The SNP's fatal flaw

Nicola Sturgeon, SNP leader and occasional first minister of Scotland, has come to a jarring realisation. After 31 years as a member of the SNP and three as the party’s leader, she has announced that she is not comfortable with the name ‘Scottish National Party’. At the Edinburgh Festival, Sturgeon told Turkish novelist Elif Shafak:

‘If I could turn the clock back, what 90 years, to the establishment of my party, and chose its name all over again, I wouldn’t choose the name it has got just now. I would call it something other than the Scottish National Party.’

The problem for Sturgeon, it seems, was the worldwide upsurge in populist nationalism. This was causing confusion about the SNP’s mission and motivations. How anyone might come to associate the SNP with angry grievance politics is truly baffling. Thankfully, Sturgeon was able to reassure people that ‘what those of us who do support Scottish independence are all about could not be further removed from some of what you would recognise as nationalism in other parts of the world’.