I see you’ve read Machiavelli for Dummies, Nicola
ANNIVERSARIES can be a time of celebration or maudlin reflection. This month is the 20th anniversary of the setting up of the Scottish parliament and the third of the referendum in which Scotland reaffirmed its place in the United Kingdom.
As we mark them both, I suggest it would be more appropriate to reach for a box of Kleenex rather than one of Celebrations.
Neither event has significantly improved Scotland’s lot, however much they have played to our puffed-up sense of self-importance.
The late David McLetchie said that, since the advent of devolution, we now live in a country where, ‘that which is not banned, is compulsory’.
Holyrood’s achievements start with what has been banned. Smoking in pubs, although the UK was about to do it. Fox hunting, kind of. But the list of new freedoms is short.
Worse, the Scottish parliament has become a place where Scotland’s problems are ignored or covered up. Take this week’s Programme for Government. For Nicola Sturgeon, this was clearly an event to be got through, rather than a moment of real vision.
There were two major announcements. That petrol and diesel cars would be banned by 2032 and that she might – if there is consensus, if she can find a way of not taking the blame – raise income tax.
The first shows two things. One, Scottish Nationalism cannot exist without Hadrian’s Wall and the English. She just wanted to say the internal combustion engine would be banned eight years before the date set by Westminster. Reactionary, not visionary.
What was not addressed was the implications of electric cars. This month, a report from Stanford University said that their advent would ensure that the price of a barrel of oil would not rise above $25 in the years ahead. What does that mean for our oil economy, Aberdeen and the North-East? Why is she hastening its decline?
Considering the expense and complexity of putting in charging points in the Highlands and Islands, should the First Minister not instead be arguing for the maintenance of clean diesel in these areas?
We are a country that likes listening to its own voice more than curing its own problems.
Then there is the Orwellian mantra, more powers good, fewer powers bad. The Scottish parliament now controls income tax. So, following the myths of Scottish identity that Holyrood maintains, Miss Sturgeon suggests that we should increase it because that is the kind of thing Scotland believes in.
If the desire is to ‘soak the rich’ it will dent the ambitions of aspiring families instead. If the aim is to increase the tax base, the better solution would be to cut tax and attract more workers, address our problem of an ageing population and raise more public funds.
But that is not a debate to be had. In an era where Scottish identity is all – and ideas an afterthought – the parliament is where Scotland’s voice must be heard but real character not listened to.
THE last government to raise the basic rate of income tax was Labour in 1975. When the revered John Smith proposed raising the tax burden in 1992, Scotland was the only part of the UK that saw a swing to the Conservatives. Then there was the SNP’s ‘penny for Scotland’ in 1999 – that policy slashed its poll ratings.
Miss Sturgeon’s programme is not a vision for a nation but an exercise in council cunning. She made offers to opposition parties challenging them to vote against them.
It suggested she had read the executive summary of Machiavelli for Dummies, rather than written a national strategy.
Our Government is led by a party that does not believe in devolution. It has turned out to be an awful lot of conversation but very little action, thanks.
Instead, the SNP wants to talk about what devolution cannot do – as it refuses to accept the people’s verdict in 2014. It would make you weep.
Devolution got off to a bad start with the opening sentence of Winnie Ewing in 1999, when she said: ‘The Scottish parliament, adjourned on the 25th day of March in the year 1707, is hereby reconvened.’
It wasn’t. This was a new parliament of universal suffrage, within the UK, set up to address Scotland’s problems.
That it hasn’t is because we have been blinded by the very sentiment that led to it – our sense of national identity. There is no national narrative, just an illusion of our history.
As the author Paul Scott wrote: ‘The liberal instinct is so dear to historians that they lay it out like a guideline through the unmapped forests of prejudice and self-interest as though this line, and not the forest, is our history.’
For devolution to succeed, Holyrood would be better addressing the prejudice and self-interest of this country than thinking there was a historic path to the Scottish parliament.
Time to start ripping up trees.