Reading between the lines, SNP is getting desperate
THERE is one thing about this week’s appalling literacy figures that Alex Salmond will have found most shocking. It won’t be that more than half of Scotland’s teenagers cannot write properly. He did, after all, dismiss the fact that one in five of Scottish school leavers is ‘functionally illiterate’ as ‘just one statistic’. Presumably one they have not been educated well enough to understand.
The fact that this is against the backdrop of Scotland’s worst ever performance in international studies of standards in maths, science and reading is also unlikely to be what disturbs our former First Minister most.
Instead, it is more likely to be the fact that the Scottish Government published the figures at all – and at the start of the General Election campaign.
This is a man who went to court before the 2011 Scottish election to prevent analysis of his policy on a local income tax becoming public.
He went back in front of the beak to make sure that voters were not privy to legal advice on an independent Scotland being able to join the EU – advice that did not exist.
SALMOND has said that the ‘art of government’ is ‘communication’ or, in his case, how to block it. Only vanity will prevent him from pulling his thinning thatch at Nicola Sturgeon making such a schoolgirl error as publishing proof of her failures – underlining the fact that schoolgirls aren’t what they used to be.
The departments of health, education, finance and justice are all failing at Holyrood but what will worry the SNP most is a malfunction at their most prized function of government – the Ministry of Truth.
The comms plan that has so far served Nicola Sturgeon well is threefold. First, deny there is a problem. Second, admit there is a problem but say you are sorting it. If the issue comes back then move to stage three – admit to a problem but assert things are worse in England.
For our current First Minister, that strategy is now failing and must be chillingly reminiscent of an old joke about the advice an outgoing prime minister leaves for his successor in three buff envelopes to be opened at moments of crisis.
The message in the first advises the new PM to blame everything on his predecessor. He does and the crisis passes. The second advises him to reshuffle his cabinet, which he does and survives again. At the next crisis he opens the third envelope to read the message: ‘prepare three buff envelopes’.
Nicola Sturgeon is running out of stationery.
Something profound appears to be happening in this General Election campaign – albeit not a vote has yet been cast. For decades, even when Labour was in the ascendancy, it has been enough to assert your Scottishness to win votes. That strategy is beginning to crack. The referendum didn’t just reassure Yes voters in their identity, the aftermath made pro-Union Scots more certain of their patriotism and loyalty to Scotland.
It is exposing the SNP’s lack of faith in the form of government Scots have chosen – devolution. For the Nats it has always been a stepping stone to independence, the grease on the slippery slope to separation. They are not invested in making it work.
But there is a problem in that it is difficult to argue that you should have control of all the levers of government when you cannot handle those you have. The truth slowly dawning on Scotland is that in terms of education, the economy and health, this SNP administration is the worst in living memory. Its strategy was to get in government, assert competence and dash to independence. It is losing that race and in danger of being lapped by its failures.
Nicola Sturgeon knows this. It must be what her private polling is telling her. And we can tell how bad it is by the desperate messages she is pumping out.
Her outrage at what she terms the ‘rape clause’ and now anger about food banks suggests she is trying to shore up a core vote that must be vulnerable.
Nothing she is saying is designed or likely to sway a floating voter.
OLD hands in the SNP are bracing themselves for losing at least ten seats and maybe more. That would stall the drive for a second independence referendum and lead to a more profound question – what is the point of Nicola Sturgeon?
The truth is that she cannot work out what this election is about. Calls for a second referendum lose votes and stiffen opposition, while making it about Brexit loses core SNP voters in her North-East heartlands.
Worse she faces losing the SNP’s public Westminster face. John Nicolson, Angus Robertson, Joanna Cherry and even Alex Salmond are all at risk. Scots voters may be embarking on a decapitation strategy – her lack of message could deprive her of her best messengers.
Already she is being reduced, Corbyn-style, to pleading for the public to stop a Tory landslide.
Scots Tories should start arguing that Scotland’s voice will be better heard by having voices within government rather than opposing it.
That would be a positive message. And as Alex Salmond will tell you – a positive message always trumps a negative one.