Sturgeon, not Boris, deserves censure for Scotland’s woes
“It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine,” wrote P G Wodehouse. To acknowledge the enduring validity of the Master’s observation, it is not necessary to look further than the person (personality might be an extravagant term) of Ian Blackford, leader of the SNP faction at Westminster.
Blackford is a highly recognisable type of Scot. He resembles the bore at a provincial Burns supper who buttonholes people to complain that the haggis was too dry, the toast to the Immortal Memory too frivolous and the whole event calculated to make Rabbie revolve in his grave. This year, he conceived a novel way of celebrating St Andrew’s Day, by tabling a vote of censure on Boris Johnson.
While it is certainly true that there is an awful lot wrong with Scotland and whoever is in charge is thoroughly deserving of censure, the areas where misgovernment is rampant are all devolved to Blackford’s own nationalist administration at Holyrood. If Blackford was truly concerned about Scotland’s problems, he should have tabled a motion of censure on Nicola Sturgeon.
The Sturgeon administration, while looking busy and pro-active, is in a state of virtual suspended animation. Although Nicola Sturgeon is the First Minister who said of her stewardship of Scottish education “I want to be judged on this,” she has clearly given up on any serious attempt to reform that vital public service. When her party came to power in 2007, in the OECD’s PISA education league tables of 79 countries, Scotland ranked 10th for proficiency in Science; today it ranks 27th. In Maths it ranked 11th; today it is 30th.
To protect the Scottish public from this disagreeable reality, the PISA figures for Scotland are now published as a meaningless list of points scored, without relating them to the performances of competitors, in an attempt to conceal the fact that Scotland now ranks 14 places below Slovenia in Science and 15 places in Maths. Publication of an OECD report on Scottish schools was delayed until after the last Scottish election, to spare the administration’s blushes.
Sturgeon, however, has not been laggard in introducing reform: last September Scotland became the first country in the world to “embed” LGBT education in the schools curriculum. So, we shall see what improvement that produces in Scotland’s PISA performance. This initiative was not an isolated phenomenon: the Sturgeon government has consistently tried to distract attention from its serial failures in the administration of public services by grandstanding with woke legislation.
Thanks to new SNP legislation at Holyrood, Scots can now be prosecuted and potentially face a prison sentence for remarks passed in what was, pre-Sturgeon, the privacy of their own homes. That is the kind of totalitarian state control most of us thought had been banished between Galway and Vladivostok at the fall of Communism in 1989. Posters on Scottish public transport enforcing woke behaviour abound with the exhortation “Report…” Under Sturgeon’s SNP/Green regime, the mural décor of Scotland’s public spaces resembles that of occupied France in 1940.
The continuing failure in education has proceeded in tandem with a similar decline in healthcare, epitomised by the embarrassment to the SNP when its faltering vaccination programme had to be rescued by medics from the British Army of occupation. Law and order? Oh dear. When a Scottish pensioner was raped and murdered in her home last May by a sex offender with 23 previous convictions, who had been sentenced to seven years for rape in 2013 but released on licence after serving five years, public concern was understandably provoked.
Not to worry: Nicola was on the case. She produced 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. Who said the SNP is not a listening government? Sturgeon brought the same philosophy to bear on Scotland’s drugs problem. The country is now the drug-deaths capital of Europe, with four people on average dying every day. The SNP response is to create legal “shooting galleries” (official bureaucratic name Drug Consumption Rooms or DCRs) where addicts could indulge their craving.
However, such facilities are illegal under UK law and in this instance reserved powers protected Scotland from one more SNP advance into lawlessness, with Kit Malthouse, UK crime minister, telling a drugs conference in Scotland last year that DCRs would be a distraction from tackling the real problem. In characteristic grandstanding style, the Scottish government held an identical conference at the same venue and with largely the same participants on the previous day, to put its own gloss on the policy.
That is what the SNP does all the time. While public services fester, every conceivable issue – most recently “Tory sleaze” – is conscripted into the relentless, mind-numbingly tedious reiteration of the demand for a second independence referendum. The reality is that Sturgeon does not want it: at the last election she again failed to secure a majority for her party, so why would she imagine the Scottish electorate would endorse the much more radical option of independence?
The SNP makes much of the fact that it has consistently increased its share of the vote at elections. True, but at the last outing, in May, it was by a modest one per cent. Nicola Sturgeon was reduced to the embarrassing expedient of hailing as “historic and extraordinary” an election she went into with 63 parliamentary seats and a minority government and emerged from with 64 seats and still a minority government.
The conclusion is obvious: even the extraordinarily acquiescent Scottish electorate has reached Peak Nat. The composition of that electorate has always included a large and volatile minority of independence supporters, contained by a narrow majority of sceptical, hold-very-tightly-onto-nurse unionists who live in the real world and recognise that a deficit which more than doubled to £36.3bn, or 22.4 per cent of GDP, in 2020-21 is not the best foundation for sovereign prosperity, despite Kate Forbes, the Scottish finance secretary, insisting it presents no obstacle to independence. Ay, right.
None of Scotland’s problems, which uniformly arise from Ian Blackford’s Holyrood-based colleagues’ incompetence and obsession with separatism, can be laid at the door of Boris Johnson. Insofar as responsibility can be attributed to anyone at Westminster it is a previous generation of politicians, headed by Tony Blair, that blithely set about sundering the seamless texture of the United Kingdom and laid Scotland open to the blandishments of nationalism and the seduction of part of the nation, formerly a bastion of realism and scepticism, now selectively infantilised by a creed based on credulity and wishful thinking. The rightful object of any vote of censure is Nicola Sturgeon and her rag-tag army of charlatan adventurers.