When Nicola Sturgeon addresses delegates at the end of the Scottish National Party's conference in Aberdeen today it will be as a leader with approval ratings almost unheard of in a democratic society, at the head of a party sweeping all before it.
The hangar-like conference centre on the outskirts of the Granite City has hosted a record number of delegates this week from a party that has seen its membership multiply fourfold since it lost Scotland’s independence referendum.
Many of its elected representatives, including most of the 56 SNP MPs at Westminster, have been introducing themselves to delegates for the first time.
Sturgeon told delegates this week that there would be no second independence referendum until she was confident a majority would vote Yes. But a clock above the main stage, counting down by the second, reminds the party that its next electoral test, the Scottish parliamentary elections, is just 200 days away.
"The question will be, who stands for Scotland?" deputy first minister John Swinney declared in his stem-winder conference speech yesterday.
The answer, if the polls are right, is unequivocal. At just five foot four inches tall, Sturgeon is the commanding presence in Scottish politics, with an appeal that stretches far beyond SNP supporters.
A career politician from a modest background who joined the party when she was 16, Sturgeon has, according to her biographer David Torrance, persuaded most Scots that she is just like them.
Old-fashioned
“It’s actually a rather old-fashioned view of Scottishness – Presbyterian, work hard, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It’s not actually a very left-wing vision; it’s almost a Tory image of self-improvement and the Presbyterian work ethic,” he says.
“But it’s very potent and people recognise that and they think she’s sincere and committed and she harnesses the two crucial things about Scottish politics – opposition to the Tories and the embodiment of Scottishness, standing up for Scotland.”
The SNP in Aberdeen sounds like a party of the radical left, full of fiery rhetoric against austerity and privilege but it looks more sedate, with most of the conference delegates dressed conservatively and broadly middle-aged or older.
The stalls in the exhibition area showcase everything from the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign to the Scottish Transgender Alliance but corporate sponsors at the conference include Coca-Cola, Santander Bank and the Chartered Institute of Taxation. This reflects what Torrance describes as the unusually diverse congregation in the SNP's broad church, as well as a defining feature of Scottish politics.
“I think a key to understanding Scottish politics is that Scots like to think of themselves as left-wing. Now if you ask them detailed questions about will they pay more tax, do they want more generous welfare, they tend to be, as in the rest of the UK, ‘small c’ conservatives and to be against it,” he says.
"They like to think of themselves as in the tradition of Red Clydeside, of radical reformers, because if the SNP defines itself against Labour, Scots like to define themselves against the rest of the UK, which is caricatured as Tory and right-wing."
Mike Russell has been a member of the SNP for more than 30 years and has served as Scotland's education secretary, environment minister and culture minister. He says the SNP is firmly situated in the "left of centre mainstream" and he is confident that the massive influx of new members will do nothing to change that.
“I’d say virtually all of the people who have come in reflect that view in Scotland, that we want to have a more equitable, a more just, fairer society,” he says.
Disputed record
Ideology aside, the SNP’s critics argue that the party has simply not been effective in government and that, instead of protecting Scotland from the impact of Westminster budget cuts, it has allowed Scotland’s performance in health and education to fall behind the rest of the UK.
Despite the cuts, spending on the National Health Service in England has increased by 5 per cent but in Scotland by only 0.2 per cent. Despite Scotland’s abolition of third-level fees, fewer students are going to college in Scotland than before the SNP took power.
Russell says much of the criticism is based on disputed or distorted statistics and insists that the SNP’s record after eight years in government in Scotland is a good one.
“I meet my constituency people who say, we’re voting for you not because we’re nationalists but because we think you’re doing a good job in government. If a government after eight years has an opinion poll rating of 51 per cent, it must be doing something right,” he says.
Beyond the conference centre, Aberdeen is feeling the impact of low oil prices, which have made the cost of extracting oil in the North Sea increasingly uncompetitive. Thousands of oil workers have been laid off and many of those who remain have seen their shift pattern change from two weeks on and two weeks off to three weeks on and three weeks off. The change has meant less work for the helicopters that carry workers to the oil rigs and much of Aberdeen’s economy, from taxis to hotels and restaurants, is feeling the pinch.
Despite the downturn, few in Aberdeen are blaming the SNP and fewer still criticise Sturgeon. Torrance believes the SNP owes much of its apparent political invincibility to its position in Britain’s current constitutional system.
“They occupy the halfway house between full responsibility and opposition and that’s a good place to be if you’re a populist party, as the SNP are, because you can take credit for the good stuff and blame the bad stuff on your opponents, Westminster, the Conservatives, or whatever,” he says.
“And that means that the SNP will never be fully tested by the normal rules of the game until Scotland becomes independent, when there are still excuses but they are markedly fewer than they are at the moment. But of course from a unionist point of view, that’s much too late.”
