The Brigadoon fantasy election – voters in a trance set to reward SNP for wrecking Scotland

It is a given among commentators on today’s local and devolved government elections  that the hardships, fears and economic damage suffered under pandemic lockdown have concentrated voters’ minds as seldom before and that the mood of the electorate is one of hard-headed realism, focused on material recovery. The Conservatives are heavily in the lead because, having got Brexit done, Boris went on to preside over a world-leading vaccine rollout. Labour is struggling, partly because its association with the hallucinatory politics of wokeness has perpetuated the alienation of its former supporters who defected over Brexit. Bread-and-butter issues have displaced ideology.

Except in one part of the United Kingdom: in Scotland the opinion polls reveal a nation in a trance-like state, about to award a further four years of governance to the party that has presided over the extravagant decline of education, healthcare and key public services, while subjecting business and the economy to the unrelenting uncertainty of a further independence referendum, poised like a sword of Damocles over investors and entrepreneurs. The SNP is not so much a political party as a therapy group for obsessives focused, to the point of irrationality, on achieving separatism.

Monomania is not the best foundation for sound government, with schools, hospitals and businesses regarded as irritating distractions from the sole item on the SNP’s real agenda. This week even the tame Scottish media were outraged when Keith Brown, the SNP deputy leader, volunteered the information that the party wanted to sort out the pandemic in order to get on with organising for IndyRef2. Yet, if polls are anywhere near accurate, around half of the Scottish electorate is in the grip of a kind of Stockholm syndrome, blindly subservient to the party that is systematically demolishing Scotland’s future prospects. In any other developed nation, a governing party with the SNP’s record would be facing annihilation.

The SNP manifesto displays the party’s contempt for the voters’ intelligence: to any thinking person it is not so much a programme as a provocation. On education, it pledges that the findings of an OECD review of the schools curriculum will be “taken forward”. Since Nicola Sturgeon has refused to publish the review until after the election – an indication of its damning contents – what are voters supposed to make of that opaque commitment? What other political party in the Western world would dare to introduce into its manifesto a pledge relating to a report it has suppressed?  

The fact that, under the SNP government, Scotland has tumbled down the OECD’s PISA schools league tables for 79 countries, from 10th in Science to 27th and from 11th in Maths to 30th suggests why Sturgeon refuses to publish the OECD report. Scotland is now 15 places below Slovenia in Maths proficiency. What does the SNP intend to do to remedy the decline it has facilitated during its 14-year rule? Well, of course we know: the report whose findings are a state secret will be “taken forward”. And £1bn will be invested in closing the attainment gap between rich and poor; if the implementation of that policy conforms to previous SNP initiatives, it will presumably entail lowering the attainment of the rich to match that of the poor. Yet the fiasco that is Scottish education under the SNP receives 22 per cent more funding per person than the UK figure.

Of education, Nicola Sturgeon famously said: “Judge me on this.” Fortunately for her, the Scottish electorate does not appear to be in a judgemental mood. The SNP political culture is one of bribery of sections of the public on a lavish scale. Health spending will be increased by at least 20 per cent over five years, free bus travel will be extended to under-22s, school clothing grants for low income families will be increased to £150 for secondary pupils, every pupil will receive a free digital device, free school meals will be expanded (to include children of well-off parents, since the deprived are already fully covered), free early years education will be expanded to include some one and two-year-olds.

Additionally, 3,500 extra teachers and classroom assistants will be hired: we have heard it all before. Every educational target set by the SNP has been abjectly missed. The interesting thing is that this Christmas-every-day largesse will not be accompanied by any increase in income tax rates above inflation for the duration of the parliament. There is, however, a caveat in the text that “it is important for any Government to have flexibility to respond to a change in circumstances”; so taxes could be raised after all.

The SNP, like its voters, does not live in the real world. As Scotland emerges cautiously from lockdown to survey an economic landscape littered with businesses that will never open again, what are the preoccupations of the SNP, as revealed in its manifesto? New legislation to close “loopholes” in anti-fox hunting rules, while the party “remains committed” to a licensing regime for grouse shooting, interfering in an important rural industry.

The reality is that the SNP has made the intoxicating discovery that it can do anything it likes, including criminalising conversations in private houses, without forfeiting the support of its constituency. Vis-à-vis the Sturgeon regime, the typical SNP voter makes a Stepford wife look stroppy. Yet, all around, the fabric of society is becoming dilapidated, the consensual passivity of the one-party state growing ingrained, the world of fiscal and economic reality fast receding. The independence project, remotely feasible during the oil boom of the 1970s, is now wholly impossible without Scotland declining to an abysmal standard of living.

“I think Nicola has coped brilliantly with the pandemic” translates in real life into: “I admire the way she read out the statistics of scientific advisers and the soundbites of civil servants, while receiving £9.7bn from the UK government, in the financial year 2020-21, to fund pandemic relief.” Never have “Barnett consequentials” been of more consequence. Funding per head in Scotland is now 30 per cent higher than in England: the Scottish government has more than £1.30 to spend per person, compared with £1 per person in England. Yet the Sturgeon government has chosen to allocate some temporary Covid-19 funding to new permanent spending commitments.

