The shameful SNP play fast and loose with the truth. They’ll do anything to avoid telling people what they have a right to know

The SNP has always had a shaky relationship with simple facts. Their obsession with breaking up the UK – an ambition that, for them, trumps any other policy – often means ignoring obvious but inconvenient truths or shamelessly pursuing blatant contradictions.

So they have to pretend the UK Government – or ‘Westminster’ – is starving Scotland of funds at a time when Scotland is receiving the largest block grants in devolution history, and every man, woman and child in Scotland has £2,184 more spent on them than the UK average.

They claim it’s undemocratic that they can’t call another divisive referendum – even though making such a statement ignores the democratic, and decisive, result of the last one, the largest democratic exercise in Scotland’s history.

They have to claim that the countless and often catastrophic failures in Scotland’s NHS, education, justice system and local authority funding have nothing to do with them, even though they’ve been in sole charge of all those areas for 15 years.

It’s incredible they’ve got away with it for so long. That’s just part and parcel of nationalism, though.

It’s infected and curtailed the SNP’s ability to govern properly and responsibly in the interests of the people of Scotland. And now the Scottish Greens are complicit in the deception too.

But the Nationalists also have a shameful track record of misrepresenting the facts whilst going to extraordinary lengths to avoid disclosing information the public has a right to know. Particularly when it involves one of the many things they’ve made a mess of, or if it requires disclosing the whereabouts of taxpayers’ money.

That is a far more serious and damning matter than their pie-inthe-sky secession fantasies. It’s about Scotland’s government habitually misrepresenting or concealing matters directly connected with decisions they have made.

As we can now see in almost every area of devolved policy, this approach provides and is used to justify the basis for terrible policy decisions, leads to public funds being wasted, and corrodes trust in the political process.

Yet there are ever increasing instances where the SNP has been called out, by fact-checking news services, independent experts like the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), or official bodies such as the UK’s statistics authority, for dodgy data, fake news and playing fast and loose with the truth. It would be pathetic were it not so serious.

There was a particularly spectacular example last week, when a claim continually repeated by many SNP politicians was comprehensively debunked.

For years, senior party figures boasted ad nauseam that Scotland had 25 per cent of Europe’s total potential for wind power.

It turns out that there’s no evidence for this at all and the true figure is probably between 4 and 6 per cent.

Even more damning than Ministers’ parroting of this implausible claim was the discovery, from letters obtained under Freedom of Information rules, that they knew fine well there was no basis for it. In official correspondence, it’s admitted the figure has ‘never… been properly sourced’ while another letter says, ‘we did recycle these figures quite robotically without really checking them’.

There was instant proof of that last claim. On the very same morning this false statistic was exposed, the Scottish Greens tweeted government Minister Lorna Slater repeating the lie.

Just a few days earlier, the First Minister was caught out repeating another whopper on energy, when she claimed, as many other Scottish Government Ministers often had, that Scotland’s net energy consumption was provided by renewables (Full Fact said the true figure was 62 per cent).

Following my Point of Order in the Chamber, she skulked back to amend the parliamentary record.

But this sort of casual misrepresentation infects all sorts of government departments. After 15 years of getting away with it, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.

Recently the UK Office for Statistics Regulation wrote to the SNP Government to point out its NHS Inform website could mislead patients about waiting times. They ticked off Humza Yousaf for failing to back up claims about children’s hospital admissions with published data.

And the other day, it turned out the A&E statistics don’t use consistent data on medical assessment units and may therefore be misleading. Think about that for a moment; the Health Secretary has presided over 14 record lows in the percentage of patients being seen within his Government’s four-hour target – and 68 record worsts in total across the different A&E waiting-time metrics – in his 18-month reign, and yet the true picture could be even worse.

The SNP were also hauled up several times during the Covid pandemic, usually for trying to overstate differences between Scotland and the rest of the UK without proper evidence. It was bad enough that they should try to use a public health emergency to foster division, but John Swinney also put out a graphic on mask wearing for which there was no evidence.

The IFS found that the SNP had not been transparent about how they spent UK Covid funding. Instead of being used for its intended purposes, it was spent elsewhere. This follows a pattern of evasion about public money.

Of course, we’ve had the long-running, hugely expensive homegrown scandals over ferries, the malicious Rangers prosecution, and evasion and secrecy about the Lochaber smelter deal.

But when it comes to UK funding matters, they are even more opaque. The SNP Government never explains how an independent Scotland would find the record £41 billion that currently comes through the block grant.

It’s equally secretive about how it will spend the £123 million extra it has received – thanks to the Barnett

The First Minister caught out repeating another energy whopper

The public deserves to know what has happened to these sums

Formula – intended to support households through the global cost of living crisis.

But let’s not hold our breath waiting for an explanation because the precedents aren’t good.

The SNP Government has spent only 2 per cent of the £97 million it got to tackle dangerous cladding. It has not said what it plans to do with another £375 million received as a transfer from the UK Government over tax differences.

The public deserves to know what has happened to these enormous sums, especially as the SNP faces a financial black hole and takes an axe to public services. But Nicola Sturgeon’s government admits no responsibility. Instead, they fall back on the crutch of blaming Westminster, or ‘Tory austerity’.

So when they claim that there’s no need to worry about cutting ourselves off from by far our biggest trading partner, insist that there won’t be any problems with a hard border, blithely assert they’ll use the pound – a currency over which we would no longer have any control – or assert without evidence that Scotland could join the EU without signing up to the Euro, are the people of Scotland really expected to take it on trust?

The record is one of constant misrepresentation, secrecy and fantasy. It’s no wonder their separation prospectus is built on similar foundations.

Now more than ever, Scotland deserves so much more than the SNP, their misrepresentations, their groundless assertions, and their woeful record of delivery.