Sturgeon should get on with her day job
Nicola Sturgeon said yesterday that it is time to talk about Scottish independence. Voters could be forgiven for thinking the SNP has done little else since its side lost the referendum in 2014. But now, Scotland’s First Minister says she wants to hold another one, and this time not necessarily with the formal agreement of the Government in Westminster. It is surely not a coincidence that she has been under pressure from more extreme nationalists frustrated by her inability to translate her aggressive rhetoric on separation into action.
Ms Sturgeon was speaking at the launch of a series of papers designed to set out the case for Scotland to secede from the Union. The first, entitled “Independence in the Modern World. Wealthier, Happier, Fairer: Why Not Scotland?”, purports to be an analysis of the UK’S performance relative to several other European countries. It contains a welter of statistics designed to show the UK in the worst possible light. The SNP would evidently like Scottish voters to think that, after independence, they would inevitably enjoy living standards much closer to those of richer countries per capita, such as Ireland.
But given the poor performance of Snp-led governments, that would seem unlikely. Successive SNP administrations have embraced the high-tax, high-spending agenda of far less successful European nations. Indeed, Ms Sturgeon appeared yesterday alongside Patrick Harvie of the Scottish Greens, a pro-independence party of the hard-left that is propping up her rule.
The First Minister may find it politically convenient to lay all of Scotland’s ills at the door of the Conservative Party or Westminster, but the result is that the SNP has consistently refused to take responsibility for failures that were in its power to rectify. Now, Ms Sturgeon is attempting to restart a debate that the majority of Scots do not want to have, at a time when there are far more pressing concerns – not least the small matter of a post-lockdown cost-of-living crisis.
Downing Street rejected the First Minister’s latest calls for another referendum, and that ought to be the end of the matter. But she has promised to update the Scottish Parliament in the coming weeks on the means by which she thinks she can get around this. Instead of appeasing her activists with dubious promises that she presumably knows she cannot keep, it would be better for Scotland if she would get on with the day job.