Sturgeon’s cabinet reshuffle won’t change fate of SNP

The role of Harold MacMillan was played this week by Nicola Sturgeon as she carried out a large-scale cabinet reshuffle, replacing failed mediocrities with soon-to-fail nonentities, watched by the Scottish public with passionate indifference.

Sturgeon’s Night of the Long Dirks encompassed the appointment of five new “cabinet secretaries” and nine new junior ministers, drawn mainly from the 2016 SNP Holyrood intake. The principal victims were Shona Robison who “resigned” as Health Secretary which, considering the current state of the Scottish NHS, is hardly surprising, Social Security Secretary Angela Constance and Economy Secretary Keith Brown, whose legacy is official growth forecasts of less than 1 per cent for the next five years.

It would be pointless to name the new junior ministers since few of them could expect to achieve recognition at their neighbourhood bus shelter. There is unlikely to be much turmoil in the chancelleries of Europe over the news that Ben Macpherson, MSP for Edinburgh North and Leith, has been appointed Minister for Europe, Migration and International Development [in a devolved administration].

One of the newly promoted cabinet members, however, in contrast to the general anonymity, already has a high profile even south of the Border: Aileen Campbell, now appointed Minister for Communities, went “viral” as the argot terms it, following an interview on the Today programme on 24 March.

In that car-crash interview with Nick Robinson, Campbell who was then a junior health minister, assumed all she had to do was triumphantly parrot a “good news” press release about the Scottish government funding three free cycles of IVF treatment for Scottish couples. When Robinson, unlike the style of deferential Scottish hacks, pointed out this would cost “many millions” at a time when a Glasgow maternity hospital had to turn away expectant mothers, Scotland was missing A & E targets and the BMA had described the Scottish NHS as “near breaking point”, Campbell was pole-axed.

If the interview had been a boxing match the referee would have stopped it during the first round. Now, Aileen Campbell has entered the Scottish cabinet: in Sturgeon’s Scotland nothing succeeds like failure. There are, of course, still a few familiar faces around and Michael Russell, a former Education Secretary [“Si monumentum requiris…”] will bring to the cabinet an imposing degree of self-importance which, in Holyrood politics, is as close as one gets to statesmanship.

On a minor point of interest, this Scottish cabinet has been constructed on what one might call the Phillip Lee model. You may [or may not] remember Lee, whose resignation from the House of Commons Teacakes Committee, or some such post, over Brexit dominated the political news for almost four minutes. Lee was reportedly also unhappy that, as a practising GP, he had not been made a health minister. Colleagues patiently explained to him that that is not how ministerial posts are allocated.

In Scotland, though, it is. A former mental health nurse has been appointed Minister for Mental Health, a sometime college lecturer is now Minister for Further Education, Higher Education and Science, and a qualified accountant is the new Minister for Public Finances and Digital Economy [good luck with that]. The obvious flaw in this Ministry of All the Talents is that, unless these turn out to be appointments for life, what prospects of future portfolios can these exponents of a specialized expertise entertain?

This whole piece of political theatre was hyped by the SNP, partly to divert attention from the embarrassing antics of the party’s Westminster contingent last Monday, when the nationalist MPs abstained from the vote on a third runway for Heathrow. Yet support for the runway, which would create at least 100 extra landing slots per week from Heathrow to Scottish airports, was a settled policy of the Scottish government. As late as last Sunday a Transport Scotland spokesman said the Scottish government “supports expansion at Heathrow airport” and “looks forward to Scotland seeing the benefits”.

The following day the SNP’s MPs abstained from voting on the grounds they “could not vote for a third runway at Heathrow with no guarantees of the benefits”. That is a totally meaningless claim. What guarantees did they need or expect? This was just another instance of the SNP’s petulant, attention-seeking behaviour at Westminster. The pretext is that the SNP has not been sufficiently deferred to over Brexit, when the reality is that only the cancellation of Brexit could appease Sturgeon and even then she would use it as the pretext for another independence referendum.

At the last general election the number of nationalist MPs was slashed from 56 to 35. If they abstain from voting on issues important to Scotland, in infantile theatrics, many voters may conclude there is no point in sending them to Westminster. Already, at Holyrood, the SNP is reduced to minority government, dependent on the support of the Greens. The SNP always depended on maintaining the impetus of a supposed nationalist surge. That myth was broken by the lost independence referendum in 2014 and the writing is increasingly on the wall.

The state of education in Scotland, now lagging behind Vietnam in some subjects in international league tables, is enraging parents and the wider public. This is compounded by the so-called Named Person scheme whereby the Sturgeon government aspires to impose a state monitor on every child, with legal powers superior to the parents. This Orwellian project was stalled by the Supreme Court due to concerns over privacy and data sharing. The SNP response was: “We’ll take that as a yes, then.”

While implementing some cosmetic changes the Sturgeon administration is stubbornly trying to proceed with the scheme, which was again derailed last December by a vote of the Education Committee at Holyrood. The totalitarian nature of a project that would marginalize parents and effectively nationalize children is obvious and tells you all you need to know about the SNP’s attitude to families and freedom. Named Persons would have authority to interrogate parents about such matters as “family finances” and even “contraceptive choices”.

Yet it also illustrates the fantasy world of SNP policy. The Named Person would supervise every child from birth to 18 years of age [two years after eligibility to vote in Scotland]. In its first year it would cover 55,000 children; by the end of 18 years it would embrace over one million youngsters, more than one-sixth of the Scottish population under state monitoring. In the early stages just 1,300 health visitors would have to supervise 280,000 pre-school children; thereafter, 2,650 head teachers and a finite number of guidance teachers would have to oversee 810,000 schoolchildren. Does anyone, outside Sturgeon’s La-La Land, imagine this is remotely practical?

This scheme – the Stasi meets the Keystone Cops – testifies to the SNP’s loss of contact with reality. By the next Scottish election in 2021 the SNP, already a minority government, will have been in power for 14 years, presiding over sustained decline. As for “Indyref 2”, the latest polls on independence record Yes at 41 per cent, No at 53 per cent. Nicola Sturgeon can make and unmake cabinets as often as she likes, but no amount of ducking and weaving can evade her reckoning with the Scottish electorate.