Floodwater will recede but inept politicians seem here to stay

At the start of the New Year, it’s been water and the Basic Payment which have been the main topics of conversation in farming circles.

Too much of the first and too few recipients of the second have combined to plunge the farming industry into even deeper gloom than is the norm in the first weeks of January.

There’s not much we can do about either other than to thole them until things get better.

There wasn’t much comfort and joy to be had from ministers during the festive season.

As the south was swamped at the beginning of December, environment minister Dr Aileen McLeod made us all responsible for the flood defences of our homes and property.

How the residents and business owners of flooded Aberdeenshire, Angus and Tayside must be wishing that they’d paid more attention and rushed to do more to defend their premises against metres-deep floodwater.

The minister had some brass neck to be telling people off for not looking after their own property when Scotgov’s stewardship of the Forth Road Bridge was found to be seriously deficient just a few days later.

Not much Yuletide cheer either from Dr McLeod’s colleague Richard ‘Scrooge’ Lochhead who grudgingly allowed a miserly 75% of the Basic Payment to be paid to a minority of applicants on the last day of 2015, thereby fulfilling his pledge to begin payments ‘by the end of December’.

Dr McLeod’s crass insensitivity and Lochhead’s cynicism are symptoms arising from the certainty of another term in office for the SNP.

It’s letting ministers away with murder. If the predicted result of the 2016 Holyrood election was on a knifeedge you can be sure that McLeod would have been reprimanded for her comments and Lochhead would have been sacked or threatened with having his ears ripped off if there was the slightest chance that farmers would not receive their support payments on time.

It’s pretty clear rural voters don’t matter to the SNP as much as they once did.

To add to the wall-to-wall misery, the First Minister fired the opening shots of the Holyrood election, the outcome of which is such foregone conclusion that you have to wonder why we need to endure the earache of listening to electioneering politicians.

In fact you have to wonder why there is any need to vote.

Despite the SNP’s disappointing record in government, Nicola Sturgeon is predicted to win the election single-handedly and with an increased majority.

Highly-popular, intelligent, politically-astute with a huge personal following, a leader who imposes iron discipline on her party, Sturgeon ticks all these boxes. So did Tony Blair once.

Putting the tin hat on it all, Liz Truss, the Defra minister has admitted there is no plan for farm support in the event of a UK vote to leave the EU.

That really takes the biscuit. We can replace leaky wellies and waterproofs and the floods will disappear. What a pity we can’t say the same about underperforming politicians.