WHENEVER John Swinney suffers an election reverse, as he did in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse on 5 June, he assures us he will focus on the priorities that matter to Scots – child poverty, the crumbling NHS, the cost of living, and so on. As Wings over Scotland would say, ‘alert readers’ will notice the SNP has been in power at Holyrood since 2007 – a mere 18 years – and that in most of the devolved areas of government, that is, those for which the SNP has been responsible, the situation is worse than it was in 2007 and shows no sign of improving.
In recent days an avalanche of reports has shown the deterioration in a range of public services since then. This is scarcely surprising when we consider the nature of the governing party, the SNP.
Most political parties campaign to win an election that will instal them as the party of government. They have a programme, and sometimes even have a plan for its implementation. The SNP, by contrast, has a wish list that always is subordinated to the one policy the party consistently has: the breaking up of the UK and the creation of a secessionist Scotland – although even that has now been superseded by the priority of keeping the SNP in power. The SNP does not, however, have a plan or strategy that would be workable for establishing a separate Scotland. It has never answered the big questions about currency, central bank, lender of last resort, control of monetary policy and deficit. Its stance on issues such as the border, immigration and defence is muddled. Its attitude to detailed policy that needs to be devised remains that of the late Alex Salmond: ‘It’ll be all right on the night’.
This is because the SNP is not and never has been, for practical purposes, a governing party. It is an agit prop campaigning group. Nothing more, nothing less. Salmond was an appropriate leader, a gambler who was prepared to take risks, including particularly the biggest risk of all: leaving the UK without any kind of a blueprint. As Professor Mark Blyth (Brown University) said about the Sturgeonite party, there is a
“complete lack of specificity as to: here is what the Scottish business model is now; here is where we want to be; this is how we are going to get from here to here by doing this. Instead of which we’ve got ‘Denmark is awesome. We should be like Denmark. If we were independent, we would be Denmark.’ No, you wouldn’t be Denmark. Denmark took 600 years to become Denmark. How do you become your own thing, given where you’re starting? That’s the only thing that really needs to be answered.”
That last point is the critical one, and the one the SNP cannot answer. It is a campaigning party whose leaders fantasise about a separate Scotland sitting at the world’s ‘top tables’ (whatever they are) and dictating policy – for example, modifying the EU’s Common Fisheries’ Policy to meet what it perceives as Scotland’s needs. But it has no idea of how to craft a new Scotland that would create the wealth that nationalists crave and which they would use to increase the already substantial reach of the state. Of course, if Scots had the wealth that is rightly theirs (in the view of those who believe it has been ‘pillaged’ and ‘stripped’ by the English), they would be able to create nirvana without them having to exert themselves. The nationalist narrative of a virtuous people who should have a cushy life without effort underpins their belief in imaginary wrongs they have been done by the English.
The SNP does not even know, and cannot admit, where it would be starting from. That place is one where Scotland earns £88 billion and spends £111 billion. Its ministers seem unable to do the arithmetic – yes, Shona Robison, finance minister, I am looking at you – to work out that the almost £23 billion shortfall would not disappear by magic and that after Scexit HM Treasury would not be there to make it go away. The rank and file of the SNP seem to imagine they would start at some Year Zero, with a clean sheet that wiped away the loss makers that incur the 10.4 per cent annual deficit.
Listen to how often SNP politicians tell you that iScotland would be like Denmark, or Finland, or Ireland. ‘If they can be a success, we can’ is the challenge. This is the politics of the kindergarten. Why are some other countries a success? What did they do to get there? Could Scotland do that? How? Would it have the will or the ability to do it?
Take Luxembourg, a living insult to Scottish nationalists in that it is about the size of Edinburgh yet is an independent state within the EU, precisely what Scottish nationalists aspire to be. That is somewhat accidental in that, after the Second World War, Luxembourg became, for geopolitical reasons, integrated into the ‘Benelux’ group of countries which formed a building bloc of the new European Economic Community in 1958, and then went on in the 1960s to become a wealthy tax haven with a lucrative trade in offshore European bonds. Luxembourg did not have a withholding tax, did not require a stamp duty and did not require bond issuers to publish a prospectus.
Or consider Ireland, another tax haven that has attracted large multinationals to declare their domicile there to avail themselves of Ireland’s predatory corporation tax rates, along with its tax hospitality to other international businesses such as aircraft leasing and intellectual property companies. This affords Ireland the optical illusion of extreme wealth, while the large revenues from the multinationals are only, as Father Ted would say, ‘resting in their account’ before being repatriated to their home country, usually the USA.
Are these the kinds of practice being sought by Scottish nationalists to enrich a Scottish state? It would fit in with the nationalist belief in Scots’ inalienable right to live in style without doing any hard graft. Do those Scots who pose as terribly social democratic and moral really aspire to these dodges? Anyway, the Luxembourgeois and Irish have pre-empted Scots in playing these tricks.
