SNP membership long term trends
One of the classic unionist myths is that SNP membership is 'secret', and has supposedly 'collapsed', 'possibly to as low as 50,000', to quote some erm 'real independence supporters' commenting on the National.
This is of course utter guff. The SNP publish data on their membership annually as part of the audited accounts submitted to the Electoral Commission*. It would be illegal to falsify membership data here, and illegal for Johnston Carmichael (the SNP's auditors) to knowingly sign that off. The latest data has just been released, and is the final point in the graph below.
As can be seen, since the post 2014 surge, SNP membership has never fallen below 100k. In fact it steadily increased longer term to a peak in 2019-2020 (a recent peak for Yes in polls) before falling away due to covid. The main reason people gave for leaving during this period was apparently due to financial reasons associated with lost income during the pandemic, which seems plausible.
This is supported in the data by the fact that as the pandemic has receded, so membership has surged again, reaching 119k by the key election month of May 2021.
Anyway, the advice is that if people are telling you that SNP membership is 'secret' and/or 'has collapsed', they are either completely lacking in knowledge or are lying, so should be ignored in either case going forward.
