It has been a bizarre
couple of months in Scotland’s modern political history. Last week we saw the
commencement of ex-First Minister Alex Salmond’s Long Goodbye at the SNP
Conference in Perth. As an incorrigible Hibs supporter I’m not as well
acquainted as I would like with the spectacle of parading a trophy to
triumphant crowds. But I do understand one aspect of the ritual which has
bypassed Salmond’s delirious, Saltire-waving tartan-clad acolytes. Before one
parades a trophy, it is common courtesy to win it first.
Salmond’s increasingly
bitter round of farewells has however been trumped by his successor Nicola
Sturgeon’s frankly absurd Democracy Rocks
event at Glasgow Hydro last Saturday. In a venue more accustomed to hosting
bands like One Direction, Sturgeon wowed 12,000 of the faithful with a speech
which included all the predictable digs at the other UK Parties but did not
trouble itself with boring stuff like the NHS, housing, employment or education
- trifles which just might be expected to interest the Scottish electorate come
the 2015 Westminster Election and the Holyrood Election in 2016.
And of course neither
Nicola nor her support acts Alex Salmond and Stewart Hosie were keen to mention
the O word – the oil bonanza which
pre-Referendum was going the fund their brave New Salmondonia, but in the few
weeks since, the barrel price of which has continued to fall through the floor.
Fire
the Glitter Cannons, cue the music
In fairness,
attracting 12,000 to any event is pretty impressive, or at least sounds
impressive until one remembers that the No over Yes majority in Edinburgh City
alone was 71,000. To put it into better perspective, Glasgow’s two big football
teams attract somewhat larger crowds on alternate Saturdays throughout the
hoary Scottish winter. And unlike the Hydro SturgeFest, you have to pay to watch the Old Firm.
Excuse me, sir, are you a member?
It would be
interesting to know just who comprised the crowd last Saturday and how many of
them were even bona fide SNP members.
I obviously was not personally in attendance (naysayers are not popular at the
increasingly stage-managed SNP media events and press conferences), but from
reliable reports including the BBC – any Indieniers reading this, you may froth
at the mouth now - it looks to have been mostly the 24-hour party people (and
that definitely is party with a small p)
who were latterly drowning their post Referendum sorrows in Glasgow’s George
Square, Freedom Square as they would have it, though freedom from exactly what
never became entirely clear.
That mob are mostly a
ragbag of vaguely leftie grumblies with no real post-Indy political berth who
have reportedly been swamping the SNP’s traditional membership base since 18
September 2014 – all 67,000 of them and rising by the nanosecond, if the SNP’s
publicity machine is to be trusted. It will be interesting to see how those
newcomers, a stunning increase of around 250% on the Party’s pre-Indy
membership, with their penchant for
giant video screens, waving foam fingers and women with Dynasty-shouldered tartan jackets, rub along with the existing
25,000 gradualists carefully cultivated and manipulated by Salmond and Sturgeon
over the past decade or so.
After all, this is the
Party which the late Margo McDonald felt forced to leave because her
fundamentalist views were so much at odds with those of Salmond. I wonder what
Margo, a genuine and deserved legend of Scottish politics, would have made of
all of this.
All
remaining passengers for Planet Reality, go to Gate 1 now
In the bubble of
alternative reality which surrounds Nicola Sturgeon’s prolonged coronation, one
inescapable fact seems to have, well, escaped. On 18 Sep 2014, the proposal
that Scotland should be an independent country, the SNP’s very raison d’etre since 1934, was soundly
rejected by Scots voters by a majority of 55%-45%. In electoral terms, only 37%
of Scots voters – a tad over 1 in 3 - were persuaded to affirm the SNP’s
proposition that Scotland should separate from the rest of the UK. Most
commentators, if not the losers themselves, now accept that another independence Referendum is off
the political Agenda for the foreseeable future.
Nevertheless, the SNP
continue to celebrate a result which is, in their own terms, a lot more
Culloden than Bannockburn. One can only admire the sheer chutzpah of the SNP in managing (with quite a bit of help from
Scotland’s supine mainstream media it has to be said), to present the unelected
coronation of new First Minister Nicola Sturgeon as a planned succession, when
what actually happened was that Ms Sturgeon, as the Party’s Deputy Leader, was
required to step up after a poor Referendum result which forced a reluctant
Salmond to fall on his own sword.
Salmond is hardly
retiring in a blaze of glory with a record of solid achievement behind him as
First Minister either. You would be hard pushed to identify one solid SNP
policy in the past seven years introduced to the betterment of Scots’ lot.
