SNP won’t need to look too hard for a grievance
WHO checked the speech?
Inside government when the boss has a final draft, usually written by several people and smoothed together by the most trusted wordsmith, the script is passed to fresh, friendly eyes.
Their task is not to be friendly at all. It is to play the cynic, put themselves in the mind of opponents and questioning journalists and to shoot holes in the argument.
They then pass the underscored document back with suggestions on making it watertight.
That appears not to have happened with the First Minister’s prestigious David Hume lecture.
What we ended up with was a speech of glaring inconsistencies with an over-cooked passage about Brexit being an excuse to undermine the very “foundations of devolution” being dropped at the last minute.
How embarrassing for a normally smooth operation.
People scratch their heads on whether to read the slip as a sign of unpreparedness or a signal of the increasing insolation of the SNP leader’s office from critical advice.
In any case, what emerged was an armful of grievances about fishing and agriculture powers looking for a scaffold to hang off.
What is devolved where in postBrexit Britain will involve “mature debate”, as Ruth Davidson notes. But why have that when you can have a screaming match instead?
The pawns in this game, the farmers, will follow the money and side with whoever makes the best offer of continued subsidy. The fishermen will follow the fish, no respecters of devolution.
Yet in the “never mistake a Scot for a ray of sunshine” stakes, the FM might actually have some grievances come true.
To disentangle the UK from European law the government promise a Great Repeal Bill which, when first presented, was going to be as easy as abracadabra.
Instead of waving a magic wand, Whitehall officials find their clever exit plans are snared by cold reality.
Repeal will involve not just many legislative consent motions in Holyrood to turn EU law into Scots law – itself a potential minefield – but also the possibility of getting under the bonnet of the devolution settlement itself.
Opening the Scotland Act, even if it were just to re-tie its laces, would be leapt on by the SNP as the power grab Sturgeon, oh so precipitously, warned about. “I told you so,” she’ll say, though I’ve just saved her the bother.
The biggest grievance of all will be when Sturgeon demands Section 30 powers to call a referendum and is told by Theresa May (perhaps to the private relief of both) that it will have to wait until Brexit is over.
I believe the Prime Minister is looking for the right form of polite words.
I’m sure her speech checker for today will say that “not yet” doesn’t quite cut it as an answer.