New SNP video isn’t selling Scotland. It’s selling out Scotland
SCOTLAND Is Now. That is the Scottish Government’s £6 million slogan to sell our nation around the world. Phew. It could so easily have been Scotland Is Yesterday. Or Scotland Is Tomorrow. Either way, we might have missed the boat. But we are OK because Scotland Is Now.
There are worse fates. Former RBS banker Andrew Wilson’s economic blueprint for an independent Scotland – his Growth Commission – has positively shrivelled as it has been caught in ‘it will be published in the next few weeks’ for the past couple of years.
The NHS must know how to treat that condition – but Health Secretary Shona Robison has probably created a waiting list for it. How Mr Wilson must wish his Growth Commission was Now.
Our First Minister Nicola Sturgeon revealed the new slogan on her visit to China.
She spoke thus: ‘The message at the heart of Scotland Is Now is of a bold and positive country offering the warmest of welcomes, rich in history and heritage and with a progressive, pioneering and inclusive approach to our future.
‘The campaign will inspire people to be part of Scotland’s future and tell Scotland’s story through those who know it best – people who have embraced living, working, studying, B visiting and investing here.’ UT which people? This is a 61-second, £6 million film supposedly to sell Scotland to the world. I mean, it could not possibly be a £6 million movie that was really an SNP propaganda film for the home populace paid for by the taxpayer, could it?
Let’s compare it with the international competition; in the country where she revealed it, indeed.
China’s equivalent to Scotland Is Now is its top-grossing documentary of all time – people pay to see it at the cinemas – called China Is Amazing. It is straightforward Chinese Communist Party propaganda which some would argue is part of the personality cult of Xi Jinping.
So here is what Miss Sturgeon’s film revealed to the Chinese.
Scotland Is Now says, ‘Scotland builds bridges,’ over pictures of the Queensferry Crossing. That’s it. The Chinese must have already known this, as they provided the steel for the 1.7-mile, foreigndesigned structure our First Minister called ‘the best bridge in the world’.
If any of her hosts have seen their own government’s China Is Amazing film – and I guess they might have done so with complimentary tickets – they would have seen and heard it say this. China is finishing a 34-mile bridge connecting Hong Kong to Macau which, with two artificial islands, has a 3.7-mile tunnel in the middle.
It also talks of how the Chinese rebuilt the Beijing equivalent of the Kingston Bridge in Glasgow in only 43 hours.
Oh, and they have trains that go at 217mph – which, they point out, could take you from London to Edinburgh in just over two hours for around £20.
Scotland Is Now must have brought back all their yesterdays for Miss Sturgeon’s hosts, although I do not know the Cantonese for ‘Bless’.
Our nation’s video also refers to the invention of the phone (by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 in Canada) and TV (by John Logie Baird in 1926 in London) and the discovery of penicillin (by Alexander Fleming in 1928, also in London).
The equivalent Chinese film reveals how they have won global awards for their advances in computer science in the past three years. How their new supercomputer can do 100 quadrillion calculations in one second.
We have a picture of Dolly the Sheep.
Now don’t think I have been taken in by Chinese propaganda, but they do have the decency to pepper their video with third-party endorsements. The Scottish Government peppers its film with pictures of mountains and lochs and happy young folk on nights out.
It finishes with a shot of the Baby Box – the First Minister’s vanity project – which when Economy Secretary Keith Brown revealed it in New York must have proved we are an advanced nation.
There, it can take many years of alcohol and drug abuse before you sleep in cardboard; while in the Scottish state you get the chance to do it from birth.
Whatever this video is selling, no one is going to buy.
It was John Swinney who first alleged that critics of Scottish independence thought Scotland ‘too small, too stupid and too poor’ to support it.
NOW the SNP seems to have taken £6 million of taxpayers’ money to make a film that appears to tell the world we’re suffering a huge poverty of ideas. Of course, it has nothing to do with selling Scotland abroad. It is all about trying to resell the SNP to Scotland.
Having a real, modern, international story for Scotland would require proper policy and hard work – something of which our Government has proved itself to be incapable over the past decade.
But with the SNP split on the timing of another referendum, it spends our money on a film which, with a nod and a wink, suggests it will be Now.
This video is not about selling Scotland. It is about selling out Scottish taxpayers in the interests of the SNP.
WHY do our politicians make the most important of military decisions based not on what should be done for the future, but what was done in the past? In 2013, with the scars of the Iraq War barely healed, our MPs decided not to intervene in Syria. If we cared about humanity, we should have done so then. Recognising it had been a mistake not to do so then, we have bombed Syria now. I have no idea whether it will be effective and I am not against military action in the interests of saving lives. But can someone give us a plan that looks forward and not back to the last mistake?