Credit where credit’s due. The fact that the SNP has about 100,000 members in a nation of four million or so voters is little short of phenomenal if one compares that total with, say, the Conservatives’ 170,000 in the whole of the UK, which contains easily ten times as many voters. That didn’t, of course, stop the Tories letting that tiny and unrepresentative subsection of the wider electorate to decide who was going to replace Boris Johnson last summer. Then again, the disastrous consequences of that decision did persuade Tory MPs to deny their grassroots a second bite at the cherry a few weeks later when Rishi Sunak took over from Liz Truss without a membership ballot.

Whether the fact that the SNP, with far more members per voter, will escape the same kind of criticism when those members are invited to replace Nicola Sturgeon in a few weeks’ time, who knows? But it’s only fair that Scotland should know more about the people who are going to be making that big decision on its behalf. Parties are notoriously reluctant to release information about their members beyond how many they’ve got and, frankly, they only tend to shout about that when the numbers are going in the right direction. My colleague Paul Webb and I have been able to get round that by commissioning YouGov to carry out numerous party member surveys, the last of which we conducted shortly after the 2019 general election. This is what it told us about the SNP’s rank and file.

When it comes to demographics, the pattern will be (depressingly?) familiar to anyone’s who’s read Footsoldiers, our book about party members in the UK as a whole. The SNP grassroots split 58:42 male: female. Agewise there’s a skew towards the older generation: 71 per cent of SNP members were over 50 (40 per cent in the 50-64 bracket with 31 per cent over 65); those aged 25-49 made up 26 per cent, meaning only 3 per cent were 18-24. There’s also a skew towards the middleclass as well as the middle-aged: nearly three quarters of SNP members fell into the ABC1 rather than the C2DE bracket.

So much for what they look like; what about what they think?

Perhaps predictably, SNP members are left-wing – very left-wing.

More than nine out of ten agreed that ‘”government should redistribute income from the better-off to those who are less well-off “, that “big business takes advantage of ordinary people”, that “ordinary working people” don’t get their fair share of the nation’s wealth, and that “there’s one law for the rich and one for the poor”.

SNP members are also relatively socially liberal, though there are limits. We didn’t ask about gender recognition: however, seven out of ten, for instance, were opposed to the death penalty.

On the other hand, they were much more evenly split on the need for stiffer sentences more generally speaking.

We also asked them, incidentally, about leadership qualities: intelligence mattered; so did strength; but what mattered most was being “in touch with ordinary people”. And that means Scottish voters as well as SNP members.

Originally published at https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/snp-members-scottish-independence-future-33c9rcwdm