SNP’s manifesto for failure & a poll reckoning
A brand new hospital that can’t treat patients. Ferries that can’t carry passengers. Declining school standards and record drug deaths. As a bitter civil war tears the party apart, Scotland cannot afford another Nationalist government
IT’S never a good look when politicians make excuses for their failures. ‘It’s not our fault’ isn’t exactly an election-winning slogan. But in the case of the SNP, maybe they have a point.
True, the list of ministerial mishaps and pratfalls grows longer by the day, from incompetent procurement contracts to an inability to open hospitals.
But to be fair to Nicola Sturgeon and her party, they never actually claimed to have any interest in these issues. Or, in fact, in governing at all.
The SNP is not like other parties. While labour is founded on a commitment to economic and social equality, and the Conservatives believe in individual liberty, low taxes and encouraging the private sector, Nationalists are experts in only one thing: independence.
It is this narrow but laser-like focus on future constitutional change that motivates Sturgeon’s ministers and party activists; and it is the same obsession which has helped to protect the SNP from public scrutiny and criticism.
It’s an ingenious strategy. Whereas other parties view social and economic policy as essential to their offer to the electorate, the SNP sees them as merely boxes that have to be ticked on the road to independence; inconvenient and not particularly interesting subjects to which it is expected to pay a modicum of attention before being allowed to indulge its real interest.
AND so long as the electorate continue to indulge that obsession, so long as they share the Nationalist priorities of flags and slogans over policy and substance, ministers are insulated against scrutiny.
Which for them is just as well. So long as voters are prepared to withhold their scepticism and concern about areas where SNP policy has lamentably failed, then the Holyrood elections in May can be about only one thing: separatism.
So long as Scots remain uninterested in those failures, a vote for the SNP in ten weeks’ time will be interpreted – whether intended or not – as a validation of 14 years of abject failure in the most important aspects of public policy.
An SNP victory on May 7 will be the equivalent of an approving teacher’s tick on the homework jotters of this current administration: ‘We’re loving your work, carry on as before!’
There are some modest signs that Sturgeon’s current difficulties might finally be having the effect of fraying her party’s reputation at the edges.
An Ipsos MORI survey shows a small fall in the SNP’s popularity, from 55 per cent in November to 52 today (still enough to give the SNP the overall majority it desperately craves), while its flagship policy, independence, is also slightly less popular, attracting the support of 52 per cent – down four points since November. Hardly the ‘settled will of the people’. At least, not yet.
These findings, though no doubt welcomed by Sturgeon, are bound to make her ever so slightly nervous, too.
That the SNP will win in May isn’t in serious doubt, but winning isn’t enough. Another performance like the last one in 2016 would see Sturgeon confirmed as First Minister for a second time but without that elusive overall majority, which would be seen by many in her party as a disastrous waste of an opportunity – a failure to capitalise on a truly unprecedented run of popularity heightened by her leadership during the Covid pandemic.
So yesterday’s appearance before a Holyrood committee by her predecessor, former mentor and now bitter enemy,
Alex Salmond, could not have come at a worse time for the First Minister and her party.
He wounded his former protégé at her most vulnerable.
Amid a snowstorm of allegations and accusations, Salmond claimed the First Minister did indeed know about the substance of the charges levelled against him earlier than she has so far admitted.
For politicians it’s called ‘breaking the ministerial code’ – for the rest of us, it’s known as deliberately misleading the people who trust you to lead.
Henry Mcleish resigned as First Minister because of ‘a muddle, not a fiddle’ over his constituency expenses. If Sturgeon is found to have misled the parliament, she must surely follow his example.
It is a political cliché that divided parties don’t win elections, but it is a cliché that the SNP looks set to confound.
Perhaps the open divisions within the party are a consequence of years of stratospheric polling numbers and the sense of impregnability it conveys. Or perhaps voters really don’t care all that much about whether this or that MP or MSP is a personal supporter of the First Minister. After all, which labour or Conservative leader has been without their internal critics? Why should the SNP be any different?
In 2007 Salmond’s party represented a breath of fresh air, a welcome change from the tired old faces of labour and libDem ministers who had governed us for eight years.
SAlMOND’S administration did eye-catching things, like introduce free prescriptions, which was overwhelmingly popular, especially among the wealthier middle classes who benefited most and who – not coincidentally – are the people most likely to come out and vote at election time.
It kept free university tuition – a policy bequeathed by the outgoing regime – but also abolished the Graduate endowment Scheme, set up to help poorer students cope with the expense of university.
Sleights of hand though these measures were, regressive policies dressed in shiny new social democratic clothes, they were
popular, especially in the hands of master spin doctor Salmond.
