The SNP failed as an activist party. If it becomes a competent governing force, it may have a chance | Martin Kettle

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Faced with a crisis in its direction and its fortunes, a political party can sometimes change. Labour has managed that since 2019. But parties do not change easily. Sometimes, indeed, they respond by doubling down on past error, as the Conservatives have done. But the choice between continuity and change cannot be ducked, and it is the one that now faces the Scottish National party after Humza Yousaf's resignation this week.

Part of the crisis confronting the SNP is immediate and circumstantial. The SNP is easily the largest party in the Scottish parliament. Until the next Holyrood election, due in 2026, Scotland cannot be governed without it. But the SNP has lost popularity, is a divided party and, since the breach with the Greens last week, has no natural allies that it is able to call on. Its opposition rivals, moreover, have zero interest in coming to the SNP's rescue.

Choosing a new leader is therefore only one part of the SNP's problem. Continuing to govern under that new leader is part of it too, since a new first minister must win a parliamentary vote as well. Governing effectively is a third part. All of this is made far more difficult by calculations about the imminence of a UK general election that may upend the balance of power among the parties in Scotland as well as in the UK. It's a rough road ahead, and there's not much time.

But this only scratches the surface of the SNP's deeper problems. The party's fundamental difficulty is that the upheaval of Scottish politics around the party's core demand of independence has both failed and faded. An era that began with the sensational ousting of Scottish Labour in 2007, and which peaked with the astonishing surge under Nicola Sturgeon in 2015, is finally losing its momentum.

This has happened for many reasons. The SNP's failure to deliver the promised second independence referendum, let alone to win it, is fundamental. Seventeen continuous years in power, with not enough else to show for it during hard economic and social times, makes for difficulties too. No one, though, should be in any doubt that the tipping point in the SNP's recent fortunes has been cultural. It failed, both as a party and a government, to read the public's less doctrinaire mood over Scotland's gender recognition reform bill, which would make it simpler to change legal gender. More recently, the Cass review on gender identity services reopened the same issues and arguments.

The crunch over gender had been coming a long time. Fifteen months ago, when Sturgeon was still at the helm, as many as half of Scots voters welcomed Rishi Sunak's government's decision to block the gender recognition reform bill. That ought to have been a sign, because the SNP once thrived on resisting overmighty moves from London. But both Sturgeon and then Yousaf ignored the new mood this time. An ambivalent response to the Cass review last month then reopened the argument; the Greens' co-leader Patrick Harvie still refuses to accept the review's conclusions. This has left both the SNP in general, and the Greens in particular, looking to too many eyes like activists rather than a government.

All of which leaves the independence cause with nowhere much to go anytime soon. There is strong minority support among Scots for leaving the UK - a YouGov poll this week put support on 46% with 54% opposed. But support has fluctuated at around these levels for years now, and not even Brexit, Boris Johnson or Liz Truss has succeeded in gifting the SNP the new surge of support that it coveted.