SNP will win local elections, but independence is a lost cause
“If you have tears…” Or, to express it in more demotic Scottish terms, “There’s aye someone worse off than yersel’.” For, melancholy to report, all is not well with Wee Krankie, Scotland’s president-for-life and national treasure, alias Nicola Sturgeon. It should be emphasised, however, that her problems are not, at least for the time being, electoral. On the contrary, pollsters report she is heading for a record-breaking victory in next month’s local elections. A poll by Survation for election analyst Ballot Box Scotland, taken in the last week of March, recorded the SNP as commanding 44 per cent of all first preference votes, with Labour on 23 per cent and the Scottish Conservatives/Get Boris Out party on 18 per cent.
For the SNP, that is an increase from 32 per cent at the last council elections in 2017, while psephologists are making much of the fact that, since devolution, only one party has ever registered more than 33 per cent of the total vote at council elections and that was Labour in 1999.
So, since Scots appear to be remaining constant to their egalitarian principle of rewarding failure, Krankie seems to have little to fear from her next encounter with the electorate whose interests, services and freedoms she has trashed for the past eight years, and her party for the past 15. For any politician it is gratifying to be on the cusp of breaking electoral records and to extend the tentacles of party influence ever deeper into communities; but, for Krankie, this forecast success is less satisfying than it would be for almost any other practitioner of the black art of politics.
For, the slug in the salad is that this projected triumph is at the wrong end of the spectrum. As recently as a generation ago, a faction within the SNP still believed the party should not contest local elections, since they were not an instrument for winning independence. Understandably, the more sophisticated view that the separatist movement must advance on all fronts, to gain influence and recognition, prevailed; but local victories leave a bitter aftertaste for separatists, so long as the electorate, at the opposite end of the spectrum – in devolved parliamentary elections and referendum voting intentions – stubbornly refuses to embrace the SNP agenda of independence.
At the last Holyrood elections, when the SNP believed its own hype of returning to majority government at Holyrood, after straining every political nerve, the party, which had gone into the election with 63 Holyrood seats and minority government, emerged with 64 seats and still as a minority government – a deficiency repaired by a Faustian pact with the Green loons which is doing nothing to advance the SNP’s credibility at national level. Of the five polls conducted so far this year on a putative independence vote, the earliest, back in February showed a narrow one per cent lead for No, the following three recorded a consistent five per cent lead for No, and the latest slightly increases that unionist lead to six per cent.
Yet the beleaguered First Minister insists she will hold a referendum (presumably illegally, in view of Boris’s veto) as early as next year. Time was, when a more cautious Krankie took the view that a further referendum should not be hazarded until opinion polls had consistently shown 60 per cent support for independence for an entire year. That was her declared position in 2015, when she believed time was on her side. Now, she is showing signs of desperation.
And no wonder. With the fundamentalist wing of the SNP nagging at her to hold a plebiscite, she does not want to go down in nationalist history as the leader who held a second, and inevitably final, referendum in unfavourable circumstances and blew it. Nor does she want to miss out on the opportunity of presiding over a historic event, since she must know her days as First Minister, regardless of qualified electoral success, are numbered.
So, what consolation for Krankie can there be in making a clean sweep of Auchenshuggle council, when opinion polls show a 49-43 per cent voting intention in favour of the Union? Last September, a survey found that even a quarter of Yes voters from 2014 did not want another referendum. She is condemned to endure a situation reminiscent of some ordeal in classical mythology: in charge of Scotland indefinitely, but not as a majority government, and doomed never to hold a second referendum with any prospect of success.
So, it is safe to say that the First Minister, in the closing years of her hegemony, is not a happy bunny. It is also true that, like Angela Merkel, to whom sycophants and more recently her enemies have compared her, her legacy will be toxic. A majority of Scots cannot forever slumber, Rip Van Winkle-like, while their country’s public services are reduced to ruination. The Scottish NHS is a disaster area. In education, the area in which Sturgeon said “I want to be judged on this”, the situation is scandalous.
