SNP is home to 'culture of hate' and is 'profoundly depressing' to voters, says former MP

The SNP is home to a ‘culture of hate’ and ‘heading for opposition’, one of its most prominent figures has said amid the party’s civil war.

In a brutal assessment, former MP Joanna Cherry, KC, said the state of the party was ‘profoundly depressing’ and it was ‘no wonder we are putting voters off’.

Announcing she was stepping back from frontline politics, she said the SNP must not ignore the ‘enormity’ of its general election defeat, when it lost 39 of 48 seats won in 2019.

Unless the party confronted why its vote crashed from 1.2million to 725,000, it would ‘suffer another rout at the 2026 Holyrood election’.

Challenging John Swinney’s response to date, she said: ‘I don’t sense any great appetite on the part of the leadership of the party to do this properly.’

The Scottish Conservatives called Ms Cherry’s comments a ‘damning indictment’ of a party ‘rotted to its core’ after 17 years in power.

The MP for Edinburgh South West from 2015 until losing to Labour on July 4, Ms Cherry was an outspoken critic of the SNP’s gender reforms and independence strategy.

Writing in the National, she said she received ‘some real pelters’ from others in the party, some highly personal and ‘hard to take’.

She wrote: ‘A culture of hate against those who dare to disagree has been allowed to flourish in the SNP without anyone in authority having the courage to address it and it has poisoned our discourse and prevented proper debate.’

She said if she had foreseen ‘the level of abuse and harassment’ she would endure from colleagues she would not have left her legal career, but did not regret being an MP.

The party’s ‘deafening silence’ over the conviction of former SNP branch equalities officer Cameron Downing for serious sexual assaults was also ‘shameful’, she said.

‘I am of course now free to stand for Holyrood, but eternal opposition is not for me, and opposition is where the SNP are heading at present. 

'I went into elected politics to try and change things not to carp from the sidelines.’

Tory MSP Annie Wells said: ‘That one of the party’s most prominent politicians has suffered years of abuse for daring to question the SNP’s direction on certain issues demonstrates how ugly this civil war has become. 

'The sooner Scotland sees the back of this wretched SNP government the better.’

The SNP was approached for comment.