Education and closing the door on separatists

POP dinner onto the kitchen table at my house and inevitably the phone will ring, or someone will arrive at the door, and things went to their usual maddening form on Wednesday.

I was just about to ‘plate up’, as cheffy types say, when the dog went apoplectic. A stranger was trying the doorbell (20 years and more we’ve been in our house on the Ayrshire riviera and I’ve still to get round to fixing that bell. Maybe tomorrow…)

It was a canvasser for the SNP and if he thought the dog’s reaction to his arrival was wild, it was nothing on mine.

The Mail that morning published the story of how dreadfully pupils are faring with literacy. We pictured Nicola ‘Judge us on education’ Sturgeon above the lacerating headline: ‘You’re failing our children.’

Now I’ve never been a member of any political party and I like that ‘sanctity of the voting booth’ thing and keeping schtum about who you vote for. So when canvassers rock up, I’m non-committal at best and downright evasive at worst.

This time the red mist descended and I told the Nat that I will most certainly not be voting for his party and if he wanted to know why, to have a look at the Daily Mail.

BeCAUSe it enrages me that after ten years in charge of education, the SNP is presiding over a school system from which children emerge as functionally illiterate. ‘Milk snatcher’ Thatcher may have cut kids’ half-pintas but they could still read and write under her reign.

Nothing damages your life chances more, yet Scotland is turning children out into a global employment marketplace hamstrung because the ‘three rs’ are not inculcated.

Ah, say the separatists, education is a holyrood matter and so nothing to do with June’s General election.

Well, let’s talk about the so-called rape Clause they’ve been making so much noise about. In reality it is a relief clause designed to protect a tiny handful of women in very unusual and horrific circumstances from a monolithic piece of benefits regulation.

Far from being monstrous, it represents the early introduction of a ‘special circumstances’ rule that would normally be the hard-won fruit of a long-running campaign by activists. But the whole issue is part of UK-wide benefits legislation and, as such, should be discussed only at Westminster. Yet there’s been more talk at holyrood about the ‘evil Tory rape clause’ than about education.

That’s partly down to woeful Presiding Officer Ken Macintosh (salary £92,988) who weekly lets Miss Sturgeon turn First Minister’s Questions into a party political broadcast. So if MSPs can witter about UK matters, then voters are entitled to take education into account in next month’s General election.

And of course everything the SNP touches is tainted by the independence question. It again must be taken into account on June 8, whether the SNP has the temerity to put Indyref 2 into its manifesto or not.

My children were aghast at the short shrift I gave that canvasser and we must all guard against rudeness in these febrile times. But my patience is wearing thin with a party hell-bent on a separatist path that would turn this country into a backwater and risk the wellbeing of generations yet unborn.

education shows what a mess the SNP is making of key issues now when there is money in the system. What chaos there would be if it were disbursing only what crumbs the International Monetary Fund would give a ‘free’ Scotland when the inevitable cash crisis hit.

There is an SNP supporter who holds open the door of my community centre, rain or shine, on polling days.

On June 8, I will thank him sincerely for his kindness – and still vote against his dangerously obsessed party.