Ten years of failure to tackle the day job

AFTER ten years in power at Holyrood, the SNP ought to be able to point to a slew of successes and bask in the glory of having done much to improve the lives of Scots families.

In reality, it has little to show for its decade at the top, apart from a pile of flawed legislation. Take the flagship Named Person scheme, now shelved after its key plank – the secret sharing of information about families – was ruled illegal. Or the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act, described by a sheriff as ‘mince’.

Manifesto pledges have come to nothing. In schools, class sizes remain high, teacherto-pupil ratios low and literacy and numeracy rates are on the slide.

In the NHS, GP services are in crisis with a knock-on effect on A&E, where treatment targets are missed with monotonous regularity. Cancer patients are treated abysmally.

Police Scotland, the monolithic force created with unseemly haste by the SNP, has lost public faith and lumbers from crisis to crisis. Transport is sclerotic, with jammed and crumbling roads and unreliable trains. In Prestwick, we have an airport in public hands, costing a fortune, while no one at the SNP has a clue how to exploit its potential.

The economy trails the rest of the UK while millions have been squandered on vanity projects such as wave power.

Business labours under a taxation burden that is the heaviest in the UK, while hardworking Scots pay more in income tax than their counterparts a few miles away in England.

The principal reason for this decade of failure is not Brexit, not the evil Tories, not ‘Westmonster’ indifference to the wishes of Scots. No, the truth is that the SNP’s independence mania has blinded the Nationalists to the day job.

They have found it far easier to generate hot air about hypothetical constitutional questions while agitating for the break-up of the UK than to deal with the hard graft of making Scotland a better place in which to live, work and raise a family.

Just as the independence monomania has been a ten-year distraction at Holyrood, so now it bleeds into June’s General Election.

Tory leader Ruth Davidson’s quip that Nicola Sturgeon is a ‘Nat out of hell’ is amusing but underscores the fact that we have a First Minister determined above all else to deliver her party’s one fatally flawed idea: independence.