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The Scottish National Party (SNP) (Scottish Gaelic: Pàrtaidh Nàiseanta na h-Alba, Scots: Scots Naitional Pairtie) is a Scottish nationalist[13][14] and social-democratic[15][16][17] political party in Scotland. The SNP supports and campaigns for Scottish independence.[18][19] It is the third largest political party by membership in the United Kingdom, behind the Conservative Party and the Labour Party.[20]
The SNP was founded in 1934, with the merger of the National Party of Scotland and the Scottish Party. The party has had continuous parliamentary representation since Winnie Ewing won the 1967 Hamilton by-election.[21]
As of 2014, the SNP is the largest political party in Scotland in terms of membership, MSPs and local councillors, with over 92,000 members, 65 MSPs and 424 councillors, comprising in total 1.6% of the Scottish gross population.[1][22][23] The SNP also currently holds 6 of 59 Scottish seats in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. The party has 2 MEPs in the European Parliament, who sit in The Greens/European Free Alliance group. The SNP is a member of the European Free Alliance (EFA).
With the creation of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, the SNP became the second largest party, serving two terms as the opposition. The SNP came to power in the 2007 Scottish general election, forming a minority government, before going on to win the 2011 election, after which it formed its first majority government.[24]
The leader of the SNP, Nicola Sturgeon, is the current First Minister of Scotland.
The SNP was formed in 1934 through the merger of the National Party of Scotland and the Scottish Party, with Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham as its first president. Professor Douglas Young, who was the leader of the Scottish National Party from 1942 to 1945 campaigned for the Scottish people to refuse conscription and his activities were popularly vilified as undermining the British war effort against the Axis powers. Young was imprisoned for refusing to be conscripted.
The SNP first won a parliamentary seat at the Motherwell by-election in 1945, but Dr Robert McIntyre MP lost the seat at the general election three months later. They next won a seat in 1967, when Winnie Ewing was the surprise winner of a by-election in the previously safe Labour seat of Hamilton. This brought the SNP to national prominence, leading to the establishment of the Kilbrandon Commission.
The high point in a UK general election was when the SNP polled almost a third of all votes in Scotland at the October 1974 general election and returned 11 MPs to Westminster, to date the most MPs it has had. However, the party experienced a large drop in its support at the 1979 General election, followed by a further drop at the 1983 election.
In the 2007 Scottish Parliamentary general election the SNP emerged as the largest party with 47 seats, narrowly ousting the Scottish Labour Party with 46 seats and Alex Salmond became Scottish First Minister. The Scottish Green Party supported Salmond's election as First Minister, and his subsequent appointments of ministers, in return for early tabling of the climate change bill and the SNP nominating a Green MSP to chair a parliamentary committee.[25]
In May 2011, the SNP won an overall majority in the Scottish Parliament with 69 seats. Overall majorities are unusual in the Additional Member system that is used for elections to the Scottish Parliament, which was specially designed by the Labour UK government in 1999 to prevent any party gaining overall control of the parliament.[26]
The primary level of organisation in the SNP are the local Branches. All of the Branches within each Scottish Parliament constituency form a Constituency Association, which coordinates the work of the Branches within the constituency, coordinates the activities of the party in the constituency, and acts as a point of liaison between an MSP or MP and the party. Constituency Associations are composed of delegates from all of the Branches within the constituency.
The annual National Conference is the supreme governing body of the SNP, and is responsible for determining party policy and electing the National Executive Committee. The National Conference is composed of:
The National Council serves as the SNP’s governing body between National Conferences, and its decisions are binding, unless rescinded or modified by the National Conference. There are also regular meetings of the National Assembly, which provides a forum for detailed discussion of party policy by party members.
The party has an active youth wing, the Young Scots for Independence, as well as a student wing, the Federation of Student Nationalists. There is also an SNP Trade Union Group. There is an independently-owned monthly newspaper, The Scots Independent, which is highly supportive of the party.
The SNP's leadership is vested in its National Executive Committee (NEC) which is made up of the party's elected office bearers and six elected members (voted for at conference). The SNP parliamentarians (Scottish, Westminster and European) and councillors have representation on the NEC, as do the Trade Union Group, the youth wing and the student wing.
According to accounts filed with the Electoral Commission for the year ending 2010, the party had a membership of 16,232,[27] up from 15,097 in 2008 and 9,450 in 2003.[28] Between 2003-2011 SNP membership increased by around 110%.[29] From 19-26 September 2014 (the week after the Scottish independence referendum) party membership more than doubled, surpassing the Liberal Democrats to become the third largest political party in the United Kingdom in terms of membership.[30] On 14 November 2014 an announcement was made to SNP conference that the party's membership as of that afternoon stood at 85,884.[1] In 2004 the party had income of approximately £1,300,000 (including bequests of just under £300,000) and expenditure of about £1,000,000.
The SNP retains close links with Plaid Cymru, its counterpart in Wales. MPs from both parties co-operate closely with each other and work as a single parliamentary group within the House of Commons. The SNP and Plaid Cymru were involved in joint campaigning during the 2005 General Election campaign. Both the SNP and Plaid Cymru, along with Mebyon Kernow from Cornwall, are members of the European Free Alliance (EFA), a European political party comprising regionalist political parties. The EFA co-operates with the larger European Green Party to form The Greens–European Free Alliance (Greens/EFA) group in the European Parliament.
