A gaffe by a top Nat? Try a rare moment of honest wisdom

THE other day Kirsty Blackman, MP for Aberdeen North and the SNP’s deputy Westminster leader, gave a forthright interview to a London paper and said many sensible things about, for instance, Parliament’s unfortunate drinking culture and the impropriety of hugs in the workplace.

A mother of two and local councillor for eight years before her elevation to the Commons, she is an unusually grounded politician. When pushed on the possibility of an independence referendum, she gave a strikingly candid reply.

‘I don’t think most folk in their daily lives give two hoots about whether Scotland is a member of the Union,’ she said. ‘The constitutional issues are not the biggest concern for an awful lot of people and, in fact, I very rarely talk about Scottish independence in the chamber because I talk about things that matter to the people of Aberdeen.’

As almost always happens when a politician gives an honest and interesting answer, many have been quick to proclaim this a ‘gaffe’.

Folk from rival parties have tried gleefully to make hay with her ‘admission’ and ponderous commentators argue that Miss Blackman has somehow ‘embarrassed’ the SNP leadership.

But it is silly to jump on such a tut-tutting bandwagon because she was only telling the truth.

Few of us go about our daily round agonising over, say, Scotland’s constitutional arrangements, the European single market or proportional representation – or believe that even radical constitutional rearrangement would make that much difference to our lives.

Refreshing

Miss Blackman’s cheerful perspective is refreshing in many regards. It is good when a politician remembers that there are things in life much more important than politics – family, friendship, faith, country walks and fine music – and sad that, usually, it is only in the aftermath of such tragedy as the murder of Jo Cox that party differences are, at least for the moment, set aside.

Her wisdom touches on other truths. One, of course, is that there is no near prospect of Scottish independence.

It is barely three years since we voted decisively against separation. When Nicola Sturgeon foolishly resurrected the issue last spring, many highly irritated Scots duly punished her and the Nationalists in June’s general election.

Time is on the SNP’s side. After all, many working-age Scots support independence. Right now, though – not least amid the uncertainty of Brexit – we would much rather that the SNP Government focus on the day job.

On many pressing fronts – our schools and hospitals, our creaky transport infrastructure and the rapid flight of services and amenities from country towns – there is more than enough for them to do.

And Scottish independence would not make as much difference as people might think. In the Republic of Ireland, people live very much as we do – shopping in the same sort of supermarkets, following the same soap operas, worrying about the same things.

The dominant worry in Ireland – rarely off the front pages of her newspapers – is Brexit. Ireland may have been selfgoverning since 1922 and she may have quit the Commonwealth in 1949, but she is still – by geography, economically and in many respects culturally – bound up with the United Kingdom. So would we be, even as an independent state – the residual UK would still be the market for fourfifths of all Scotland’s goods and services.

That is not to say there is no case for independence, but it is in no way a guaranteed panacea and London policy and the English market would always constrain the choices of an Edinburgh government.

For decades after the formation of the Irish Free State, Ireland actually went backwards – a repressive land of rural poverty, dismal censorship, appalling education, extraordinary discrimination against women and, by the 1950s, wholesale emigration.

It was only by brave new leadership that her fortunes were turned, to the point that Ireland now attracts thousands of annual immigrants and the once-prosperous North, by contrast, is an economic basket case whose selfindulgent politicians cannot even form a Stormont government.

But Miss Blackman’s observation is a reminder that not all Nationalists are unthinking devotees of, effectively, a religious cult. For too many, independence is not only an aspiration but an idol at the apex of their faith-based lives.

You would be left in little doubt as to the vacuity and venom of so many SNP activists if you attended a party conference, saw how members jeer and howl down journalists trying to ask reasonable questions at a manifestolaunch, or spent very much time on the internet.

Pomp

This is a party which, even in its years on the political fringes, has always attracted people with personality problems, and in its present pomp has fatted itself with ambitious networking types and, notably, many who are antifamily and gender-obsessed.

Worse, it is an echo chamber movement, with the mass of Nats too busy validating each other or cooing over their demotically canonised leader to engage meaningfully with those Scots – a majority of Scots, remember – they have yet to convince of their cause.

In many ways one now rather regrets Alex Salmond’s decision, after the referendum result, to fall on his sword. He was an SNP leader in genuine command of his party, who from 1990 led it away from hateful ethnic nationalism and suspicion of devolution.

He was by no means perfect. (Scotland’s schools are in such a state because, as First Minister, education was not his strongest interest.) But he was good at sitting down after electoral reverse, confronting SNP failure and identifying what needed to change.

He would probably, after 2014, have come up with a new and credible policy on currency, and identified why some 55 per cent of Scots recoiled from independence. Perhaps he might even have reassessed his party’s unfortunate relations with the media it continues to demonise.

But he went and Nicola Sturgeon, unopposed, was crowned First Minister. She is not so much a leader of her movement as its prisoner; the worse for operating in such a small personal bubble where few, if any, dare tell her the stuff she does not want to hear.

With a most dangerous millennialist streak, she wants not only an independent Scotland but a particular type of secular, centralised, virtue-signalling and ‘progressive’ entity.

No doubt Kirsty Blackman believes in independence and could argue a perky case for it. But she has refused to let it become her all-consuming obsession, and puts first and centre the concerns of her constituents. The SNP, or at least its wiser elements, could learn much from her.