When the SNP came to power in 2007, in the OSCE schools league tables of 79 countries (PISA), Scotland ranked 10th for proficiency in Science; in the latest survey it ranked 27th. In Maths, in 2007, Scotland came 11th; now it is 30th. That is to say, Scotland is now 14 places below Slovenia in Science, and 15 places in Maths. Krankie’s response was to make Scotland the first country in the world to “embed” LGBT education in its schools curriculum. “I want to be judged…”
Law and Order? The public was outraged last year when a Scottish pensioner was raped and murdered in her home by a sex offender with 23 previous convictions who had been sentenced to seven years for rape in 2013, but released after serving five years. Krankie’s response was to produce proposals to release even violent criminals after serving just one-third of their sentences and to raise the age of criminal responsibility from eight to 12.
Scotland is now the drugs-death capital of Europe. The Sturgeon solution was to attempt to introduce “Drug Consumption Rooms” (i.e. legal “shooting galleries”) for addicts, but that ploy was frustrated because it clashed with powers reserved to Westminster. Presumably the SNP regards that Westminster obstruction as reinforcing the case for independence (“Vote Yes and get stoned at taxpayers’ expense!”).
In the last pre-lockdown year, 2019-20, there were 246,516 crimes committed in Scotland, but just 75,251 convictions. Meantime, over a five-year period, Police Scotland recorded more than 3,300 “non-crime hate incidents”, instead of tracking down actual criminals. Sturgeon’s Stalinist hate laws, which for the first time in post-Communist Europe, empower the state to arrest and convict a citizen for expressing politically incorrect views in his own home, have blazed a trail in the advance towards totalitarian repression. What was that word that Braveheart William Wallace shouted with his last breath? “Freedom”? He wouldn’t get away with that in SNP-run Scotland.
To say that Nicola Sturgeon’s reputation is tarnished would be an understatement. The evidence that dripped out from the Alex Salmond inquiry at Holyrood was damning. Nor was the “ethical” First Minister’s discreet deal with totalitarian China morally impressive. There are questions hanging over SNP administration of its finances. The anti-Covid vaccination programme in Scotland only caught up thanks to British Army medics coming to the rescue.
Two months ago, Krankie and her party incurred much ridicule by attempting to claim that, post-independence, English taxpayers would continue to fund Scottish pensions – an indication of the extent to which a grievance-fuelled sense of entitlement has generated fantasy. Now, SNP incompetence is resulting in the delivery of two Scottish ferries four years late, at a cost to taxpayers of almost £240m.
Increasingly, Krankie is taking refuge from reality in ever more extravagant woke legislation, to appease the social revolutionaries who control the SNP’s national executive committee. The latest proposed law is to allow people to change the sex on their birth certificates, without any medical attestation and after just three months of living in their new identity. The implications are obvious, as protesting women’s groups are broadcasting.
Most recently, Krankie was caught on video breaking her own mask-wearing laws in a crowded, small barber’s shop where she was electioneering. The First Minister claimed she had realised “within seconds” she had forgotten to put her mask on: “I then immediately put it on,” she claimed. However, the video shows her frolicking with a band of supporters, all unmasked, in the small shop, with no face coverings in sight. Police Scotland which, unlike the Met in its dealings with Number 10, knows its place, respectfully “spoke to” the First Minister, then exited, leaving Krankie to get on with denouncing Boris for breaching Covid rules.
The SNP is a far-left party; its pre-election prawn cocktail charm offensives with business are purely cosmetic. Recently, Benny Higgins, the veteran banker and current chairman of the Edinburgh Fringe, said of the SNP: “The relationship with business remains poor. If someone wants to tell me the relationship with business in Scotland is good then I’m sorry but in any relationship, when one side doesn’t think it’s good then I’m afraid it’s just definitively not good.”
Scotland’s relationship with the SNP is in thrall to around one-third of the electorate that has ideologically lashed itself to the mast of separatism on the sinking ship and will not be moved. A further third is confused by propaganda, peer pressure and the toxic notion that it is unpatriotic to reject the SNP. Yet, simultaneously, an innate instinct for self-preservation inhibits the electorate from handing Sturgeon the prize of majority government or, still less, majority support in an independence referendum. That leaves Wee Krankie as tormented as Tantalus, in classical mythology, with refreshing fruit and water just beyond his reach. At least, as a consolation, Scotland’s “Mutti” Merkel is set to carry all before her on Auchenshuggle town council.