A victory . . . but one with a bloody nose
SPORTS fans will tell you that a win – no matter how close, no matter how lucky – is still a victory and all that matters. So the SNP is the winner atop the Scottish Holyrood election 2016 podium. End of, they’ll tell you.
Yes, it is a remarkable achievement for a party that has been running the Scottish Government for nine years.
Like barnacles attaching over years to even the sleekest vessel afloat, problems accumulate for governments. Half-solved issues, compromises, blunders and stitch-ups become an impediment to progress and ballot-box disaster.
Yet the SNP has again defied political gravity. So the Nationalists sail on but Nicola Sturgeon, at the tiller of the SS Separatist, must chart a different course… because she has no majority.
Deputy leader Stewart Hosie has been quick to point out that the Holyrood system is specifically designed to prevent an outright win and claims that ‘other people’ raised the possibility of an SNP whitewash in the constituency contest.
Well, Alex Salmond – abrasive, combative, dyspeptic and insufferably smug though he is – delivered a majority in 2011.
The question now is why couldn’t Nicola Sturgeon do the same? She could not have asked for more propitious circumstances.
Her party, filled to the gunwales with members, has never been healthier.
And surely with a leader as genuinely personable as Nicola (has anyone in Scotland ever been the subject of so many selfies?) a majority should have been a doddle.
And Mr Hosie is wrong too about who set the bar so very high for his party in this vote. The ‘other people’ who talked up outright victory were his own rank-and-file, drunk on the party’s vainglorious talk of speaking ‘for the people of Scotland’.
The people who spoke on Thursday were a previously silent majority and what they said was clear: Stop presuming to know what we think; stop droning on about independence; start doing the hard work of government.
The problems Miss Sturgeon faces on her return to Bute House on Monday will be just as intractable, the economy and education foremost.
And Ruth Davidson is firing on all cylinders. Leading the opposition, Miss Davidson will – as she promised – ‘hold the Nationalists to account’.
That means she will torpedo the Nationalists’ treasured IndyRef2.
That is great news for the very many pro-Union supporters who voted against the SNP but very bad news for the SNP.
The prospect of another crack at breaking up Britain is the catnip that brought so many hot-headed separatists running to the SNP. How now to prevent the old SNP fault line – between gradualists and zealots – rending the party? It is one thing to soothe the CyberNats and militant wing with hints that a new vote is not far away; another to admit it is a generation – a proper generation this time – away.
The message middle Scotland roared out clearly is that they see independence is a dangerous dead-end and talking endlessly about it is a distraction from so much that really matters, such as the NHS, transport and, yes, tax.
Dominance in Holyrood made the SNP indolent. It began to believe its own spin doctors’ narcotic words that it was doing a fabulous job.
Legislation of deeply uneven quality went through the parliament’s engine-room – its committees – on the nod.
The results were agonising for Scotland. Police Scotland is deeply flawed. Hopeless ministers – Angela Constance was safer at Education than the schools over which she presided; Aileen McLeod at Environment so vacuous she did not know her party is agin fracking – thrived.
But now the flaws will be cruelly exposed in committee and First Minister’s Questions. First for the inquisition will be the Named Persons Act.
It is emblematic of so much of what went wrong with the SNP. Rooted in dogma, its state guardians are more likely to undermine parents over trivia than protect at-risk children.
Yet the Nationalists stood by it, never admitting a mistake, let alone rectifying one.
Named Persons is, like so many of the woes besetting the party post Thursday’s results, a selfinflicted wound.
Miss Sturgeon will need all her charm to hold this together.
It is one thing to lead a party on the sunny uplands of a majority.
It is altogether different to deal with the difficult issues when voters have handed your opponents a very big stick with which to beat you.
Thursday was a victory for the SNP, yes, but Pyrrhic victories – where the price is catastrophic to your core beliefs – come in many shapes and forms.