SNP can no longer hide behind bluster

A RIPPLE of applause – taboo in Westminster, but then it did come from the gauche SNP cohort – greeted Angus Robertson’s contrarian response to the Queen’s Speech.

It was nothing compared to the roar of approval for the Prime Minister from the public here in Scotland – sick of a posturing and preening SNP – when he told the Nationalists: ‘It’s time for you to stop talking and start acting.’

It is a message that cut like a laser through the fug of self-satisfied hot air that has surrounded the Nationalists since their election success. Their pipe dreams of being Commons kingmakers are long gone but still they talk long and loud about the exaggerated power of their 56 MPs – a sort of tartan tail trying to wag the British dog. But Mr Cameron has their measure, brushing aside their demand of full fiscal autonomy for Holyrood. It has become a touchstone f or separatists who see it – correctly – as a key tool to fatally loosening the bonds of the Union. They care not that it would be a financial disaster for every hard-working Scottish family.

For Nationalists it is merely a means to an end and the ‘collateral damage’ to the public, in terms of rocketing taxes or savage cuts, is a price worth paying.

Mr Cameron is, however, acutely aware of the danger – ‘Raising 100 per cent of what you spend means asking Scottish people to pay almost an extra £10billion i n taxes or make an almost extra £10billion in additional cuts by the end of this parliament’ – and rejected the notion out of hand. But this Queen’s Speech was hugely significant for what it sets out as well as what it leaves out.

Holyrood will now set thresholds and rates of income tax on earnings in Scotland and keep all the money raised here.

The Edinburgh parliament will also assume control over the f i rst ten percentage points of standard-rate VAT revenue raised in Scotland.

That will for the first time establish a clear link between what Holyrood raises and what it spends.

Now we will see what the SNP are truly made of. The portents are not good.

Their time in charge at Holyrood has been marred by slipping standards in education, police reform that promised the earth and failed to deliver, shambolic attempts to reform Scots Law, a troubled NHS – all set against a backdrop of their independence monomania.

This, too, is the party that believes its call for £180billion extra Government spending over four years was ‘modest’ yet £80billion over 30 years for a Trident replacement programme was unaffordable.

The other good news is that the Tory party in Scotland can contrast the profligate policies of the SNP, designed to force the state into more and more areas of our lives, with their own lower-tax, small-state agenda. The SNP had their moment in the sun as the election results rolled their way and when all their boasting was of holding ‘feet to the fire’.

Now they are about to have their noses held to the grindstone.

For as Mr Cameron says, the time for talking is over and the time for action is upon us.

The SNP are very good at the former – but we have seen precious little evidence that they are adroit at the latter.