Are the days when politicians stood up and took bad news on the chin gone?

Around 2,000 years ago, in a territory we now call Palestine, then run by a man called King Herod, a young couple – the wife on the point of giving birth – could not find a room in an inn in Bethlehem. At least they got a place in a stable and their son was safely born.

2,017 years later – give or take – in a place called Scotland, run by a woman called nicola Sturgeon, five women went to a state-of-the-art £1billion hospital in Glasgow to give birth to their children. Like the couple at the inn, they were told there was no place for them and were turned away.

Whatever the children of those women do to change the course of human history in the coming years, you can be sure our Scottish Government will do its damnedest to airbrush that part of their story out.

The SNP cannot admit any problems. The nationalists don’t have the grace, intelligence or self-confidence to admit when they cannot do something. Evidence of failure has to be a lie.

For many years I prepared elected politicians to question the likes of Alex Salmond. We gamed what his responses would be. We deliberately never prepared for him admitting failure because we knew he was incapable of it.

Conspiracy

Ask him if coal was black, he would say it was white and claim any other suggestion was a ‘Tory conspiracy’.

So Scotland can invest more than ever before in building a hospital but when that facility fails in its most basic of duties – to treat patients – we are told to shut up. And that is before we get to the Queen Elizabeth university Hospital’s shameful record of treating patients who attend its accident and emergency unit.

Instead of treating the people of Scotland like adults and admitting it failings, the SNP uses Scots as human shields. To complain about NHS Scotland is, it contends, to attack the nurses and doctors who work in it. It is not.

If you think the NHS in Scotland is failing, it is worse in England, they tell us.

That’s not merely cold comfort, it is chilling indifference to Scotland.

The evident truth is we live in a country where mothers cannot get a hospital bed in which to give birth. Where the sick and dying spend hours on hospital trolleys awaiting treatment. Where our schools are failing and our children have a better chance of a decent education outwith Scotland.

Where our poorest are denied college or university places. Where people lie dying by the side of the road for days before they are detected by the police.

Yet the only crime here, our government says, is to criticise its own administration. Instead we should ignore its incompetence and entrust it to run even more of our lives.

After the 1997 election, I remember the then Scottish health minister, the late Sam Galbraith, answering questions about waiting times in Scottish hospitals.

They were appalling, partly because the then Scottish office had targeted treatment for heart, stroke and cancer patients rather than bring down the numbers. Mr. Galbraith offered no excuses. He declared the figures a disgrace and said that if he did not improve them he would go.

My, how Scottish politics has changed. Straight dealing with the public in the Galbraith tradition would appear to be a quaint thing of the past.

After the referendum, nicola Sturgeon said she would reach out and offer the hand of friendship to people like me who voted for Scotland to remain in the UK.

So far it seems that hand has only two fingers on it.

Instead of explaining or legitimising her own position, she instead seeks more and more platforms to delegitimise her critics. You see it every week at First Minister’s Questions. nicola Sturgeon will not debate – she can only abuse.

Much has been made of the apparent social progress Scotland has made now three of our most senior political leaders are women. now I believe in equality, if not quotas, but I do not see much womanly understanding in how nicola Sturgeon treats her sisters from the First Minister’s lectern.

Instead I see the anger of the caricature 1950s husband randomly back from the pub wondering where his tea is. refusing to allow his authority to be questioned.

In that stare, I see the threat of ‘the back of my hand’. She will ‘take no lectures from’ – you can fill in the blanks.

This weekend the independence supporter and ally of Alex Salmond, Peter de Vink, has suggested that Miss Sturgeon is ‘worse than Margaret Thatcher’. I think she is not as good as Margaret Thatcher.

The Tory Prime Minister achieved most of her goals and even Miss Sturgeon has said she wishes the children of Scotland to get the standard of education she received when Mrs Thatcher was Prime Minister.

But it seems we have to be wedded to the prescription nicola Sturgeon bought into for Scotland while she was receiving that education.

Failures

The dream born in an Irvine bedroom in the 1980s bedecked with duran duran posters must be followed through whatever the current circumstances or the failures of nicola Sturgeon’s government.

I remember that period of our political history well, so let me explain what will happen if we do not reject not just the question of independence, but the style of Miss Sturgeon’s politics.

I warn you not to get ill, because when there is no hospital bed for you they won’t admit it. I warn you not to be ignorant, because if there is no education system, you’ll be told you would be worse off in Essex. I warn you not to want a welfare system, when the SNP refuses the powers to run one.

This is a dishonest government and its dishonesty transcends the question of independence.

I once worked with a man who was a drunk and a womaniser. He would lie to his wife and she would accept those lies because she wanted to believe in a better world. one day she woke up to reality and left him to start her own honest life.

The SNP’s relationship with its own voters is very similar. They want to believe in what they are being told but the reality surrounding them is stark and appalling.

Miss Sturgeon can seek all the outlets she wants but what she is saying is fundamentally dishonest.

And the day is coming when she will find no room for her opinions at the inn.