Alan COCHRANE
Given rising criticism over Covid, the First Minister’s best hope is to push for another referendum vote
For much of the Covid emergency, she has been a star turn at her sure-footed televised daily press briefings, which many thought much better than the often lacklustre efforts from Boris Johnson and his Westminster team. Commentators, even those normally immune to her political appeal, sang the praises of Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister, as she insisted that she was aiming to defeat the virus while the Prime Minister was merely trying to manage it.
On the face of it, the results have been remarkable: recent opinion polls have shown a majority now for breaking up Britain, suggesting that moderate, normally Unionist, voters have decided that if she can lick Covid, Ms Sturgeon can surely be trusted with running an independent country.
It’s an outcome that I find hard to fathom, given the dreadful performance of her government on the economy, education and health. But there are signs now that even Ms Sturgeon’s main policy advantage – her thus far successful attempts to beat the virus – may be coming unstuck, in substance as well as style. So, as was clear from the First Minister’s “Statement for Government” – the equivalent at Holyrood of the Queen’s Speech – she is falling back on her tried and trusted standby: another referendum on Scottish independence.
After glorying in the huge reductions in deaths, hospital admissions and infection rates, Ms Sturgeon now wakes up to headlines screaming that the virus rate is “rocketing” again – with spikes in many parts of the country, rural as well as urban. So much so that she’s had to bring in a form of house arrest for 800,000 people, in the greater Glasgow area, banning them from mixing indoors with friends and neighbours.
Her hour-long televised performances, where journalists link up through Zoom, have always engendered a foreboding atmosphere where Scotland is lectured by the First Minister about what it must do to stifle the virus. There she is flanked by the always solemn figures of her interim chief medical officer, a former GP, and her clinical director, a former dentist. But the mood has turned even on these events. The feeling of gloom has led to calls on the First Minister to end her briefings, which one commentator likened to the “Zooms of Doom”.
Having refused to ease the lockdown at the same rate as England, Ms Sturgeon found that lifting the restrictions was more difficult than imposing them and took it as a personal affront, almost, when rules were broken. She “felt like crying” when hundreds crowded Portobello beach and she was furious when police had to break up a 300-strong house party in a rented Midlothian mansion.
Her rules are confusing. Neighbours mixing in each other’s houses and ignoring the two-metre social distancing requirement are breaking them. However, if they crossed the road to a pub, the distance demanded is only one metre. And she has gone her own way on travel; the latest being imposing a quarantine requirement on Portugal where England has not.
Yet the pandemic is only the start of Ms Sturgeon’s troubles. While expectation was high in advance of Ms Sturgeon’s policy statement and with the business community looking for urgent help, there was no mention whatsoever of small business. The SNP programme is heavy on future promises but there is no urgency in getting Scots back to work. In spite of £6.5 billion in UK Treasury assistance to help Scottish jobs and a £15billion budget deficit rising to £40billion next year, the attitude is that it’s the UK Government’s responsibility – not theirs – to continue to sort Scotland’s economy.
On education, the SNP paved the way for the English exams fiasco with a farce of its own, with children from the least prosperous backgrounds suffering worst in initially having their exam grades reduced. On health, the Sturgeon government will be in the dock at the inevitable Covid public inquiry about the fact that 47 per cent of deaths in Scotland occurred in care homes – many having been transferred from hospitals.
And still awaiting a possibly explosive denouement is the outcome of the Holyrood inquiry into the allegations of sexual harassment against Alex Salmond. He says he was the victim of a conspiracy. Ms Sturgeon denies being involved. Both may give evidence.
What there was in the First Minister’s speech was a declaration to publish a draft Bill in the New Year, providing for a new independence referendum. Ms Sturgeon said she would campaign for such a vote in May’s Scottish Parliament elections. If she wins, she’d then claim a mandate and demand that Boris Johnson grant the necessary authority, something that he has refused to countenance – pointing to the 11-point majority against independence in the
2014 referendum.
With the SNP split on the Salmond issue and the Tories determined to mount an onslaught on her failed policies, Ms Sturgeon’s best hope is to keep her troops’ eyes focused on the “prize” of independence. The future of the UK may well depend on whether she’s successful or not.