Driven off the rails by disaster-prone SNP

WITH huge understatement, Nicola Sturgeon describes the ScotRail debacle as ‘regrettable’.

Yet the disruption caused by cancellations, and the prospect of a massively reduced rail timetable from Monday, threatens to drag on until next year, or even 2024.

Nationalisation was meant to spark a rail renaissance. Instead, passengers are facing many months of delays as hundreds of services are axed due to driver shortages.

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar rightly pointed out yesterday that ‘in the same weekend that Nicola Sturgeon jetted over to the US to talk about climate change, the SNP/Green Government cut rail services – the greenest form of transport – here at home’.

In a sign of her desperation, the First Minister resorted to attacking Labour for striking deals with the Tories to run councils. That her only meaningful response was tired tribalism is deeply telling – she knows that these appalling failures, only weeks after nationalisation on April 1, are utterly indefensible.

Across Scotland, commuters are reassessing their travel options in light of the ScotRail chaos, and many will venture back onto the roads – despite the sky-high cost of fuel and the looming workplace parking levy.

It’s hardly surprising that Green MSP Gillian Mackay, questioned about whether the swingeing rail cuts tally with the party’s environmental ambitions, asked her media handler: ‘Do I have to?’ – before churning out the agreed line.

Meanwhile, the SNP’s Westminster transport spokesman Gavin Newlands yesterday told the Commons that ScotRail is ‘actually the exemplar for the rest of the UK in how to run a rail system’. In fact, it’s an object lesson in gross incompetence by a disaster-prone administration that makes grand promises it can never fulfil – and leaves carnage in its wake.