Cult-like, the SNP will never admit they are wrong on anything

THERE seems to be a curious outbreak of honesty in the higher ranks of the Scottish National Party. Cool candour, manly frankness and even the clinking ice of bleak realism. George Kerevan, their charisma-free MP for East Lothian, first trod this unusual road with an outline, three weeks back, of a strategy for independence amidst the excitement of Brexit.

But it would, he warned, be fraught, perilous, scary. There would have to be dramatic ‘fiscal consolidation,’ a ‘cut budget,’ ‘shifting resources from consumption to investment… painful in the short term’.

All this from a politician whose party, only two summers ago, was doing its utmost to tickle us into voting for independence with visions of a new Scotland flowing with untold oil-bought goodies… now suddenly painted as a gasping forcedmarch through high and lonely mountains in a particularly fraught chapter from Lord of the Rings. ’Ware halflings.

This week, Kenny MacAskill – best remembered for ensuring 2009’s Scottish Year of Homecoming was particularly enjoyed by Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi – in turn bowed the weeping strings.

Independence, he has at this late hour grasped, ‘will come at a price, though. The criticism of wanting Scandinavian solidarity at UK tax levels has some validity. If benefits are to be improved and a path towards a fairer and more equal society embarked upon, then tax will have to rise. There will have to be a price of being Scottish.’

Courage, brother, do not stumble, though thy path be dark as night…

Smitten this week, too, with a refreshing taste for inconvenient truth was Alyn Smith, a honey-toned SNP MEP whose post-Brexit fit of the weepies in the European Parliament added another minor YouTube moment to the gaiety of nations.

Mr Smith, though, steered well clear of fatted taxes, smitten budgets and a short sticky spell, come national freedom, when we will all have to work in the fields gathering filth as the First Minister heroically foregoes a chauffeured haywain.

HE – pressed online as to where he stood on a Scottish monarchy or a Scottish republic – drew a bead on the Queen. ‘I want to see the people of Scotland in charge of Scotland’s future,’ declared Smith nobly, ‘so once we regain independence I would be up for a referendum on the subject and the people will choose, but let’s do it after independence so we can have a proper debate about the subject in its own right.’

A referendum on the monarchy is not SNP policy. Or more, accurately, it was not part of the dish presented to us in September 2014, as massed Nationalists did in fact vote for a referendum on Her Majesty two decades ago, have never formally rescinded that position and pretend they never did it.

Yet large tracts of the SNP remain refreshingly immune to this outbreak of silly-season straightforwardness. Last Thursday, from the Scottish Government’s official statement to poor, decent John Swinney’s desperate endeavours to spin wholesale humiliation as a mere administrative glitch, the Nationalists went to diverting lengths denying the Supreme Court had just struck down their scary Named Person proposals and ripped out its guts… hours after, unanimously, the Supreme Court justices had done just that.

The latest, announced delay to the opening of the new Queensferry Crossing was last week put down to the weather, as if nobody could have foreseen the odd outburst of rain, storm, tempest and hail on the Firth of Forth; and, last weekend – as one Glasgow paper excitedly announced – the Christian Institute was ‘reported’ to the Charity Commission for having dared to campaign – successfully – against the unnerving state-guardian scheme.

It is of course outrageous that any mere charity should think of challenging Scottish Government policy and lobbying to change it. Apart from these tireless gay rights lobbyists, Equality Network and Stonewall Scotland, who have since 2002 enjoyed more than £9million of Scottish Government money.

Such low games only reflect the high and flailing confusion at the Nationalist summit.

‘The Christian Institute, like most Christian charities, will not receive a penny from the government,’ senior Free Church minister Rev David Robertson pointed out on Tuesday. ‘The Equality Network on the other hand is in effect funded by the government to tell the government what to do and then to congratulate the government on what it is doing, before asking it to do more of the same thing again. It appears that some are more equal than others.’

We know not who reported the Christian Institute, who were swiftly reassured by the Charities Commission that no action would be taken.

But it was an unsettling reminder that, in the new Scotland, telling the truth to power is becoming a dangerous game.

Only the other night, respected journalist, pundit and Salmond biographer David Torrance closed his Twitter account.

‘It’s no longer fun,’ he announced, ‘and the constant ad hominem attacks have begun to penetrate even my relatively thick skin. Adios.’

Few weeks pass, though, when he is not accosted in a café or other public place by a stranger, some menacing Nat eager loudly and in the coarsest terms to tell him how despicable he is.

There is something increasingly cultish about the Nationalist movement; an all-consuming religion, a certitude that they – and they only – are on the paths of righteousness and that anyone who as much as looks cross-eyed at the Scottish Government is essentially wicked.

AND this bout of hairshirted and terrible candour from elements of the leadership – though not, significantly, Miss Sturgeon herself – may well be part of a new broader strategy to dial down the expectations of a massed faithful they notionally command but cannot truly control.

It is hard, too, not to sense, now, the merest bat-squeak of SNP panic. Nicola Sturgeon was not posturing, early this summer, when she said – repeatedly – that she honestly hoped the UK as a whole would vote to stay in the European Union. She probably never really anticipated – who did? – that Britain would, come the crunch, vote Brexit.

And she is smart enough to realise that, contrary to initial and widespread talk that our departure from the EU makes Scotland’s independence inevitable, it actually makes it a great deal more difficult.

Scots, like everyone else, are immediately focused on the drama to hand: how, precisely, we will leave the EU, and when, and if it will prove a crisis or an opportunity. We grow increasingly weary of Nationalist breastbeating about all those Scots who voted Remain when there is evident and lofty disregard for the still higher number who, in September 2014, voted No.

And we are ballot-weary; would welcome a spell of political normality, of Scottish Government ministers getting on with their day-jobs, a long respite from polls and plebiscites and incessant banging on about the constitution.

Only in May, Humza Yousaf, now Transport Minister, had an early dose of this frankness summer bug when he said: ‘Most people in the SNP – it would hardly be a surprise to you – would at some point like to see our head of state elected. But for the purpose of independence we said we would keep the Queen as the head of state.’

What else might the Nationalists cynically assert, in the years ahead, ‘for the purpose of independence’? And, given the state of our schools and our hospitals, a toiling Scottish economy and a creaking infrastructure, might their ministers spend an occasional afternoon not thinking about independence? If only for the novelty?