04.06.2026

Small-nation crook

Peter Murrell’s bizarre shopping habits have badly damaged the SNP. But the national question is still very much on the agenda, argues Paul Demarty. Around half of voters remain committed to separation

What can we possibly make of Peter Murrell, who has admitted to embezzling £400,000 from the Scottish National Party?

Murrell was certainly in a good place to do so: chief executive of the SNP in its decade of glory, where it began to displace Labour in Scotland’s central belt, came agonisingly close to winning an independence referendum in 2014, and rode the fallout from defeat to a half-decade of near-total dominance in Scottish politics, in Holyrood and Westminster alike. Its membership rolls multiplying, its coffers filling, it was an attractive target for a well-placed malefactor.

And you could not get more well-placed than Murrell - with a senior post of his own and a marriage to the SNP’s unquestioned and well-respected leader, Nicola Sturgeon. So steal he could, and steal he did. Yet there is something slightly off about the whole thing, which is simply the pettiness of the theft. The list is, to be sure, of expensive items. He bought a Jaguar SUV. He bought a motor-home, which apparently sat rusting on the driveway of his mother, like Alan Bennett’s Lady in the van (four miles on the clock, according to the evidence given). He bought two advent calendars at Fortnums (£200 each!), crystal salt and pepper grinders (£2,600 and change), a Starwalker fountain pen (£4,225, and who today can even write with those things?).

The list goes down into more plebeian territory - games consoles (why he needed three different Nintendo 3DS handhelds remains a mystery), Scandinavian detective TV box-sets, and so forth. But it seems to be random splurging with little real purpose behind it. Sturgeon hotly denies any awareness of all this, and I suppose we must take her at her word, but it frankly beggars belief. (‘Honey, I’m home!’ ‘Hello, darling. How nice of you to bring four hundred quid’s worth of Le Creuset coffee cups, whose provenance I am definitely not going to ask you about. And that’s a nice Jaguar!’)

Grand larceny

Sturgeon is not the only person spluttering in outrage - real or confected - that they could have been so deceived. Current SNP leader and first minister John Swinney, a veteran of the party, likewise had to put on a show. In his case perhaps, ignorance could more plausibly be maintained. Humza Yousaf, whose tenure in the top job separates those of Sturgeon and Swinney, has demanded a hefty prison sentence.

Of course, Murrell is guilty of robbing ordinary party members, and some punishment will surely be meted out. If he were really motivated entirely by greed, though, he surely would have picked a different rosette. The profits available to those in the Labour and Conservative parties who traverse the revolving door between public life and private business are stupendous.

We expect that Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson enjoyed many more overpriced home trinkets and luxury advent calendars in their years riding high on the boutique-consultancy hog than Murrell ever could have. After George Osborne was ejected from Number 11, it became a full-time task merely to keep track of all the lavish sinecures he was collecting. That is to say nothing of the countless freebies accepted from lobbyists. All of this stuff has the advantage of being perfectly legal, and even the cheapest pair of spectacles bought for Keir Starmer by Lord Alli is - politically speaking - far dirtier than Murrell’s salt grinder.

Perhaps there is something rather compulsive about Murrell’s past behaviour: a psychopathological quirk that undermined a sincere commitment to the cause of Scottish independence, activated by the world of temptation that is bourgeois political life. Here I speculate: we may never know what led him to commit these eminently detectable crimes. He seems a little more like Sam Brinton, a minor Biden administration official who attracted notoriety for repeatedly stealing expensive-looking suitcases from airport baggage carousels. In both cases, it is hard to avoid resorting to amateur Freudianism, and diagnose an unconscious desire precisely to be caught in the act.

The more important matter is how the party came to be so vulnerable to such bizarre petty criminality, which, we should remember, took place over the course of an entire decade. It will not be too much, I hope, to expect some sort of internal inquiry into this matter; but the core problems are clear. The SNP was a fairly marginal party prior to devolution - its high watermark at Westminster coming in the second general election of 1974, where it took 11 seats (and famously played a significant role in the downfall of James Callaghan in 1979). More typically, its contingent could comfortably fit in the proverbial London taxi and, in many parliaments, on a tandem bicycle.

It was established immediately as the main opposition party in Holyrood, however, and in 2011 became not only the main party, but the governing party, a position which it has yet to lose. (This was about the time that Murrell began fishing in the till.) In 2015, still high on the referendum near-miss and the subsequent backstabbing by David Cameron, the SNP achieved an astonishing victory in Westminster, taking all but three of Scotland’s 59 Commons seats. Scotland began suddenly to look like a one-party state.

This, of course, made the SNP worth bribing (though Murrell did not take bribes as such!). It generally plunged it into the world of temptation, as noted, that bourgeois politics generally is. But it also must have imposed certain growing pains. All those MPs and MSPs needed staff; the party’s internal machinery suddenly needed to support vastly more activists; and those jobs had to be filled, more or less, by the human capital ready to hand. Personal connections to senior politicians no doubt counted for a lot - sometimes the man at the top of the greasy pole turns out to be a kleptomaniac!

