Hilarious SNP demands return of powers it wants to send back to Brussels anyway

One of the quirks of there not being an opposition party in the House of Commons, thanks to the destruction of the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn, is that at PMQs the SNP gets to look statesmanlike. My old friend Angus Robertson MP, the party’s Westminster leader, tends to give a good account of himself, putting on his serious face and asking about whatever the latest supposed snub to Scotland is.

Today he had a difficulty, in that he could not very well ask Theresa May about the latest row that had riled touchy Nationalists. The Guardian newspaper had committed the sin of publishing a crossword in which the answers “Sturgeon” and “racist” appeared alongside each other. This attracted some criticism online. Angus, as a statesman, could not very well go round asking questions about a crossword. The Prime Minister can be blamed for many things, but not the puzzles page of The Guardian..

That left him falling back on a question about a lesser subject, namely whether or not the Prime Minister could clarify precisely which powers on agriculture and fisheries once repatriated from the EU will flow back to Edinburgh rather than Westminster. Talks are ongoing, from which SNP luminaries emerge shaking their heads at the alleged uselessness of the UK government which cannot immediately confirm every detail. This from a party, the SNP, that could not in the 2014 referendum even sort out something as basic as what currency a newly independent Scotland would use.

This latest complaint – the agriculture and fisheries complaint, not the crossword – is rich on several counts. The SNP cannot even properly use the existing powers. Its attempts to create a separate Scottish welfare system have been hit by snags. The handing out of subsidies to farmers has been botched. The Scottish Parliament has also controlled education policy for almost two decades, with the SNP ‎running the Scottish government for almost ten years, ‎and the results are an appalling betrayal of the poorest.

More importantly, there is a simple flaw in the Nationalist logic in this latest gripe. The SNP completely opposed Brexit. It claims that the return of these powers from the EU is a disaster. But now that Brexit is happening it starts getting annoyed that there is not enough Brexit quickly enough.

Even more amusingly, these are anyway powers that the SNP wants to take to Edinburgh only to hand back to the EU and Brussels if the SNP can wangle a way back into the EU. What’s the point of that or the complaint? There isn’t one, really. It is simply more anti-Westminster grievance-hunting. It is the action of people that, as my Paisley grandmother used to describe it, “would rather have the grievance” instead of finding a reasonable solution.