Stop being bitter and make Scotland better
HARD-WORKING Scots have no end of problems on their plates right now. Bills are rising while wages are static. There is the ever-present threat to livelihoods as jobs are picked off in both the private and public sectors.
They struggle to see a GP and linger on NHS waiting lists while many must brave the chaos that is an A&E service swamped by demand. The roads are potholed and traffic-jammed; the trains are expensive, overcrowded and unreliable.
Faith in Police Scotland and justice more generally is at a low as soft-touch policies put criminals first and victims last. They see children’s literacy and numeracy skills slipping as pupils are taught in overcrowded and crumbling schools.
Against this backdrop, surely our politicians’ every waking minute should be spent trying to address the myriad problems?
Nothing of the sort, of course. For the SNP is about to embark on two days of utterly pointless navel gazing at Holyrood as they demand another referendum on their one obsession: independence.
Prime Minister Theresa May has already ruled out this presumptuous referendum, yet the SNP – showing utter contempt for the public – press on regardless, dragging their Green acolytes along.
As Graham Grant points out on this page, we will today and tomorrow have to endure their usual litany of grievance. The Nationalists will denigrate every other party while pretending their decade in power at Holyrood has been an unalloyed success.
The scale of the separatists’ pomposity cannot be exaggerated. This is towering arrogance as the party desperately tries to placate its own zealots by breathing life into a campaign to break up Britain that was stopped in its tracks in September 2014 with an emphatic No vote.
The blame for the shameful farce that will play out in Edinburgh lies fair and square at the door of Nicola Sturgeon.
Her reckless declaration that she would seek to hold another referendum saw her shrug off any pretence that she is a First Minister for all of Scotland. She is merely the partisan head of a minority party desperately casting around for something, anything, to distract from her woeful record.
The people of Scotland do not want hours squandered on a futile debate about another divisive referendum. They want Miss Sturgeon and her hapless SNP to get a grip on the real-world problems they face now.