Nicola hasn’t misled the people...she IS the people (well, in her own head)
VOTING is only part of the contract that is democracy. After all, you get to vote in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China – and we don’t see them as democracies. The other part of the contract is where the people we vote for respect us. When they don’t take us for granted.
Don’t regard our vote as something they have conned us into as if we were fools. A kiss stolen on a false chat up line. An election being a date they make only once every five years, knowing a peck on the cheek will seduce us and then they’ll lose our number.
Like any meaningful relationship, there has to be trust.
But thank goodness we live in a democracy. It would be ludicrous to think we didn’t.
One where our First Minister can refer to the opposition as ‘a waste of space’. Where she can stand up and warn the supporters of other parties that they should shut up because a passing opinion poll shows they are in a minority.
One where closing a children’s ward in a hospital you promised you had no plans to close is actually a sign of your trustworthiness and judgment. One where you raise taxes after you went to the polls promising you wouldn’t.
That is our democracy. No wonder Vladimir and Xi can’t understand why we think our system is better.
In olden times of British democracy – and I want to take you way back to the days of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and John Major – the Merlins of government used to come up with a policy they thought was right then try to sell it with a clever phrase. Sometimes they even knew it would be unpopular. Sometimes they even admitted making a mistake.
But those are bygone days. Now we come up with the phrase and rearrange the facts into what passes for a policy.
Now to hold someone to the word they pledged yesterday is passé.
Nicola Sturgeon was stridently right when she told the people of Scotland she wouldn’t raise taxes at the last election. Now she is going to break that promise, the only thing rising more quickly than tax is her stridency that she is still right. She hasn’t misled the people of Scotland because she is the people of Scotland – in her own head, at least.
With the sort of confidence that were it in a cat would lead to a jag in the paw, last week she told the Scottish parliament that she was making Scotland the least taxed part of the UK.
She might as well have told us of her part in winning El Alamein and discovering penicillin.
It is true that people on £15,000 a year could benefit from her tax plans by around 32p a week.
Meanwhile, promoted teachers, nurses and doctors will lose nearly £1,000 a year. And for why? Like the policy of independence itself, Nicola Sturgeon is coming up with answers to questions that don’t exist.
There used to be quite a straightforward formula in political thought. Create wealth then discuss how you redistribute it to fund public services and support equality.
Scotland’s problem is not redistributing wealth – it is creating it. I am all for redistribution, I would just like us to have something to redistribute.
Instead, in a country whose health service has a crisis in hiring consultants and GPs, the First Minister, who is offended she does not have control of immigration policy, says to the world: ‘Come here and we will pay you less and tax you more.’
Decent hard-working people will feel the pain of Nicola Sturgeon’s tax rises – but they won’t see the benefit in terms of increased public spending because the sums raised are not significant enough. Then their council tax will go up.
The First Minister often says her politics were formed in the years of Margaret Thatcher. Fair enough. But if she really believed in Scotland, she would be honest about the problems we face in 2018 rather than elicit revenge on Britain 1979.
If Scotland is to prosper, we need to retain the talent we have and attract more. Raising tax is not the way to do that.
The Sturgeon household pulls in more than £200,000 a year, with the First Minister guaranteed a goldplated, publicly funded pension when she gets the boot. Perhaps in that world you can say: ‘Let them pay tax.’
BUT for real Scots, her tax rises will cause pain for no gain – and the long-term damage to the public services which she claims to be protecting could be most profound. How do we attract the doctors, nurses and teachers we need by saying you will be poorer if you come to Scotland?
The First Minister’s politics may have been formed in her teenage years but that does not allow her to come up with adolescent policies that damage Scotland.
She says there is a social contract in this country. She should examine her own. It is not just with SNP voters, but should be with every voter. Yet she has broken it with us all.