Never mind homage to Catalonia, what about Caledonia?
NICOLA Sturgeon was the future once. Now the First Minister, her project and her Saltire appear more than a little yellowed at the edges. Indyref 2 increasingly looks like a 1960s jet pack – a vision of the future that never arrived. Nicola, ‘Queen of Scots,’ has become ‘that woman’ on the doorsteps.
And at heart she struggles with a fundamental problem – how can you argue for a radical convulsion in self-government when the last ten years have proved you, yourself, cannot govern?
Last week’s report from Audit Scotland on the dysfunction of the National Health Service describes a national disgrace.
Fewer patients being treated. Waiting lists growing. The time people wait for treatment lengthening. Seven out of eight targets missed – targets the SNP set for itself.
The pity and fear of it is that it is more likely to provoke the Scottish Government into plans to reform Audit Scotland than it is to get Ministers to think of ways of improving our NHS. For them the flag is often best used as a gag.
Yet while it still shocks, it is part of a familiar story of failure.
EDUCATION is part of Scottish identity. You would have thought that the Nationalists would have reinforced it. Instead our once internationally renowned schools are falling backwards by international standards.
When murderers are given home leave from jail and beat innocent dog walkers with a dumbbell, the Justice Secretary refuses to comment. At least he is consistent. This is a government that refuses to govern or ever take responsibility for anything.
Instead the First Minister starts answers with old, tired refrains: ‘In England...’, ‘Tory austerity…’, ‘When we came to office….’ But the familiar chorus is starting to grate even on pro-independence ears.
The SNP’s record should be subjected to its own ‘Tory Test’. Michael – now Lord – Forsyth was the last
Conservative Secretary of State for Scotland just over 20 years ago. He was deeply hated and used as a scapegoat by the SNP and the Labour Party.
Yet, given his starting point, his record in health was better than Miss Sturgeon’s. And in education. And in law and order.
Imagine what Miss Sturgeon would have to say about her record if it had happened on his watch? Try to fathom the breadth of her explosion of self-righteousness.
Unable – and unwilling – to govern, the SNP instead operates a policy of deflection. Raw from the savaging she received at First Minister’s Questions last week on her own record, Miss Sturgeon’s response was to write an ‘urgent’ letter to Theresa May about Brexit. The details of it don’t really matter. It was designed to move headlines on, not EU negotiations.
However big her failure, her essential argument seems to boil down to saying to Scotland: ‘If you think we are rubbish you should see the other guys.’
The problem with trying to deflect attention by pointing and shrieking, ‘Oh, look, a squirrel,’ is you end up infested with rodents.
For many years the SNP has got through the moment by hoping that no one would remember tomorrow what it said today. This is, after all, the party that pledged to abolish the ‘hated’ council tax, dump student debt and ‘re-industrialise’ Scotland. For it the past is clearly another country. Yet whether it took the high one, or the low one, the SNP is running out of road.
The latest deflection that is heartening disheartened nationalists is Catalonia. However, using the scenes of demonstrations in Barcelona as a narcotic to ease the pain of defeat in the Scottish referendum of 2014 may be addictive but it is not productive. Catalonia is, at best from a nationalist point of view, divided on independence. The referendum the Catalonian administration held was illegal and less than half the electorate took part.
IF anything, what is happening there is proof that how we do things in the United Kingdom the Nationalists decry is much fairer, more reasonable and more peaceful than what happens in other parts of the world. Whatever happens after Catalonia’s unilateral declaration of independence is more likely to be detrimental to the SNP’s cause than boost it.
Yes diehards with a weakness for woad may feel their blood is up but scenes of disorder and chaos are unlikely to make any No voter change their minds.
Add to that the shambles of Brexit, and Scots seeing how hard it is for the UK to dissolve its union with the EU, and the appetite for more constitutional convulsion will become positively anorexic.
Miss Sturgeon’s tenuous case for Indyref 2 depends on Brexit and Scots somehow deciding it is more important for Scotland to remain in the EU than in the UK.
That will be destroyed by any support she shows for Catalonian independence. The EU is a members’ club and its members are nation states. They do not like being broken up.
A nation that encourages regions of other nations to leave is not going to be welcome, and the Spanish could not possibly agree when they – and the other 26 nations – have made it clear an independent Catalonia cannot join the EU. Without EU membership the SNP’s case fails. Miss Sturgeon has failed to build new arguments for independence or answer the crucial questions they would rest upon.
The first is currency. An independent Scotland could not keep the pound sterling and although the Growth Commission report she is suppressing recommends a separate Scottish currency, no one seriously believes that would be viable. Better to start bartering the rights to undiscovered oil fields for magic beans. The euro – with all its drawbacks – would be the only option.
The second question is why it would be in Scotland’s interests to leave our biggest single market – the UK – to join the EU, with which we do just a quarter of the trade.
The third is how we would bridge a £15 billion deficit in public spending.
None of those questions has been addressed – let alone answered – as Miss Sturgeon prefers to point at squirrels. Not only is she failing at the day job, she isn’t even attending her evening classes in separation.
To say that the Scottish Government and the SNP are in stasis would be a compliment. It would also be untrue.
Our public services are going backwards. This week the First Minister is likely to demand higher taxes to invest in them, as another damaging deflection. Better funded than most of the rest of the UK, she will have some job persuading Scots they should give her more money to throw after bad. It also suggests she has run out of ideas.
After a decade of SNP government, Scotland is stuck in reverse – and so is the case for independence.