The SNP’s grip on Scotland is firmer than we think. Labour should beware
I have spent most of the past week in Scotland, finding things depressingly unchanged since my last visit 18 months ago. A questionable First Minister in the form of Nicola Sturgeon has been replaced by another in the shape of Humza Yousaf. Edinburgh remains littered with the drugaddicted homeless, radiating the misery of Scottish urban society, pitching their tents in the doorways of empty shops like refugees from the reality of a country living even further beyond its means than the rest of the United Kingdom.
While few talk about the Sturgeonite obsession with another independence referendum, support for the SNP – even among intelligent people on the Left – seems hardly to have dwindled, which will disturb the Labour Party. This is despite a missing £660,000 or so of SNP donors’ money, and both Ms Sturgeon and her husband having helped the police with an apparently interminable inquiry into what went wrong in the party’s management of its internal finances. Doubtless we shall learn the truth one day: though not, perhaps, before the next election.
But timing seems irrelevant. For large swathes of Scotland, support for a party offering separatism, even if separation never happens, makes many voters feel happier about themselves. It remains a means of indicating desire for freedom from the English paymaster – forgive me, “oppressor” – for whom the entire Scottish project since the act of Union of 1707 has, allegedly, been one of colonial exploitation.
The truth is that the Scots – who largely built the British Empire, and were once an industrial powerhouse – have been even more corrupted by Labour and SNP bribes via the welfare state than other parts of the UK; and it is far easier for the corrupted to hate the English than ever to admit that.