No trust in Swinney after schools fiasco

IT was a day that underlined again the disconnect between Holyrood and voters.

The minister responsible for Scotland’s exam shambles rightly faced a vote of no confidence. But thanks to an SNP pact with the ever-obliging Greens, John Swinney remains in office.

Perhaps the most telling contribution to yesterday’s debate came from SNP backbencher Angela Constance, who defended Mr Swinney.

But she was sacked from the education brief inherited by Mr Swinney over her appalling record. The spectacle of a failed minister backing a colleague who refuses to quit tells us all we need to know about the state of the SNP.

Mr Swinney’s Cabinet colleague Mike Russell condemned ‘random smears’ which he believed were driving the campaign against Mr Swinney.

His own party is fractured by factionalism and precisely the kind of score-settling he criticised yesterday.

And yet yesterday’s vote had nothing to do with personality: it was focused solely on Mr Swinney’s fitness for his job. He presided over the Named Person shambles, persisting with the legislation even after it was branded unlawful, before a humiliating U-turn.

A flagship Education Bill was ditched, and during the pandemic Mr Swinney formulated abortive plans for pupils to go back to school for as little as one day a week.

Before Covid-19, the SNP’s chaotic Curriculum for Excellence was blamed for the severe limitation of subject choice in schools. Teacher shortages and the ongoing failure to close the attainment gap compound the case against Mr Swinney as a man fit to implement vital reform of state education (once said to be the First Minister’s central mission).

Our educational decline has been so marked that in order to disguise it the SNP withdrew from key international studies.

Schools that were once among the best in the world are now outperformed by their counterparts in former Soviet Bloc nations.

We don’t yet know whether or not Mr Swinney’s quick-fix reversal of downgraded results will ensure no young Scot misses out on their chosen university place, or job.

But we do know that he was guilty of a profound error of judgment that will cast a shadow over the rest of his career.

The SNP has closed ranks and called in favours from its de facto backbenchers in the Green Party to save Mr Swinney from the axe.

But he has lost the trust of parents and indeed the many thousands of children who have paid a heavy price for his abject incompetence.