The revenge of the Tories... Nicola’s new horror movie
PAUL SINCLAIR
FOR the SNP, this General Election campaign is starting like the ending of a very scary movie. The Tories were killed off years ago in a flashback to the 1990s in the opening reel. Now, in the final scene, the Nats in their own minds finish the pic by quietly patting the earth on the top of the Labour Party’s shallow grave.
Yet in a twist that it would appear only the audience can see, the Tories, risen from the dead, appear behind them with a spade of their own to clatter them over the back of the head.
Stunned, it is not that their heroine Nicola Sturgeon cannot remember her lines – she doesn’t seem capable of choosing one.
The SNP cannot decide what its purpose is in this election and is standing frozen as a Tory tide threatens, not to sweep it aside, but at least to stop it striding forward.
Let’s remember what killed off the Tories in those opening scenes. It was dastardly former Secretary of State for Scotland, Michael Forsyth, imposing on Scotland policies ‘Scotland didn’t want and didn’t vote for’.
TWENTY years on, the SNP is in danger of becoming the villain it despised – imposing another independence referendum the majority of Scots don’t want and won’t vote for. Who would have thought it would be Nicola Sturgeon who would give the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party the kiss of life by her intransigence on Indyref 2.
There is little doubt the SNP will win the popular vote and gain the largest number of seats but when it comes to its ultimate purpose of independence, it will lose this election.
It cannot decide whether or not it will give it a mandate for another referendum. Alex Salmond says it will – Miss Sturgeon says she already has that. Then the First Minister says she and her predecessor are in absolute agreement. Go figure.
When it comes to stretching the truth – or just making things up – the SNP has got away with it better than most for years. The legal advice on joining the EU which didn’t exist, the privatisation of the NHS if we voted No, education being the First Minister’s top priority.
But the habit of telling fibs has turned into passing off whoppers. Now the SNP can’t tell it’s doing it, but a growing number of Scots see through it. It will be lucky in this election to get to the magic figure of the 45 per cent who backed it in the 2014 referendum. Credibility can crumble even in victory. Once that starts it is hard to reverse.
In the 2015 general election, pro-Union voters, tired by the referendum, voted along traditional party lines. Disappointed Yes voters were galvanised to vote for the SNP.
Now it is the pro-Union majority that is galvanised. The Tories are benefiting from their unequivocal stance on the Union, after the Scottish Labour Party said: ‘Mibbes aye, mibbes naw.’
The SNP is reduced to desperate renditions of old tunes that lack authenticity.
Prime Minister Theresa May is pursuing ‘the hardest of hard Brexits,’ it asserts, but it doesn’t ring true. She is ‘a Right-wing extremist’, but most Scots seem to see the vicar’s daughter’s lack of gloss as a sign of sincerity.
The Nationalists have even tried to weaponise rape. The policy to limit children’s tax credit to two children is popular in Scotland.
Whatever the insensitivities of the form to give victims of rape the right to claim it for a third child – and there is righteousness in that complaint – to say the policy is ‘morally repugnant, vile and an abomination’ makes you wonder what language they will use if there is another chemical attack in Syria.
Nationalist MP Alison Thewliss’s campaign against the policy has been honest enough. But the outraged outrage of the SNP leadership suggests that it cares more about making the Tories the victims of this policy than it cares about victims of rape.
IT suggests it has run out of positive ideas. There is no new case for independence, so it is trying to ‘rebogey’ the Tory bogeyman. Attacking Scots Tory leader Ruth Davidson on this level appears to be backfiring. In 2015, such was Nicola Sturgeon’s personal popularity that attacks on her did not work. The same can be said of Miss Davidson now. She has that precious political commodity – authenticity. And Scots are tiring of Nicola Sturgeon’s indignant spin.
The election will be reset this week and will really start in ten days.
The Scottish Labour Party will come third in the local elections on Thursday. Claims that only it can stop the SNP in a handful of seats will be proved wrong.
Then it will be the SNP versus the Tories.
In the strange world of contemporary Scottish politics, if the Conservatives win half a dozen seats or more they will have won. At least in the sense of stopping the SNP calling a snap referendum.
That movie will go straight to DVD.