EUAN MCCOLM: John Swinney is not the SNP's saviour… he is the definition of yesterday's man who helped bring the party to its knees
Twenty years ago, John Swinney was hounded from the leadership of the SNP after a disastrous four years in charge. Humiliation for the Nationalists at successive elections during the Swinney era saw him written off as a failure.
Today, SNP members have united behind Mr Swinney in the hope he can save their party from electoral oblivion.
The 60-year-old MSP for Perthshire North was the sole candidate when nominations to succeed Humza Yousaf closed yesterday.
Mr Swinney will now be nominated as his party’s candidate to become the seventh First Minister of Scotland. He will inherit a party mired in scandal, divided on both independence strategy and controversial gender ideology, and plummeting in the polls.
It says little for the SNP as a home of bright new talent that, in this time of crisis, it has dragged back to the frontline a man who, just a year ago, was adamant he had served his time.
An SNP ‘lifer’ – he joined the party at the age of 15 – Mr Swinney was a management consultant and life assurance industry executive before becoming MP for Tayside North in 1997. Two years later, he was among the first intake of MSPs at the Scottish parliament.
John Swinney and his former boss Nicola Sturgeon
An early reputation for competence was shattered when Mr Swinney succeeded Alex Salmond as party leader in 2000. For four years, he was undermined by rivals within the SNP. Unable to stamp his authority, Mr Swinney suffered a series of bruising election results.
When the SNP fared poorly in the 2004 Euro elections, a visit from the men in grey kilts brought Mr Swinney’s leadership to an end.
Fearful the subsequent leadership contest might be won by someone from the SNP’s radical wing, Alex Salmond returned as leader, going on to become the First Minister in 2007.
Mr Swinney’s authority across the party grew during its time in power. He was a member of the tiny clique – including Mr Salmond and his deputy, Nicola Sturgeon – that ran the SNP with an iron fist.
Announcing his candidacy to replace Humza Yousaf, Mr Swinney said he had come forward because of the need for change. His party had to change and if it didn’t, there would be tougher times to come.
Scottish voters may be sceptical about Mr Swinney’s ability to change the direction in which his party has been travelling.
The John Swinney who spoke in Glasgow yesterday afternoon, shortly after the announcement of his installation as SNP leader, sounded very different to the one who has so poorly understood the priorities of the majority of Scots over recent years.
He spoke of his desire to work with political opponents in the interests of Scotland.
‘I will always seek,’ said Mr Swinney, ‘with respect and courtesy, to persuade people of the case for Independence. All I ask of those who oppose that vision is they also act with the same courtesy and respect.’
Jaw-dropping doesn’t begin to describe that one. When Ms Sturgeon succeeded Alex Salmond as First Minister after the 2014 independence referendum, she appointed Mr Swinney her deputy. For the next nine years, the pair were politically inseparable, as the SNP lost interest in the priorities of voters.
The No campaign did not scrape to victory in the 2014 independence referendum.
Defeat for the SNP-led Yes movement by 55-45 was decisive.
But instead of standing by their word that the referendum would be a once-in-a-generation event, senior figures – including Mr Swinney – simply refused to accept the result was legitimate. Rather than respecting the decision of a substantial majority of Scots, the nationalists insisted that a second referendum was essential.
As Nicola Sturgeon’s right hand man, Mr Swinney treated the referendum decision – and the subsequent priorities – of the majority of Scots with dripping contempt.
In a moment of did-he-really-just-say-that? shamelessness, yesterday, Mr Swinney boasted about how he, personally, had been responsible for bringing substantial new powers to Holyrood as part of the Smith Commission process that followed the 2014 referendum.
You may have heard over the past decade the complaint of senior SNP figures that Unionist politicians cheated victory in 2014 with ‘The Vow’, a newspaper front page in which Tories, Labour, and Liberal Democrats united to promise the delivery of new power to Holyrood should Scotland remain in the Union.
For ten long years, SNP politicians have described ‘The Vow’ as worthless.
They have spoken of their Unionist opponents’ failure to keep their words and of the betrayal of the Scottish people. The Smith Commission, in which Mr Swinney played such a significant role, was established by the UK Government as its answer to the promise made in ‘The Vow’.
It turns out, then, that all that talk down the years of betrayal was hooey. ‘The Vow’ was actually delivered and Mr Swinney rinsed it for all it was worth.
And can voters trust the John Swinney who, as an architect of the Bute House Agreement, brought the Scottish Greens into power and allowed their crank obsessions to permeate Government at the expense of focus on crucial mainstream issues, to move his administration back on to the centre ground?
During a radio interview at the weekend, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar was asked a question few would have predicted has become one of the most contentious in politics: Can a woman have a penis? Over years of aggressive campaigning, trans rights activists have made politicians fearful of answering this seemingly straightforward question.
Anyone who dares answer ‘No’ risks being branded a ‘transphobe’.
If the politician defending the importance of biological reality against the whims of postmodernist narcissists happens to be a woman, she can expect to receive numerous death and rape threats.
And so Mr Sarwar’s answer was most refreshing. ‘It’s very simple,’ he said. ‘A man has a penis and woman has a vagina.’
That such a simple statement of fact should be so remarkable shows just how fraught the gender discussion has become.
Asked during his campaign launch last week whether or not he believes a trans woman was a woman, Mr Swinney dodged the question.
But this is an issue that will not go away. After years of being treated as bigots for expressing concern about the presence of men in women’s single-sex spaces and the prescription of powerful ‘puberty blocker’ drugs to confused children, those with concerns about the impact of trans-activism are being proved correct.
The recent review by Dr Hilary Cass of NHS services for gender-confused children shows those who questioned the ethics and safety of medicalising children with gender dysphoria were right to do so.
Will Mr Swinney have the courage to stand up to his former partners in the Scottish Greens and refuse to pander to their ideological demands in exchange for their support during crucial votes?
John Swinney is the very definition of ‘yesterday’s man’. SNP members now see him as their saviour but the harsh reality is that he was right behind every government misstep – from endlessly demanding a referendum unwanted by voters, to allowing trans-activists to shape unworkable law – that helped bring his party to its knees.
