It wisnae us! But SNP can’t keep blaming others for its failures
BLAME need not be a bad thing if it is the result of rationally analysing a problem you are trying to solve. Apportioning blame can be a starting point you can move on from to make things better.
But when it is your end point it becomes a cave you inhabit. Something that stops you taking any action because you can warm yourself with the idea it is all someone else’s fault. A comfort blanket woven from 100 per cent scapegoat.
It would seem almost every Minister in the Scottish Government carries such a comfort blanket in their Ministerial boxes where policies should lie.
Scotland has the worst record for drugs deaths in the European Union. The death rate is eight times – eight times – that of the European average. It is two and a half times that of the rest of the UK.
The SNP citadel of Dundee is the drugs death capital of Scotland – and therefore Europe – with 12 souls perishing last month alone. Many didn’t need to search for drugs – the dope came to them.
Interviewed on Channel 4 news last week, the woman who should be spearheading Scotland’s efforts to tackle this national – international – disgrace, Public Health Minister Aileen Campbell, was asked why Scotland’s record was so shocking.
She blamed it on ‘the economic policies of the 1980s’.
MARGARET Thatcher resigned almost 30 years ago. The SNP has been in power almost as long as she was. Yet it is still her fault. Nothing Miss Campbell can do.
Mrs Thatcher’s policies, she said, ‘led to feelings of hopelessness’.
I am no defender of Mrs Thatcher’s record in government but she has been dead for five years.
If the Scottish Government cannot do anything to save the lives of Scots who have fallen victim to drug addiction today it is they who are creating the ‘feelings of hopelessness’, not her.
After more than a decade in government how much longer does the SNP believe it can blame someone else for its own failures?
Let’s pursue Miss Campbell’s logic. She stands for office, presumably to change the world, and then complains she cannot change anything because of policies pursued when she was a toddler. What is the point of her, then? The economic policies of the 1980s she blames for Scotland’s drugs deaths were the same ones pursued throughout the rest of the UK.
If Scotland’s drugs death rate is two and a half times higher than the rest of the UK now, her argument leads to the inevitable conclusion that she thinks the Labour and Conservative governments that tried to tackle the same problems south of the Border are more successful. What is the point of the SNP, then?
Critics have a point when they say that some of Mrs Thatcher’s policies were dehumanising. In her interview Miss Campbell could not bring herself to call the dead or dying ‘people’. They were instead a ‘cohort’, indeed an ‘ageing cohort’, suffering not from illnesses but from ‘comorbidities’.
Scotland has not always shared Miss Campbell’s ‘feelings of hopelessness’. In 2005, a UN report labelled Scotland the most violent country in the developed world. Knife crime was rampant.
When we had regional constabularies and not just one dysfunctional national force, Strathclyde Police set up the Violence Reduction Unit funded by the then Scottish Executive. It brought together agencies to tackle gang culture.
Today problems remain but in a decade the number of young people caught carrying a knife has fallen by more than two-thirds. At the end of last year, of the 35 killings of young people with knives in the UK, none was in Scotland.
The UN still says we are the ‘assault capital’ of the world but those figures are disputed and no one disputes knife crime has dropped dramatically.
All of that was achieved despite the economic policies of Mrs Thatcher. The addiction of this cohort of talentless SNP Ministers to blaming someone else for their own failings damages not just Scotland’s image, but our psyche.
They paint a picture of a nation that things happen to, not one that makes things happen. Talk of powers but don’t use them. Demand we make decisions for ourselves and then refuse to take any.
IN a world where patriotism is demanded from us, there is no room to criticise to make the country better. Just blame someone else. They have done this from the beginning. When the Royal Bank of Scotland’s share price crashed in 2008, Alex Salmond blamed it on ‘spivs and speculators’ in the City of London. It wasn’t their fault, it was decisions made by Scots in Scotland, but that point could never be admitted.
I am proud of being a Scot. Proud of my nation despite its imperfections. But I believe in something that the SNP by its actions – or inactions – clearly doesn’t. That we have the ability to sort our own problems.
I’ll live in this decade, thank you very much, and look to the next ones, not the past.
Miss Campbell and her colleagues can blame their failings on policies that were pursued when they were children. But bogeymen and women are for kids.