from grace that I can criticise Derek Mackay by name. However I might be in a minority but I have some sympathy for his troubles in 2020 and quite like him. When you look at what he actually did in terms of actual physical contact compared to what some other people have admitted to, then I think he’s been harshly treated. I hope he is allowed back into the SNP in the not too distant future. His behaviour was pretty appalling but he’s had a more difficult life than almost anyone else in parliament (violent father etc). I don’t care what anyone else says, in my view he deserves a second chance.

The other Liberton Gilmerton fiasco..

Tom’s materially incomplete profile with no mention of his critical illness

As well as my own campaign I also managed that of the second Liberton/Gilmerton candidate, Derek Howie. We ran a great campaign and covered every inch of our part of the ward. The materials we put out were also superb mainly as I was supported by an excellent graphic designer. Derek is registered blind and so we had a rota of support with door-knocking and leafleting from SNP volunteers from across the city. It all came together beautifully. It was the SNP at their best for once. However, there were difficulties to be overcome before we could commence…

Along with Tom Buchanan, Derek won the nomination for that ward on the 22nd of November 2011 but by mid-February (nearly three months later) it turned out that he hadn’t been able to start campaigning. Part of the problem was that there was no agreement about splitting the ward with Tom Buchanan but mainly there was what could politely be termed an unwillingness to help from one or more Edinburgh East constituency leaders. Even if the ward had been split, Derek was blind and couldn’t simply head out and knock doors on his own. By late February I had to come in and start up his campaign or nobody would have done it. Had I not spotted the problem and volunteered to help then it was clear that there wasn’t going to be a campaign for a registered blind candidate in the constituency of the serving Justice Minister of the Scottish parliament.

No photos with famous SNP people for Derek Howie, just a bus.

Due to the avoidable three month delay in starting his campaign Derek went on to lose the fourth and last council place in his ward to the conservative councillor Nick Cook by an agonising 14 votes. Launching the careers of conservative councillors is not really what the SNP exists to do. Had Derek picked up just one vote per week in the time where he couldn’t campaign then it would’ve been enough. And had he won then the final tally would have been 19 SNP councillors, compared to Labour’s 20, instead of 18. As someone who worked himself into the ground for the three months up to the 2012 election running campaigns in two separate wards, this self-inflicted failure was annoying.

As if to prove that the hostility to Derek’s candidacy wasn’t imaginary, there was more misbehaviour after Tom Buchanan passed away. Derek put himself forward for the by-election but the same senior Edinburgh East figures who had undermined him the year before decided to send a leaflet out to the local membership to promote an alternative candidate, with endorsements from local important people, one day before the rules permitted that they could be contacted. Not a big deal but still cheating. Derek saw his opponent off anyway and won the candidacy although not the by-election. This left the SNP with zero councillors in a ward for four years where they could easily have had two for five years.

Fortunately he was elected in the next council election in 2017 but it was five years later than it should have been. Then he resigned the whip in 2020 citing the SNP’s anti-disability culture. What a mess.

Finally..

The SNP could also have won two seats in the Forth ward but George Gordon just missed out on being the second in part because the ward wasn’t split until late in the campaign. However more important was that he was narrowly defeated in the 2008 Forth ward by-election when the same SNP activists who misinformed Derek Mackay about projections for 2012 delayed the start of that campaign with various shenanigans. This meant that the SNP also helped launch the career of Labour councillor Cammy Day, the current Depute Leader. Not quite what they’re there for.

Had George Gordon won in 2008 instead then he would almost certainly have won in 2012 and, with Derek Howie, it could and should have been SNP 20, Labour 19. But senior SNP figures both local and party-wide decided they knew best when they didn’t and Labour “won”the 2012 election in Edinburgh. By the end it was obvious that there was little appetite for victory as would be crystal clear when all the key council positions were negotiated away in the coalition talks between Labour and SNP. That’s a story for another blog.