Prior to its affiliation with The Greens–European Free Alliance, the SNP had previously been allied with the European Progressive Democrats (1979-1984), Rainbow Group (1989–1994) and European Radical Alliance (1994–1999).
The SNP's policy base is mostly in the mainstream European social democratic tradition. Among its policies are commitments to same-sex marriage, reducing the voting age to 16, unilateral nuclear disarmament, progressive personal taxation, the eradication of poverty, the building of affordable social housing, free higher education, opposition to the building of new nuclear power plants, investment in renewable energy, the abolition of Air Passenger Duty, and a pay increase for nurses.[31][32]
The Scottish National Party did not have a clear ideological position until the 1970s, when it sought to explicitly present itself as a social democratic party in terms of party policy and publicity.[33][34] During the period from its foundation until the 1960s, the SNP was essentially a moderate centrist party.[33] Debate within the party focused more on the SNP being distinct as an all-Scotland national movement, with it being neither of the Left-wing politics or the Right-wing politics, but constituting a new politics that sought to put Scotland first.[34][35]
The SNP was formed through the merger of the centre-left National Party of Scotland (NPS) and the centre-right Scottish Party.[34] The SNP’s founders were united over self-determination in principle, though not its exact nature, or the best strategic means to achieve self-government. From the mid-1940s onwards, SNP policy was radical and redistributionist in relation to land and in favour of ‘the diffusion of economic power’, including the decentralization of industries such as coal to include the involvement of local authorities and regional planning bodies to control industrial structure and development.[33] Party policies supported the economic and social policy status quo of the post-war welfare state.[33][36]
By the 1960s, the SNP was starting to become defined ideologically, with a social democratic tradition emerging as the party grew in urban, industrial Scotland, and its membership experienced an influx of social democrats from the Labour Party, the trade unions and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.[35][37] The emergence of Billy Wolfe as a leading figure in the SNP also contributed to this movement to the left. By this period, the Labour Party were also the dominant party in Scotland, in terms of electoral support and representation. Targeting Labour through emphasising left-of-centre policies and values was therefore electorally logical for the SNP, as well as tying in with the ideological preferences of many new party members.[37] In 1961 the SNP conference expressed the party’s opposition to the siting of the US Polaris submarine base at the Holy Loch. This policy was followed in 1963 by a motion opposed to nuclear weapons: a policy that has remained in place ever since.[37] The 1964 policy document, SNP & You, contained a clear centre-left policy platform, including commitments to full employment, government intervention in fuel, power and transport, a state bank to guide economic development, encouragement of cooperatives and credit unions, extensive building of council houses by central and local government, pensions adjusted to cost of living, a minimum wage and an improved national health service.[33]
The ‘60s also saw the beginnings of the SNP’s efforts to establish an industrial organisation and mobilise amongst trade unionists in Scotland, with the establishment of the SNP Trade Union Group, and identifying the SNP with industrial campaigns, such as the Upper-Clyde Shipbuilders Work-in and the attempt of the workers at the Scottish Daily Express to run as a cooperative.[33] For the party manifestos for the two 1974 general elections, the SNP finally self-identified as a social democratic party, and proposed a range of social democratic policies.[35][36] There was also an unsuccessful proposal at the 1975 party conference to rename the party as the Scottish National Party (Social Democrats).[16]
There were further ideological and internal struggles after 1979 with the 79 Group attempting to move the SNP further to the left, away from being what could be described a "social-democratic" party, to an expressly "socialist" party. Members of the 79 Group - including current leader Alex Salmond - were expelled from the party. This produced a response in the shape of the Campaign for Nationalism in Scotland from those who wanted the SNP to remain a "broad church", apart from arguments of left vs. right. The 1980s saw the SNP further define itself as a party of the political left, such as campaigning against the poll tax.[33]
The ideological tensions inside the SNP are further complicated by the arguments between the so-called SNP gradualists and SNP fundamentalists. In essence, gradualists seek to advance Scotland to independence through further devolution, in a "step-by-step" strategy. They tend to be in the moderate left grouping, although much of the 79 Group was gradualist in approach. However, this 79 Group gradualism was as much a reaction against the fundamentalists of the day, many of whom believed the SNP should not take a clear left or right position.[33]
The SNP had 425 councillors in Local Government elected from the Scottish local elections, 2012.
European Parliament, National Assembly for Wales, Labour Party (UK), Sinn Féin, Democratic Unionist Party
European People's Party, European Union, Brussels, Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, European Council
Gordon Brown, Scottish Liberal Democrats, Ed Miliband, Ramsay MacDonald, Kezia Dugdale
Democratic Unionist Party, Northern Ireland Assembly, European Parliament, Fianna Fáil, Plaid Cymru
Scottish National Party, Green Party of England and Wales, Scottish Liberal Democrats, Sinn Féin, European Green Party
Scottish Labour Party, Scottish National Party, Scottish Liberal Democrats, Scottish Conservative Party, Scottish Green Party
Scottish National Party, Scottish Labour Party, Scottish Liberal Democrats, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, Scottish Green Party
Scottish National Party, Scottish Labour Party, Scottish Conservative Party, Scottish Liberal Democrats, Scotland
Scottish Labour Party, Scottish Liberal Democrats, Scottish National Party, Scottish Conservative Party, Scottish Green Party
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