There remain the SNP’s increasingly disastrous failures in devolved policies. School education has tumbled down league tables – not that the SNP has allowed Scotland to be scrutinised much in that way recently. It has withdrawn Scottish schools from international TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) and PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study), and discontinued Scotland’s own Survey of Literacy and Numeracy. Scarcely a European country failed to participate in TIMSS in 2023, but Scotland did. Worldwide, 60 countries participated in PIRLS in 2021, but not Scotland. If Scotland performs as well as its SNP leaders claim – harping on about 95 per cent of school leavers quickly arriving at a ‘positive destination’ – why would it not participate in these studies? England does.
Professor Lindsay Paterson, who knows more about this than most, has referred to ‘the decline and fall of the once great Scottish school’. Scotland has tried ‘to combine rigorous standards with equal opportunities’, but, says Paterson, ‘Scotland hasn’t adequately answered that challenge’. This is not least because the Curriculum for [alleged] Excellence is underpinned by a belief that ‘we should stop trying to pass on the great ideas of human achievement’ in favour of exercises that are more ‘relevant’. Denying Scottish pupils their anglophone heritage has been damaging, and Paterson’s view is that children educated in Scotland in the last fifteen years ‘have been let down. They’ll never get the chance again’.
As for nationalist boasts that Scotland’s NHS is the ‘best-performing’ in the UK, that does not stand up to scrutiny – on waiting lists, stroke treatment, ease of patient access to information – while the scourge of drug deaths, with by far the highest figures in Europe, is an indelible stain on a civilised country. What has the SNP offered in 18 years? A ‘safe consumption room’ that does little more than maintain addicts’ drug dependency, with no effort to break it. The SNP will not take the advice of the expert on this subject, Annemarie Ward of this parish, because they know better than anyone about everything. They think. And that’s before we mention the long-running farce of the ferries, which might be amusing if it were not killing the livelihoods of island dwellers.
As for any plan that the SNP might have for defence, that is clearly what my father used to call ‘a big round 0’. The problem is that Scottish nationalists proceed from a very flawed assumption, namely that everyone loves us, so who would attack or invade us? We wouldn’t really need to defend ourselves. This contravenes an iron rule: the first duty of government is the defence of the realm. Yet now we have an SNP minister, Mairi Gougeon, defending her government’s refusal to support a specialist welding school on the Clyde because its skills will help to build the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarines. The SNP’s position is that the UK does need armed forces but it doesn’t agree they should be… armed. No wonder the UK Defence Secretary, John Healey, dismissed this as ‘student politics’. That stance by the SNP gives the clearest confirmation that it is a campaigning outfit and not a governing party.
And now even the SNP faithful are muttering, grumbling and failing to vote for their party. Their propaganda rag, the low-circulation National, reports ‘activists’ speaking out ‘about lost momentum, fading trust, and a leadership struggling to inspire’. There are reports of (anonymous) rebels within the senior ranks of the SNP demanding that John Swinney devise in the immediate future a strategy for achieving secession. The recent by-election, with its propaganda photos of happy campaigners out every day on the stump, showed how threadbare an outfit it has become, with just about every SNP MSP pressed into service day after day and the same few volunteers trudging the streets. We know the party is short of funds, having lost about a million pounds of Short Money – public money awarded to the parties in proportion to their number of MPs – when its complement of MPs slumped from 48 (in 2019) to 9 (NINE) last year.
All that is left is the extreme wing of separatism, the #dagenham tendency – because Dagenham is beyond Barking. These fantasists tell us that the SNP’s electoral problems stem from it not pursuing secession single-mindedly as its top priority. That is as convincing as Tony Benn was when he claimed Labour had lost the 1983 general election because it wasn’t ‘left-wing’ enough. The apogee of separatist silliness can now be seen in New York, where a fringe group of Liberation/Salvo fanatics are petitioning the UN to have Scotland declared a colony of the UK (or England), and to support its ‘decolonisation’. Even Pete Wishart, veteran SNP MP, has said that anyone who calls Scotland a ‘colony’ is ‘unhinged’. And who is leading the ‘decolonisation’ case in New York? Craig Murray. Say no more.
A few years ago, I wrote an article for Think Scotland that ended as follows:
“The SNP’s Scotland has a feel of the last days of the Roman Empire. The rot set in some time ago, but now the wild delusions being expressed by separatists, and especially their formerly sure-footed leader, suggest that its days are numbered. I am not suggesting that that is imminent, but the glory days are past, and the impression is of ‘never glad confident morning again’.
For now, the SNP remains in power, but the separatist camp is splintering and the SNP’s disastrous stewardship of the devolved responsibilities of government is now openly acknowledged even by some of the faithful. It is a long, slow road to a destination of normality and sanity, but it is the road that we are travelling. But goodness knows how long it will take to expunge the scabrous legacy of Scottish nationalism, so firmly embedded in some quarters, from our society.
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Photo of Swinney, Sturgeon & Yousaf 2021 by Scottish Government – New Scottish Cabinet appointed, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=105558370