Meanwhile in Glasgow, the SNP group leader made several mistakes such as publicly stating that the election was about independence when council elections are always about public service and can never be about anything else. The SNP deservedly lost there too. In a city of a million people and with decades to prepare, the SNP still couldn’t find a competent council candidate who could be trusted in interviews and wanted to lead. Largely because historically the SNP has not valued local government.

8) Biography – part 3

This blog post is another personal one but like parts 1 and 2, it is written solely to highlight seriously inappropriate behaviour within the SNP, in particular a policy of unofficial “blacklisting” of potential parliamentary candidates lasting decades. My background is otherwise uninteresting.

To continue the story, by the time I moved back to Scotland from London in September 2007 I had by then already served five and half years of an informal, unwritten rolling ban on standing as a parliamentary candidate for the SNP. This followed the fallout from the London branch convenership elections of September 2001 which snowballed into something of a cause celebre within the senior ranks of the SNP. The idea that important national politicians had prioritised the need to neutralise a minor figure like me seemed as baffling and inappropriate then as it does now.

The ban damaged the SNP as well. Had it not been for the ban then, by this point in 2007, I would have spent around 4 more years in Scotland working as a political organiser in my spare time. As I write this blog in 2021 I’ve now missed 12 years of activism, for further reasons which will become apparent. That’s 12 years of free professional organisational support lost for no reason.

However having committed to returning home to be an activist I tried not to let these difficulties affect my self-confidence or my belief that I could overturn the ban. All it would take was finding one person, someone proactive with a strong sense of fairness, to challenge the legitimacy of the decision by for example insisting on seeing documentary evidence of wrongdoing (which I knew didn’t exist). It’s worth noting that I had been advised verbally in 2005 that the ban did not extend to standing for the council but the idea of me joining the authoritarian and damaging Edinburgh council SNP group was unthinkable. Unfortunately I would be proved right on this point in due course. The plan was to do enough to get the ban lifted in time for the 2011 Scottish parliament elections. I had already missed the chance to put myself forward for 3 national elections by 2007. (Spoiler: this plan completely fails.)

Things got off to the worst possible start. I had visited the Edinburgh South Constituency Association convener two years previously (just before my second of three candidate vetting rejections) to explain my position in advance of moving there. However when I next met him at a race night fundraiser he looked at me and it was instantly obvious that he wouldn’t be supporting or even discussing my case under any circumstances. This meeting was only about two months after the latest (24th August 2007) rejection where I was informed by email that “you should not let this [failing the vetting] deter you from coming forward again at a future date, as many applicants who have not been successful in the assessment have returned and been approved, and gone on to be candidates.”

As usual with my dealings with the SNP there was no coherence or logic to any of the communications and as a blacklisted individual I was to be quietly and informally sidelined by various anonymous figures with impunity. This was bad news given that I’d just interrupted my career to free up time to do SNP work in south Edinburgh as part of building my case. For the next fives years I’d work only as a relatively low-level self-employed auditor and rarely full-time – a huge sacrifice. And from the outset it was obvious that I wouldn’t even get the support of my own constituency.

By late 2008 the vetting situation was already hopeless and so I tried to plan an escape from Scotland and opponents in the SNP..

The developing situation was so dire that after a year and without even finishing the Masters I started to look for jobs outside Scotland and away from the SNP, like this one on the right for Syngenta in Switzerland. Over the next few years I’d look into and apply for dozens of jobs as far away as South America and the Far East even though I’d only ever wanted to live quietly in Edinburgh and support the SNP. It was impossible to plan my career or anything else. The stress was incredible. I’d already tried emigration once before in 2004 and I knew it wouldn’t solve my problems. Occasionally I would apply for and be offered a full time well paying job in Scotland but I always decided to prioritise SNP work instead. The December 2005 rejection letter had cited weak leadership skills so I was obliged to stay and provide incontrovertible proof that I was a committed leader and that meant a full time job wasn’t a possibility.

Russia had been an option after my 2005 rejection and so I followed up again there too…

Back to early 2008 and as SNP constituency organiser for Edinburgh South I started by canvassing the whole of a huge estate called the Inch more or less alone. This was afrll to improve my case. In 2009 I produced, printed and distributed many thousands of leaflets around South Edinburgh for the Euro election campaign.

