For those watching the Scottish National Party’s slow-motion reckoning, the pattern is familiar. Denial. Deflection.
A refusal to look back. First Minister John Swinney now faces a direct accusation from two former party insiders that he is burying the truth about bullying at the highest levels.
Allison Graham and Cynthia Guthrie, both former members of the SNP’s internal financial watchdog, say they were bullied when they tried to raise questions about the party’s accounts. Swinney, they claim, will not accept that senior figures — including former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon — were involved. On Thursday, Swinney declined to offer a direct apology.
He rejected the assertion that anyone had been bullied by Sturgeon or other senior party figures. This did not surprise Guthrie.
“That’s how they’ve got into the mess in the first place,” she said. Her words land like a verdict: “They have learned nothing and they have not changed.” The timing is brutal. Just days ago, Peter Murrell, the former SNP chief executive and Sturgeon’s husband, was jailed for five years and three months.
He embezzled more than £400,000 from the party. That case was the culmination of a long police investigation. It exposed a culture of financial laxity at the top of the independence movement.
Now the bullying claims add a second front. And Swinney’s response — resisting calls for a full inquiry — has earned him a label from his critics: “king of the SNP cover-up.” Guthrie’s frustration is raw.
She pointed to the people Swinney has promoted and surrounded himself with. “This hubris and this denial he is going through,” she said. She described journalists being shouted down “like clapping seals.” Her anger is not the anger of an enemy of Scottish independence.
She made that clear. “I believe in an independent Scotland and want an independent Scotland and this isn’t good enough,” she said.
“John has to step up to the plate, grow some and start leading the country. It’s unsustainable.” The call for a KC-led inquiry has been made. Swinney has not budged.
For the families watching this unfold — and for ordinary SNP members — the question is how much longer the party can hold this line. The Murrell sentence was a shock to the system. The bullying allegations are a different kind of wound.
They go to the question of how the party treats its own when they challenge the leadership. Graham and Guthrie are not outsiders.
They served on the party’s internal financial watchdog. They were trying to do a job. They say they were bullied for it.
And now the First Minister of Scotland says it did not happen. That is the core of the dispute.
Swinney is not offering a different interpretation of events. He is denying the events themselves. Guthrie’s response suggests she has seen this before.
“That’s how they’ve got into the mess in the first place,” she said. A party that cannot acknowledge its own internal failures, she argues, will keep repeating them. The independence movement is built on a promise of better governance.
The SNP has governed Scotland for nearly two decades. Now its own whistleblowers say the leadership cannot handle scrutiny from within.
Swinney’s position is clear: no apology, no inquiry, no admission that senior figures bullied anyone. Guthrie’s position is equally clear: this is denial, and it is unsustainable. Scotland deserves so much better than this, she said.