In this climate, it is understandable that Scottish voters have lost sight of financial reality. In 2019-20 Scotland’s budget deficit amounted to 8.6 per cent of GDP, compared to the UK figure of 2.6 per cent. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) estimates Scotland’s implicit budget deficit for 2020-21 could be around 26-28 per cent of GDP. Scottish government borrowing is equivalent to £2,776 per person in Scotland, compared with £855 per person across the UK. The pandemic crisis makes accurate forecasting impossible; but the IFS suggests the Scottish deficit could still exceed 11 per cent of GDP in 2024-25.

But the SNP has the solution: kick away the massive financial support regularly received from the UK and strike out into the geopolitical wilderness, in the aftermath of a pandemic crisis, with a black hole of a budget deficit, massively depleted oil revenue, a dependency economy, institutions such as RBS fleeing south and years of waiting for putative EU membership on mendicant terms, including adoption of the toxic euro currency (if Spain, seriously concerned about Catalan separatism, does not veto the application).

If Scotland had been an EU member state today, it would have boasted 28 per cent of its citizens vaccinated against Covid, as in Germany, or 26 per cent, as in France, compared with the 52 per cent currently protected – no thanks to the SNP, which promised to vaccinate one million by the end of January and managed only half that figure, until rescued by Westminster intervention. If Scottish nationalists admire the European Union, that is more than the populations of its member states do, following the abject failure of its response to the pandemic.

Nicola Sturgeon’s enthusiasm for referenda is not inexhaustible: in the event of a Yes vote she insists an independent Scotland would immediately seek EU membership without holding a referendum on the issue; Mike Russell, whose ministerial remit is the constitution, demurred at that cavalier insistence. “Immediately” is a misleading term: the earliest date at which Scotland could be admitted to the EU is 2031 – if there is still an EU in existence by that time, when Scotland on its way in would probably be passed by other countries on their way out.

At least Brussels would settle the currency argument by imposing the euro on Scotland. It is eloquent of SNP prevarication that after a two-year debate on a separatist currency it entered the 2014 referendum without a clear policy (with George Osborne raining on its parade regarding the status of sterling post-independence) and still refuses to outline its policy today.

The whole SNP posture is an absurdity. The party excels at plucking slogans and terminology out of the air and fetishizing them, e.g. “a penny for Scotland”. The currently abused phrase is “supermajority”. Sturgeon hubristically claimed she would win a supermajority in today’s election, constituting a mandate for a second independence referendum. A supermajority is a term for a parliamentary majority of two-thirds of seats, won by a single party, its significance being that most written constitutions require a two-thirds majority before amendments may be passed. An example is the Fidesz party in Hungary, which won three successive supermajorities, giving it the right to change the constitution.

The Scottish parliament has 129 seats, so to attain a supermajority at Holyrood would require a party to win a minimum of 86 seats. The opinion polls currently forecast the SNP’s performance as, at best, winning 69 seats, a majority of four, or, at worst, falling short of a majority by two seats, but forming a government with the support of the Greens. So, the SNP may struggle to win a straight majority, never mind a supermajority. With her initial hopes receding, Sturgeon is now trying to distort expectations by referring to her 60-odd putative seats, plus a possible eight or nine for the Greens, as a “supermajority for independence”. It would be no such thing.

The polling surveys’ best-case scenario for the SNP of 69 seats would simply be a repeat of its score in 2011, a majority that quickly dissipated into minority government. Unless the polls are wildly inaccurate, every likely scenario is a continuation of the SNP’s razor-edge alternation between a wafer-thin majority and Green-supported minority government. Yet Sturgeon is preparing to misrepresent this business-as-usual situation as “transformative”. Boris Johnson must laugh her out of court: the claim is absurd.

It is extravagant hypocrisy for the Greens to adopt a separatist stance. The chief feature of climate alarmist policies is their high expense, with cumulative “net zero” policies now routinely costed in trillions. Patrick Harvie, leader of the Green loons, is the biggest buffoon in the Scottish parliament – a title not easily awarded in so competitive an environment. How does he imagine an independent Scotland, struggling to maintain a recognisable standard of living for Scots, could possibly afford to fund a fraction of the eye-wateringly costly projects that will be canvassed at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in November? It is pure opportunism, sacrificing climate expenditure for possible Scottish cabinet seats.

The notion that an infinitesimal shift in the parliamentary balance of power would be revolutionary or a mandate for a further destabilising referendum less than seven years after a plebiscite that the SNP itself defined as “once in a generation” is ridiculous. Whatever happens at the ballot box today, the inevitable outcome appears to be continued misrule of Scotland by a party with no credibility, but limitless impudence. This election in Scotland is totally divorced from reality: the irony is that UK subvention has created a cocoon in which Brigadoon fantasies can be indulged with impunity.

Scots will, before too long, awaken from hypnosis. In the meantime, it is the responsibility of Boris Johnson’s government to prevent this party of incompetent charlatans from disrupting the United Kingdom as it has divided Scotland and debauched its public life. Whatever constitutional demands Nicola Sturgeon may make, the answer is no.