At the 2010 Westminster campaign I was the election agent and campaign organiser for Edinburgh South and the election agent for the Edinburgh East all at the same time. By this time I was working about 30 hours a week for free for the SNP and only getting paid for my temporary auditing job for around 3 days a week. But I loved the SNP work. Loved getting everything perfect and loved being a good organiser. It was a good feeling that no one in the SNP worked harder or more effectively than me for no material reward.

CVs for jobs abroad dated 2008 to 2011 due to my life ban on standing for parliament combined with a morbid fear of joining the council

Being election agent is just a few days’ work but organiser is a huge role and involves designing and printing numerous different leaflets, then organising and leading leaflet and canvassing runs and then inputting the data. There are also thousands of letters to supporters to be organised and much more. I took a few days off after the May 2010 general election and then was agent and organiser at the Liberton/Gimerton council by-election campaign after Ian Murray got elected to Westminster. Another three and a half month’s hard work up to 9th September 2010. The SNP lost all three elections I worked on that year.

Here is an example of my dedication. I had an 8 day holiday planned in early August to play with a pipe band at the Lorient Celtic Festival in Brittany. This was a month before the vote and no trouble to accommodate but I struggled to find ONE SINGLE PERSON in the whole of the Edinburgh SNP to be in Gilmerton to hand out materials for the three regular canvassing sessions (two Saturdays and a Wednesday) where I would be missing. Only one highly unreliable individual (an HQ worker agreed). After Wednesday 11th August 2010, someone from Musselburgh emailed me to say that nobody had been present at the meeting place on the Saturday or Wednesday to hand out materials and the handful of volunteers had all gone home disappointed. So I changed my plans and returned home alone from North West France a couple of days early just to be present for the Saturday 14th August canvassing session. I didn’t want to be connected to wasting people’s time or any unprofessional behaviour or give my opponents an excuse to label me incompetent.

In order to stand for the 2011 Scottish Parliamentary elections I needed to get vetted in 2010. I won’t detail all the many things that went on to thwart this but after the 9 September 2010 Liberton/Gilmerton by-election was over I approached my constituency convener. He’d always made clear that he wouldn’t support me under any circumstances but I asked him to give me the formal support of the constituency either with or without asking the delegates (there was no need to). He flatly refused. He wouldn’t put it on the agenda for the delegates to decide, and nor would he inform them of his “executive decision”. Nor would he discuss any of this or explain himself. This was standard SNP abuse of power and happens every day across the party. But even so it shocked me that he’d go so far out of his way to make things difficult. I should also say that, from his perspective, he knew with 100% certainty that I was banned for life, that we both knew resistance was futile and that it was dishonest and unhelpful of me to act or pretend otherwise.

After I continued to complain he later told me a) that he mistakenly thought I was asking for his “personal support” rather than that of the constituency and b) that he had no idea that I had worked for years in his constituency to try to get enough support to overturn my ban. The first was a highly improbable failure to communicate on my part and for the second I reminded him that I had visited him to discuss these exact plans at his home even before moving to Edinburgh. It was a case study in how centralised and inappropriate decision making damages the SNP internally.

One night in Leslie’s Bar he did also tell me that I had “upset some people”. I asked who these people were but he told me mysteriously “you already know”. This was more or less the same situation I had outlined to him 5 years previously when I asked for his support and when he seemed to have agreed to help me. Concepts such as behaving democratically and ethically were and are just optional in the SNP.

To his credit he was also the only person who ever spoke any truth about the real reason why I had repeatedly failed the vetting over the previous eight years. None of the numerous highly paid and trustworthy parliamentarians that interviewed me ever did. It was nice to confirm what I knew already; that every word in all the letters and interviews going back to 2002 had been incorrect. Such an approach would have been illegal if done by a normal employer. My view of the SNP had always been that we were one team who worked together and helped each other achieve important common goals but this was a minority view.

In the short term it was impossible for me to pass the vetting in time to put myself forward for the 2011 elections. I wouldn’t have had a chance of overturning the ban.