Stasis

But then there is the strange effect of the referendum defeat itself. The poll was supposed to settle the question ‘for a generation’, but the close result meant that the independence question was placed in a strange kind of stasis. The nationalists lacked the power to secure a fresh referendum, so movement in that direction tended to become rhetorical - setting up standoffs with Westminster, getting the expected rebuff, and turning that into electoral propaganda.

In some respects, it resembled, to take an American example, the question of abortion before Roe v Wade was finally overturned. So long as abortion was politically delegated to the Supreme Court, whose composition changed only glacially, it could serve as a rallying issue for both the religious right (who wanted Roe overturned) and liberal Democrats (who feared what has now happened). It can be quite convenient, after all, to have as a central political rallying point something you cannot do very much about: power can be secured on an ongoing basis with the grand goal always out of reach.

Sooner or later, reality will tend to catch up with you. In the case of Murrell’s antics, the problems began in 2020, when eyebrows were raised at the annual accounts the SNP submitted to the electoral commission, with only £97,000 of ready cash in the bank. This was down from close to £500,000 the previous year, with the money likely splurged on the 2019 general election. Eagle-eyed Sturgeon-hostile nationalists, however, saw an immediate problem. The money raised for an independence referendum do-over campaign had shown up on this balance sheet; now it was gone, despite promises that it would be ring-fenced.

Attempts by several SNP figures to get some clarity about this were aggressively rebuffed by Sturgeon, Murrell and their allies. There was nothing to see here. But it did yield the initial police investigation; and before long, the plods started to find more alarming irregularities. Murrell was arrested in 2024 and soon charged with embezzlement.

The Murrell affair is only one of several political setbacks to have afflicted the SNP in its pomp; the defection of Alex Salmond to form his own nationalist outfit, Alba, various culture-war squalls over trans rights, the rapid cycling of leaders. The embezzlement situation has at least the potential to be more damaging, despite the relative safety of the timing (so thoughtful of Murrell to delay his confession until after May 7!). A whole series of senior party figures are accused of dismissing the allegations. Though there are still a few girlboss-feminist die-hards defending her, Sturgeon’s reputation is surely destroyed. She escaped prosecution, but her protestations of innocence can only seem utterly fanciful. A country that gave such a compromised person any role in its future governance surely lacks the self-respect required for independence!

In these situations, the carrot of independence is typically dangled. So the SNP, again victorious in Holyrood, has now passed a meaningless piece of legislation ‘requesting’ the right to hold another referendum. (Amusingly, of course, no SNPers were available to promote the policy on media rounds, because they knew very well what they would actually be asked about.) When Swinney first floated this last year, the left-nationalist website Conter - which has a notably more sober outlook than much of that milieu, and with which I am broadly in agreement on the role played by independence in SNP politics - was suitably scathing:

This latest attempt by Swinney to give the pretence of another independence referendum being just one more SNP vote away is as pathetic as it is deeply cynical. Notwithstanding the obvious inherent flaws in the prospectus offered in 2014 that led to defeat - flaws that haven’t been subject to any form of proper analysis and scrutiny since - the credibility gap here is the size of the Grand Canyon.¹

That said, however cynically the issue is exploited by the SNP, the Scottish national question per se remains live. Opinion polling suggests a society strongly polarised on the question of independence: over the years since the referendum, both ‘aye’ and ‘no’ have enjoyed a lead for a time (currently the ‘ayes’ have it!), but run each other fairly close. Unionism and separatism both have solid cores of support and, were there to be another referendum, the contest would likely be quite as feisty as the last one.

Self-determination

All of this is purely theoretical, of course, because Scotland does not have the right of self-determination. Her Majesty’s government was so kind as to grant a referendum in 2014, but theoretically would have been within its rights to nullify the ‘wrong’ result. We have changed monarchs once (and premiers more times than anyone can count) since then; but, so far as Westminster is concerned, the question remains settled ‘for a generation’. In the meantime, the very tendencies that brought separatism to the centre of Scottish politics - economic decline since deindustrialisation and the great crash, the decay of what passes for democracy in Britain, the rise of far-right national chauvinism in England out of proportion to the other British nations - continue apace. The denial of self-determination is thus a profoundly anti-democratic feature of the British constitution.

That said, it has always been, and remains, the view of this paper that separatism is a non-solution for the Scots (or Welsh, for that matter) to these problems. The drifting British economy suffers its particular malaise because of its role in the global system. Separation would produce two even more vulnerable nation-states. The political drift to the right is likewise a global phenomenon, and Scotland has no special immunity to it.

The power of capital is international, and must be confronted as such: chopping up the working class into ever smaller national slivers is movement in the wrong direction. Choosing internationalism over petty nationalism is just as much an exercise of self-determination.

1. www.conter.scot/2025/7/29/swinney-the-movement-and-the-british-state.↩︎