All aboard Nicola’s IndyTrain? Not likely!

AMID the misery of the Soviet Union, citizens coined a rueful and subversive joke about President Leonid Brezhnev aboard a train halted on the forbidding steppe. He considers his options. Joe Stalin would have the locomotive driver shot if the train didn’t move. Nikita Khrushchev, ever one for reorganisations, would have the rails behind the train ripped up and placed in front…

Finally, Brezhnev pulls the carriage curtains shut and declares: ‘I will pretend the train is moving!’

There’s a touch of this head-in-the-sand from the leader of our own one-party state (I know there’s more than one name on the ballot paper, but when a Nationalist MP sits in on the editorial conference of STV like some Kommissar, freedom really is in peril).

For, just as Brezhnev presided over stagnation, so the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon is stationary but pretending we’re rattling towards independence.

The separatist faithful must also kid on all is well for, as failed deputy leader Tommy Sheppard MP says: ‘We all just happen to think alike.’

And so everything must be talked up; any criticism denounced as baseless treachery.

Take the NHS, where party apparatchiks and Useful Idiots on Twitter claim difficulties are the invention of headline writers and, anyway, things are worse in England.

But the decay is real. The South-West has a GP crisis so acute, consideration was given to deploying Army doctors.

Around 19 family doctor vacancies cannot be filled, with Stranraer and Kirkcudbright worst hit.

HEALTH Secretary Shona Robison indicates a number of new initiatives are being rolled out to reduce the pressure on GPs, including training nurse practitioners and more advice via pharmacists. In other words, tinkering and a diminished service – no new doctors.

Khrushchev would have hailed Comrade Robison’s endless consultation, planning and the repackaging of lesser care as an ‘initiative’.

Over at Finance, the SNP/Green cabal will make us pay more for less. Extra income tax, higher National Insurance – yet out-of-his-depth Derek Mackay insists, as he too closes the curtains: ‘You’ve never had it so good.’

He’ll be asking us to exult over tractor production statistics next and has already said the social compact in Scotland legitimises his pick-pocketing. But just as the lies of newspaper Pravda – ironically meaning ‘Truth’ – were transparent, so Scots are not fooled.

Freebies, such as prescriptions, are paid for by the money we gain from the Union and would vanish in a go-it-alone Scotland. The spin doctors will keep pretending everything here is glorious but endlessly repeating the ‘SNP good’ mantra does not make it so.

It won’t put a single extra bobby on the beat, won’t lift the slipping standards of numeracy and literacy in our schools and won’t create a single job. And many Scots are literally on trains that don’t move or in traffic jams while Transport Secretary Humza Yousaf tweets about Brexit.

Ah, Brexit. Just as Moscow used the Free West as the bogeyman to wring extra effort from downtrodden masses, so Brexit is the spectre meant to goad us all aboard Nicola’s train to separation.

But while the final destination of the Brexit wagons-lits is far from clear, we know where her SNP IndyTrain is. It is out of steam by Stepps, not the steppe, its boiler as holed as it was in 2014.

There is no credible currency plan. A Scottish pound would be built on sand with money borrowed at usurious rates.

That would soon mean no cash for the salaries of nurses, teachers, policemen, firemen, civil servants or for pensions…

Open those curtains a crack, Nicola. You’ll see Scots faced with job uncertainty, pay freezes, rising council tax bills and higher taxes are not rushing to join you on that stranded train.