However, I wasn’t going to give up and decided to look elsewhere for a constituency to support me. So I took my campaigning skills to East Lothian to be the campaign manager for the 2011 election. The candidate was an SNP councillor called Dave Berry and we were hoping to unseat the Labour party’s leader in Scotland Iain Gray and so it was a big deal.

Work for this campaign started in October 2010. I also agreed to be the election agent for Edinburgh Southern as a goodwill gesture to my constituency, doubling up with extra duties as usual. All in all it was another huge commitment with each campaign costing me thousands of pounds in lost wages while my career stalled. The upside was that campaigning in East Lothian was enjoyable with great people everywhere. In the end although we got a swing of over 10% we lost by just 151 votes. Amazingly, we won in Edinburgh Southern in what was a landslide national victory for the SNP. 

As for my own plans, I got lots of support in East Lothian and plenty of good references but still couldn’t find that one person who was dynamic and smart enough to take up my case with someone appropriate, such as the National Secretary, Alasdair Allan, and refuse to take “no” for an answer. The person I was looking for was someone like me but not me. I did ask the author Stephen Maxwell but he told me that he was also banned and there was no use asking him. I already knew about this – he was thought to be an early casualty of SNP centralised control. I felt bad about approaching him and didn’t approach anyone else. I had also thought about approaching Prof Sir Neil MacCormick years earlier but he passed away suddenly in 2009. My 4-year master plan to find someone to help me overturn the ban didn’t even get off the ground.

I gradually accepted that the opposition to me was insurmountable. Establishment voices in the party had been steering me towards the city council since 2005. It was to be the council or nothing for me.  From what I knew of Edinburgh council, I was very tempted by the “nothing” option. Putting a trained local authority governance manager like me into the Edinburgh SNP group was a glaringly obvious mistake but of course no one else could see that and no one would discuss it.

The stress was endless. Time and time again I had found and would continue to find myself in the position of trying desperately to avoid doing what the SNP insisted I do. From the top down people in the SNP were consistently engaging in inappropriate personal conduct and detrimental political conduct.

More votes than the other nominees combined

In late 2011, I decided to comply with the SNP and applied to be a councillor. I had to be vetted once again which was embarrassing as I was widely understood to be an unwelcome and disruptive person. It was also clear that the SNP had very little in the way of the kind of policies, priorities, training and oversight that were needed to run an effective and ambitious network of council groups, although nobody else seemed to think this. I contested and won the Southside Newington nomination in November 2011. I was still quite highly regarded in South Edinburgh and got more votes than the other 4 candidates combined. This confirmed what I’d always known – that I could quite easily have won a parliamentary nomination for an Edinburgh constituency in 2010 or 2011 had I not been banned.

In the words of my own CA convener I had “upset some people” but the actual documentary evidence suggested that I was a popular member of the party just as I had been in September 2001 when the problems started that cost me a parliamentary career. This is what happens when candidate vetting outcomes are based on gossip and interference rather than evidence. Basic governance weaknesses that would be illegal in a proper employment context.

By the time of the 2012 campaign my organiser skills were second to none and I produced over a hundred thousand high quality tabloid size leaflets for the SNP to distribute city wide. This was the first time I’d seen us publish the same materials city-wide and it made the campaigns in every ward much easier. Of course it was only possible because I was supported by a superb graphic designer.

As well as being my own campaign manager and election agent for that election, I was the campaign manager and election agent for one of the Liberton/Gilmerton candidates called Derek Howie who was blind and needed a lot of support. That was at least three months of full-time campaigning with a huge workload. The story of the mistakes made in the 2012 election is covered here.

Objectively I’d say I was as skilled and qualified to be a parliamentarian as anyone in the SNP, and as good and hard working a campaigner too. But all that was irrelevant as I was blacklisted. Not for what happened in 2001/02 but for refusing to accept it and having the audacity to continue to seek to pass the vetting.

There is a popular phrase in the SNP that everyone should “work as if you live in the early days of a better nation” but the truth is that almost nobody does.