Sorry, you don’t have what it takes to lead a breakaway nation
IT IS A compelling irony of British politics that the worst advertisement for Scottish independence is made by the dismal performance of the SNP, the most strident advocate of the separatist cause. During more than a decade of rule, Nicola Sturgeon’s party has created a miserable fiefdom of failure whose central themes of governance are bungling incompetence, bullying authoritarianism and manufactured grievance.
The Nationalists owe their dominance, not to any concrete achievements, but to stoking the flames of institutional victimhood and anti-English resentment through remorseless propaganda and the ruthless exploitation of office.
Nicola Sturgeon has been at it again this week, as she publicised her invitation to Boris Johnson for talks at her official Edinburgh residence during his two-day visit to Scotland.
The aim of the meeting was to emphasize the grandeur of her own status and put the PM in an awkward position.
As the BBC commented, he could have ended up looking “like a visiting dignitary from a foreign power” against a backdrop of “jeering crowds.”
But Johnson avoided the trap by urging instead that a summit be held soon of all the leaders from the devolved nations to discuss post-Covid recovery.
So Sturgeon was denied the chance for yet more self-important grandstanding, which has become such a feature of her reign. Throughout the Covid pandemic she has posed as the cool-headed guardian of the Scottish nation, supposedly in stark contrast to the shambolic English Government.
But this is another spectacular form of deceit, for the unprecedented health crisis has actually made a potent case for the maintenance of the union.
It was Britain’s collective endeavour that created the vaccines, upheld the NHS through crippling pressures and provided the funds to prevent economic meltdown. Indeed,
Scotland received £14.5billion from the Treasury during the worst of the pandemic, money that the Edinburgh Government could never have raised itself.
THE SCOTTISH public’s recognition of these realities partly explains why support for independence has been ebbing in recent months, reflected in the failure by the SNP to win an overall majority in recent Parliamentary elections. That has not stopped Sturgeon keeping up her usual drumbeat for the break-up of the union as she pushes for a second independence referendum, even though she famously said that the poll held in 2014 would settle the question “for a generation”.
Independence might be the all-consuming goal of the SNP, but Scotland has paid a heavy price for this destructive obsession, a monumental distraction to good governance.
The more the Nationalists bang on about self-rule, the more they reveal how unfit they are for such responsibilities. On every front, the record of the SNP is poor. Last week it was revealed Scotland has the highest drug death rate in Europe, with fatalities averaging three a day. And despite endless promises of action by the Scottish Government, the toll has risen every year since 2014.
IT IS THE same sorry story elsewhere. Scotland used to have one of the best state education systems in Europe. Today, poor pupils in Scotland are less than half as likely as their English counterparts to get a university place.
Moreover, nationalist propaganda features so heavily in the teaching of history that the nation’s foremost historian Sir Tom Devine was moved to complain about “self-evident, arrant and dangerous nonsense” in classroom materials.
Despite lavish subsidies from London, with public expenditure almost £2,000 per head higher north of the border, the Scottish economy is in a mess, with a huge fiscal deficit that is around 25 per cent of GDP.
In the land of Adam Smith, the founding father of capitalism, welfare dependency and civic bureaucracy are now rife.
And Scotland under the SNP has become the McNanny state, full of puritan finger-wagging and sanctimonious intolerance against anyone who challenges the orthodoxy on social justice.
Rising star Joanna Cherry was forced off the SNP’s front bench for expressing support for women’s rights in defiance of the party’s hardline transgender policy, which she compared to the Salem witch trials.
The SNP has also imposed one of the toughest hate crime laws in the world, which even criminalizes language in the private home, an unprecedented attack on British liberties.
Riven with personality feuds and murky finances, this is a party equipped only for provincial politics, not the leadership of a new breakaway nation.
‘They stoke the flames of institutional victimhood’