IT is by now a week since the disastrous election results proved the fallibility of the SNP. The party lauded for more than a decade as a mighty election-winning juggernaut was revealed as only too human. The laws of political gravity could not be denied forever.

And so it has been a week in which we have struggled to stay afloat in a sea of analysis.

Those who had never been convinced by the arguments for independence have queued up to celebrate that they had been right all along. Those who had never wanted any progress in the indy campaign now crow that 10 years after the referendum, we are no closer to achieving it. Those who had never accepted Labour’s fall from grace now feel justified in believing it was merely a temporary blip.

Much of this analysis has celebrated what it has depicted as the SNP’s fall back to earth, as if those who had switched allegiance to the party had somehow been hoodwinked into believing some great myth and now have to face the consequences of their gullibility.

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But it is not just the usual columnists who have feasted on the party’s bones as they pieced together a narrative on which they can all agree.

Former SNP MPs have joined the queue to emphasise the seriousness of the situation by recommending ever more drastic solutions.

However, it’s possible to accept this without believing we must burn down the entire building in order to save it. So let’s look at some of the more questionable narratives gaining traction as the smoke clears from the wreckage of the SNP’s doomed election campaign:

1. The legacy of Nicola Sturgeon, a leader once generally regarded as the premier Scottish politician of her time, is now described as a chimera, an illusion, a delusion.

In this emerging version of events, Sturgeon is depicted as a control freak either incapable of or unwilling to take advice outside of a tiny circle of advisers.

The Sturgeon era is now portrayed as one in which the demographic structures of the party atrophied. There are grains of truth in aspects of this version but do we really believe we all got it so wrong at the time? Or are we watching history being rewritten?

2. Critics have now decided that the SNP became isolated from the people it represented, preferring instead to pursue minority issues such as trans rights which, now that the scales have magically fallen from our eyes, we can all see as mere fripperies compared to the “bread and butter issues” such as health, education and the cost of living crisis which were all routinely ignored because … well, who can think of more than one thing at a time?

This story buries a few inconvenient truths, such as the fact that gender self-ID was supported by an all-party majority of MSPs and adopted without fuss all over Europe.

3. We are now told that the SNP were obsessed with the issue of independence, to the extent that all other issues were subservient to that. The party supposedly ignored the public’s refusal to accept independence as a priority, particularly in the run-up to an election which was all about getting rid of the Tories because … well, what else really mattered?

4. We are simultaneously told the SNP didn’t give a fig for independence, paying lip service to them to keep the faithful happy while doing nothing to actively pursue it.

Yes, it was on the first page of the manifesto but that wasn’t “REAL”.

We are asked to accept that the party was more interested in a variety of very bad activities including: the gravy train; drinking champagne at Westminster; settling in rather than settling up; taking away women’s rights; insisting on continuity rather than tearing up all the past achievements and just starting again; spending money meant for the independence campaign on an independence-campaigning campervan.

This story rather conveniently ignores those SNP activists and elected members who worked tirelessly to move independence from a niche issue to the political mainstream by knocking doors and pounding pavements and who we’re now expected to believe no longer care about it at all.

Still, let’s not allow facts to get in the way of a good story.

5. The SNP are also accused of ignoring the public demand for good governance in Scotland. Sure, they avoided the bitter NHS industrial action south of the Border. And yes, students in Scotland didn’t need to pay the tuition fees forcing their counterparts in England into penury.

And yes, they pointed out the many benefits immigrants brought to this country rather than drawing up plans to send them to Rwanda. And, of course, huge sums of money have been poured into mitigating the Tory cuts. But why hasn’t the party done anything on the really BIG issues?

I list these not to suggest last Thursday’s election results don’t demand serious attention and change. They do. The risk for the 2026 Holyrood election is real and significant. It demands deep thinking and a serious response.

But let’s consider that response.

The SNP have not been good in the wake of failure. Pushing the Yes vote up to 45% in the referendum was a strong achievement but it was still a failure. The lack of a serious postmortem into that failure has hindered the independence cause ever since, a fact covered up by the huge increase in the SNP vote and membership since 2014.

Let’s not repeat the mistake of acting rather than gathering evidence. Let’s try to mine real data about the drop in the General Election vote in 2024 rather than rely on gut instinct.

Here’s what I think. This was a General Election for the Westminster Parliament. It was not a referendum and not a de facto referendum.

In fact, its relationship to the independence campaign was tenuous at best. The top priority of most voters was to get rid of the Tories and the SNP did not have the ability or power to form the next Westminster government. They did have other jobs to do if elected but the voters decided these did not have the same priority as kicking out the Conservatives and acted accordingly.

The Scottish Government has a good story to tell in the Holyrood election and needs to concentrate on communicating that story as clearly and with as much impact as possible. It is not a story without its failures but we need to be honest about those.

Labour’s change agenda is not without some power in the Holyrood election but the SNP have enough strong arguments to muster in their favour, not least by explaining the important mitigations they have put in place to protect Scotland from the worst excesses of the Tory cuts and ideology.

SNP communications were not strong enough in the General Election. The mistakes need to be properly analysed and rectified soon. The Scottish Government’s achievements need to land with the electorate, its failures need to be admitted and be put back on track. The message must be clarified and strengthened.

The party’s position on independence must be made clearer. It’s obviously the party’s core belief but is it central to everything it does – in which case there needs to be a much clearer strategy on how we can achieve it – or is it a longer-term aim while running the country takes priority – in which case the need for patience needs to be embraced and explained. The SNP can no longer ride both horses at once.

While the party’s electoral fortunes have dipped, support for independence has remained high, if not yet high enough. The SNP need to decide if they consider independence to be a vote-winner or simply a box which needs to be ticked to keep their members onside.

For what it’s worth, I believe that independence IS a vote-winner but that the message and the campaign need to be clarified. I have argued before that the duties of pursuing independence and running the country cannot be properly handled by the same figurehead and the same team.

The creation of a minister for independence was a good move, even if the achievements of that role are pretty thin on the ground. Its main purpose has seemed to be to continue the rollout of independence papers which have had little effect on the public. The role has now been scrapped, a sad admission of its ineffectiveness.

In truth, the pursuit of independence requires a vibrant, imaginative movement, of which the SNP should be a significant and engaged part.

For too long the party seemed to consider the Yes movement an annoyance rather than an essential ally. It needs now to properly connect with the grassroots and organisations that represent the grassroots (such as Believe in Scotland) in a way that refreshes the whole movement.

Fundamental to that is to apply new thinking on the route to independence. We need a new strategy because the current route is blocked. We’ll never be able to move forward until we have jointly decided how to negotiate the road ahead.

The new Labour government will have opportunities aplenty to screw things up in the months leading to the 2026 Scottish elections and Labour in Scotland will no doubt remind the country why it fell out of love with the party in 2014.

But what is more important for the SNP is the positive steps they can take in running the country and in laying the groundwork for a refreshed independence movement. Recriminations over the election disaster need to stop now to pave the way for these steps.