And when he won an unprecedented [and so far never repeated] overall majority in 2011, he rightly saw that as a mandate for more of the same. Little wonder that a party that could win such a powerful mandate based on so little achievement became so lazy and complacent in government.
The signs were little noticed at first. Contracts to buy and build new ferries were bungled disastrously (and expensively), publishers committed to supporting independence were handed eyewatering bailouts by the SNP’s domesticated, publicly funded quangos [and subsequently pledged to publish a book of speeches by the First Minister – a practice with decidedly Central American overtones].
New hospitals failed to open on time, patients died from water contamination at those hospitals that had finally opened, a public inquiry into the Edinburgh tram debacle took even longer to conclude than it took to build the tram system itself.
The list is extensive and it reveals a level of arrogance so frequently displayed by parties the world over who face no real prospect of being ousted from office any time soon.
We shouldn’t be surprised that a party comprised of people with only one political aim – independence – should show little aptitude for policy areas such as transport, health and education.
It’s not as if we didn’t know that before we elected it; the SNP never claimed to be particularly interested in any subject beyond the narrow bounds of the constitutional debate. So why blame it for living down to expectations?
But then – and this is another inevitable consequence of a longserving administration facing no immediate prospect of removal – personal rivalries started to take centre stage.
In a party in which the position of leader has become synonymous with the position of First Minister, this again is no surprise. But the two catalysts that have embittered relations between factions could hardly have been foreseen.
One, of course, is the Salmond saga and the question mark over Sturgeon’s role in that sorry fiasco.
The other is trans ideology. And this is where an SNP victory in May’s elections will be seen as an endorsement of its dogmatic approach that will deprive women of the right to their own sex-based rights, including changing areas, jails, health services and sports.
THIS is anathema to feminists like Joanna Cherry MP, sacked from the SNP front bench because of her opposition to Sturgeon’s woke approach to the issue.
Cherry’s exile to the back benches came after she was barred by Sturgeon from standing for Holyrood, where she would have become a challenger for the leadership.
But none of that should prevent us from recognising that trans ideology is now a key faultline in SNP – and Scottish – politics.
A vote for the SNP will be seen as an endorsement of Sturgeon’s crusade on behalf of trans people at the expense of women’s rights.
But this soap opera risks deflecting voters’ attention from other aspects of Sturgeon’s administration which a victory in May would legitimise.
The SNP’s appalling failure, for example, to bridge the growing attainment gap between children from wealthy backgrounds and those who are less privileged, should make ministers embarrassed with their own efforts.
This was supposed to be one area about which the First Minister felt so strongly that she – or so she claimed in August 2015 – wanted to be judged on her Government’s performance. We will hear little of that bold pledge in coming weeks.
There was a time in Scotland’s recent past when we could be proud of our education system, a system that had given generations of working-class school leavers the opportunities that previously were open only to the better off.
Now, with shameful numbers of children leaving education without basic reading and writing abilities, with more Scottish working-class kids denied a place at university than in any other nation of the United Kingdom, Scottish education is in a dreadful place.
Victory by the SNP in May will send education chiefs the same, approving message: ‘Carry on as before, no need to change.’
If the election will be as much about our recent past as about its future, where does that leave Humza Yousaf’s Hate Crime Bill?
The Justice Secretary has been evangelistic in his desire to see even private dinner table conversation subject to the rule of law, and no doubt relishes the prospect of dads being arrested, cuffed and led out of their homes to police vans for making non-PC jokes about foreigners or trans people.
BUT it is not yet law, and its provisions won’t be fully felt until after polling day. Scotland will then become the legal test bed for any interest group which chooses to feel offended by whatever any critic says and will waste colossal amounts of police and court time in frivolous litigious pursuits.
The phrase ‘chilling effect’ was never more appropriately used than in reference to this latest appalling assault on free speech.
Yet Yousaf’s efforts are also set to be given the stamp of approval by an electorate whose attention may well be on other things, not least the Covid emergency.
Unless voters’ minds change significantly over the next ten weeks, May 7 will see Sturgeon and her ministers with the mandate they crave. Not just a mandate for more interminable ‘demands’ for another referendum with shouty, hysterical sound bites about ‘the will of the people’, and even more confrontations with Boris Johnson and his ministers, none of which will actually improve services in Scotland. It will also be a post hoc approval of Scottish ministers’ performance these past five years.
But Scots know what they are voting for. It is hardly a revelation that Sturgeon’s life ambition is not to improve education or the NHS, or to nurture the economy. No one is surprised to learn she yearns for independence, first and last.
The SNP has never denied this. Nationalists have benefited from it because it earns them the benefit of the doubt when, inevitably, they fall short in other policy areas.
And, so far, Scottish voters have felt inclined to indulge them.
If we want more of the same, that’s our choice. And we’ll have to live with the consequences of that choice for a very long time.