Sleazy, dishonest and absymal in office — yet zombie SNP may stagger on in power
OPPOSITIONS never really win elections. Governments lose them – when they have been in power too long, when their chief lieutenants look tired and hunted, when their back benches sag under has-beens and never-weres.
Judgments falter, too, and scandals are apt to erupt. The final years of the long postwar Tory administration, from 1951 to 1964, are eponymous with Profumo.
Similar sleaze dogged John Major’s flailing administration in the mid 1990s, and Gordon Brown’s wretched reign as Prime Minister is best remembered for such improbable claims as his passion for the Arctic Monkeys.
And were there any justice, and if we were in any other political sphere save the weird playpen of devolved Scottish politics, the Scottish National Party would be heading for a thoroughly deserved electoral trouncing.
In office for 14 years, it has left an extraordinary trail of the disgraced – Bill Walker, Mark McDonald, Derek Mackay, Margaret Ferrier. It has made war on faith and family and freedom of speech; blown huge political capital on such ludicrous, creepy endeavours as the Named Person proposals.
Now its Westminster group is rocked by new and distasteful allegations of indecency.
It all adds to the air of entitlement and hubris, dust and decay, as if we were in the last days of King Henry VIII.
Let us look closely and with relish at the record of an administration that has held the levers of power longer than all but one post-war Westminster government.
The Nationalists first won election, back in May 2007, with an unambiguous promise to abolish council tax. It is still there. They swore to reduce poverty, then enmiring 17 per cent of the population. It now traps 20 per cent.
They vowed to transform our schools with ‘smaller class sizes, starting with a reduction in the first three years of primary to 18 or less’.
Fourteen years on, our classes are bigger.
They were going to scrap student debt, too – but it has soared by 42 per cent since 2007. On winning the leadership – unchallenged – in November 2014, Nicola Sturgeon declared that she wanted to be judged on her achievements in education, doubling down on this lofty goal at the 2016 Holyrood election.
How has she done? Well, Scotland has plummeted down the rankings of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) through every pitiless year. Scotland’s schools have the lowest scores in maths and science since our first PISA rating 20 years ago.
Our children have gone from 11th to 24th in maths and 11th to 23rd in reading. Thirty per cent of them now leave primary school below the expected literacy level for a 12-year-old.
Confidence
Indeed, such is the Nationalists’ confidence in their academic laurels that Scotland has been withdrawn from every other international comparator they can think of.
An OECD report on Scottish education, in the hands of ministers since last month, will not be published till after the election – and there has not been a government-led debate on education, in the Scottish parliament, for more than two years.
The Nationalist record on health is still worse. For more than two years our accident and emergency departments have failed to meet the promised target: that 95 per cent of A&E patients must either be seen, transferred or discharged within four hours.
The first coronavirus superspreader event – at an Edinburgh hotel in February last year – was deliberately covered up by ministers.
It was two days after lockdown before the First Minister even set up a Covid-19 scientific advisory group. It was not until mid-May that her government as much as promised routine testing for all care home staff. At some points only a third of Scotland’s testing capacity has been used, and so low were PPE reserves that some Scottish hospitals were issued expired respirators; others clinical masks four years out of date.
The SNP Government seemed, too, to have a growing problem with truth.
In May last year, Jeane Freeman assured the Scottish parliament that only 300 elderly people had – untested – been transferred from hospitals to care homes.
The actual figure was 921. Pressed on that point, Sturgeon suggested that the Health Minister had been ‘a bit tired’.
In June, Humza Yousaf told MSPs that quarantine checks had been carried out on 20 per cent of international visitors and that Police Scotland confirmed compliance was ‘very high’.
In fact, there had been no checks whatsoever and Police Scotland was never told of any breaches. Meanwhile, Sturgeon loudly opposed ‘air bridges’, then introduced them. On March 13, her clinical director could ‘absolutely guarantee there is no plan right now, and no substantive rumours, that we’re going to close schools next week’.
On March 18, Sturgeon closed our schools. On June 12, John Swinney insisted that reopening them full time, on August 11, ‘would be playing with the public health of individuals’. Our children duly returned to school, full-time, on August 11.
And so ill-managed and stuttery was this year’s Covid vaccination programme – in sharp contrast to its rollout down south – that Whitehall ministers quietly sent up the Army to help, no doubt gritting their teeth as the First Minister continued to deny any problem and daily to insult them.
This is really why Nicola Sturgeon’s struggle candidly to explain her recent dealings with her estranged predecessor is now starting to damage the Scottish Government politically.
Few these days care about Alex Salmond, or for him. But the sense that the First Minister is hiding something feeds into the wider narrative, especially during Covid, that she and her colleagues are less than candid.
After all, everywhere we look, we see SNP hamfistedness. Scotland has the highest drug death rate in Europe. In 2019, 1,264 Scottish addicts died – the highest number on record, almost twice the figure in 2014, and three-and-a-half times the death rate in England and Wales.
On procurement and infrastructure, the Nats are still more hapless. The Queensferry Crossing opened over the Forth, to orchestrated acclaim, in August 2017 – but, it duly emerged, must be closed on the coldest days, as dangerous chunks of ice start falling from its stays.
Problems
Two new hospitals have been built under this administration, in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Both have serious problems. One has yet to open and both are now the subject of an inquiry – as to their planning and design, commissioning and maintenance – which does not, conveniently, begin till August.
Then – oh, dear – there are the ferries under seemingly perpetual construction at Port Glasgow; the Nationalists’ woeful mismanagement of Prestwick Airport; the death of Bifab, in their hands and on their watch; their failure on steel procurement; the hundreds of thousands of pounds of all our money squandered when the Scottish Government’s defence case against Alex Salmond collapsed.
Yet they are still trying to pass stupid laws, such as the Hate Crime Bill. They have tied themselves in all sorts of knots – and infuriated women who had to campaign for decades to win hard-earned rights – in their obsession with trans activists and every other extremist of wokery. And, as the First Minister slams everyone from Boris Johnson to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge for daring to set foot in Scotland, she leaves all cringing in embarrassment.
But this is Scotland, a realm where normal political rules seem increasingly suspended and the Nationalists and Mrs Murrell will probably win in May – though they do not deserve to.