It’s a party with one idea. That’s why the SNP is utterly hopeless as a government
John MacLeod
THE late Margo MacDonald always maintained that her husband – big Jim Sillars – was right. That devolution is not an opportunity for the SNP but a trap for it.
That, as she confided to me in 2001, the party leadership – with which, by then, she had comprehensively fallen out – thought all they had to do was win a Scottish parliament election and run the Scottish Executive with such competence and brio that the Scottish people would lose all fear of independence.
They were wrong, she insisted, the Nationalists should instead campaign continually for independence on its own terms and keep clear of the inevitable dilution and compromise of devolved government.
At the time, I genially disagreed with her. Fifteen years later, in a week of yet further humiliation for the Scottish Government, it looks increasingly as if Margo was right.
By the very act of parking independence as a sort of highminded theological aspiration – as Alex Salmond persuaded his followers to do after the SNP’s bruising defeat in the first, 1999 Scottish parliament election – their movement has become a faith-based cult.
The more so as Nationalists elected to public office must come from a centrally approved candidates list, which has hollowed out the SNP payroll of men and women of character, original thinking and minds of their own.
They now, as so many Midwich cuckoos, dote on independence as the one thing that makes their lives meaningful, that unites them in highminded purpose, that glibly explains all – and, too often, can explain anything away.
There is no Scottish problem that is not, essentially, the fault of Westminster and the Union – and no Scottish problem for which the cure is anything other than independence.
But while the road to independence might, on logical contemplation, seem best negotiated along the valley of good governance, it seems (and especially for an administration now nearly a decade in power) more and more a valley of tribulation.
Margo knew, for instance, that however well it starts, the best of governments eventually stales on the public, that ministers grow tired. The most able and best of politicians has, these days, a shelf life of barely a decade – as David Cameron can ruefully attest.
She had personally seen, too, how power – or proximity to it – turns heads and removes one from realities on the ground.
One suspects she foresaw what the temptations of populism, the tendency to confuse activity with achievement, the determination to centralise as much power as possible, and what the desperate, virtue-signalling need to look ‘progressive’ might, in the long run, do for a Nationalist administration.
Especially as, the longer you have been in office, the harder it becomes to blame anybody else for stuff going wrong.
Take education. With an eye to aspirational middle-class swing voters in suburban Scottish constituencies, the SNP excused their offspring from university tuition fees.
Crisis
These fees had nevertheless still to be covered, and from the public purse – which the Nationalists met by Faustian pact, stripping blue-collar further education colleges of funds, staff and resources and doing nothing to improve the lot of poorer youngsters from Scotland’s schemes.
Take health. Since the SNP took office, all prescriptions have been free – too much of it stuff we could likewise readily buy ourselves – at frightful cost to the public purse.
The NHS in Scotland is in tightening crisis from that extravagance and many other factors – not least as, for instance, most of us now live a good deal longer than we did.
‘A system designed to eradicate Victorian illnesses such as TB and rickets (which it did successfully) is struggling to stay at the cutting edge of nuclear and genetic medicine,’ commentator Andy Collier warns.
Others caution that we cannot indefinitely defend a structure so inefficient that, for instance, numbers waiting for an outpatient appointment have grown by 89 per cent – and the overall NHS Scotland budget by only 5 per cent.
But no Nationalist will grasp that nettle. Take transport, another unedifying saga under a long SNP administration.
The Queensferry Crossing was a crowd-pleaser but we still do not have continuous motorway between Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Our busiest rail services are toiling. West Highland and Hebridean ferry services are in mounting disarray because of the SNP’s characteristically headline-grabbing roll-out of the Road Equivalent Tariff.
This means slashing ferry fares by subsiding Caledonian MacBrayne at yet gloopier public expense.
It has had unwelcome consequences. The Stornoway retail sector is in freefall because it is now cheaper to nip over to Inverness on a Saturday or for out-of-the-back-of-a-van traders to nip over the Minch.
On a range of crossings in high summer, residents find themselves unable to find space on their own ferry, given the hordes of tourists.
The service from Mallaig to Armadale (on Skye) was this year marked by delays and hold-ups because the vessel purpose-built for that crossing had been whipped down to Mull – to cope with the new demand – and her slo-mo replacements could not handle the local extremes of tide.
Such details are likely beyond the lofty attention of a Transport Minister not even on top of his own car insurance.
And take our schools. The latest, awful PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) numbers show standards continue steadily to fall for the core skills of reading, maths and science.
For the first time since the PISA began in 2000, Scottish children were not found above average in any category and more countries than ever are out-performing us, including such relics of the Soviet bloc as Poland and Estonia.
John Swinney conceded that these findings make for ‘uncomfortable reading’.
Lindsay Paterson, professor of education policy at Edinburgh University, was blunter.
In science and maths, standards are worse in our schools than before the SNP won office and these figures are ‘the worst news on attainment... since the 1950s’.
Most agree that the muchheralded Curriculum for Excellence is the root of the problem. Teachers are tired and demoralised. They are forced to spend too much time in classroom discussion and not enough on imparting key skills.
The EIS, as usual, will hear of no reforms or changes save for schools and teachers to be given yet more money.
And there is the incessant posturing. In a muchtrumpeted speech in May, the First Minister assured us education was her priority – the ‘defining mission’ of this fourthterm administration.
Yet we have since heard far more from Miss Sturgeon, on her occasional visits to Scotland, about the iniquities of Brexit and likelihood of another independence referendum.
The trouble with such a Nationalism is that independence itself becomes a lodestone by which every policy is judged and everything has to be seen through that narrow prism.
Standards
Offered independence or a world-class education system, the most ardent SNP acolytes would choose the former – and insist the latter would follow.
Had SNP ministers wasted less energy on sourcing children’s books in Scots, dictating a sufficiently Scottish history course and a very Scottish English syllabus – for instance – and rather more on finding the best teachers to use the best methods to impart literacy and comprehension, Tuesday’s embarrassment might have been averted.
Administrators less driven by a purely ‘independence, independence, independence’ agenda and less fearful of offending this or that Nationalist sacred cow might have noticed standards slipping.
As things are, hospital waiting times grow longer and longer. Catching the 8.45am from Edinburgh Waverley is a matter of such uncertainty it would be prudent to bring a packed lunch. And, after nine years of SNP power, more youngsters than ever pour out of Scotland’s schools unable to read, write and count.
It seems that Nationalists are not, in fact, very good at the dull bread-and-butter business of diligent daily government.
If they cannot make the proverbial trains run on time, even within the limited purview of devolved and provincial administration, how can they – and we – hope to make anything of an independent and sovereign country?