Rather Salmond has gone because he was, as SNP Party Leader, unable to deliver
on the only policy to which the SNP have shown any real commitment, an
independent Scotland. Such was the margin of his defeat in the Referendum that
by political convention he had no option but to resign. Scottish voters have
most definitely sent him homeward to think again.
But that has not
stopped Salmond orchestrating his own commemoration legacy with a series of
bitter and occasionally daft post-resignation events and interviews. He was at
it again in Glasgow at the weekend, blaming the BBC for the No vote and calling
for a Scottish state broadcaster. Presumably what he had in mind for we Scots
if the Referendum vote had gone his way was River
City on a loop and chat shows hosted by Michelle McManus, interspersed with
worthy documentaries on the Great Leader’s latest achievements, all presented
of course by Brian Taylor and Lesley Riddoch. There would also have been an
annual Press Freedom Day, with a torchlight parade culminating in the burning
of copies of the BBC’s Charter and effigies of Nick Robinson and Jackie Bird in
George Square.
I am
a Rock…
Oh, and while Nicola
may be the new rock ‘n’ roll, Salmond at least has his own rock. That’s right,
he now has a giant carved rock at Heriot Watt University celebrating his
achievement of abolishing tuition fees in Scotland. That “achievement” was in
fact a continuation of the previous Scottish Labour administration’s policy,
but why let the truth get in the way of a good story? seems to be the
SNP’s attitude of this kind of thing whenever challenged. Salmond was his usual
bullish self at the unveiling ceremony. The rock had the decency to look a bit
embarrassed about it all.
Those with longish
memories know that Salmond and Sturgeon have previous when it comes to defying
political gravity. Who can easily forget Salmond’s smug “I think we won” in
2007 (in truth a very tight election had just turned on a couple of missing
ballot boxes which had mysteriously fallen overboard on the ferry back from the
Western Isles), or his triumphalist descent four years later – when the SNP
clearly did win well, though on a low turnout - from the First Minister’s
helicopter onto the green lawns of Edinburgh’s upmarket Prestonfield House.
Napoleon always said
that he preferred his Generals to be lucky rather than good, and the SNP have
been extraordinarily lucky since the advent of devolution in 1999, benefitting
in successive Holyrood elections first from the implosion of the Colin
Fox/Tommy Sheridan-led far left, and then by the meltdown of the Lib Dems.
These votes had to go somewhere and were never going to go to Scottish Labour
or the still-toxic Scottish Tories.
The
party’s over, why don’t they go home?
But that was then.
Scottish politics is in a different place now, and despite the SNP roadshow,
perhaps the dust is finally starting to settle on the Referendum result. It is
always dangerous to read too much into a small number of opinion polls, but the
recent Survation poll for the Daily Record does suggest that more than
60% of the Electorate have now accepted the result and don’t want to see
another independence Referendum for at least 5 years.
It was to be hoped
that Scotland’s political leaders, particularly those who were bullishly stating
before Referendum day that the vote was, variously, a “once in a generation”
and a “once in a lifetime” opportunity, would listen to what voters were
telling them. Scotland has wearied of what has been a bruising and divisive
process. The Edinburgh Agreement, which the major Parties signed, states
clearly that all sides should respect the result. For most people, that respect
is defined as the losers not
demanding endless re-runs of the vote until they get the result which they
would have preferred.
The first indications
from the new First Minister are not however good. The SNP have had seven years
to do something positive about Scotland’s social issues but their record is
deplorable - not one child out of poverty (when cash was available), no impact
upon jobs, no progress on housing, education in disarray, Scottish National
Health Service underfunded (when cash was available) – all potential progress
sacrificed on their vanity project of a separation from the UK which voters
have roundly rejected.
However the ink was
barely dry on Nicola’s pious words about making poverty her first priority
before she was out on the road whipping up old grievance and discontent among
the losing Indy minority, reneging on the Edinburgh Agreement and to all
appearances agitating for another Referendum.
A
job to be done
So there is a good
story for the UK Parties in Scotland to tell. We saw on 18 September 2014 that
underneath all the SNP’s hubris and self-mythology there is a traditional
Scottish electorate which largely rejects independence and has no appetite for
a Quebec-style Neverendum.
This electorate would
quite like to see a Government at Holyrood taking some positive action over the
issues which affect their lives – jobs, wages, schools, hospitals, houses –
rather than focusing on a continuous Indy campaign which blames all of
Scotland’s ills on a bad boy at Westminster who did it and ran away. It is time
for a proper Government for all Scots rather than the Yes-voting minority, a
Government supported by a Civil Service down at Edinburgh’s Victoria Quay which
devotes its abilities to developing effective policies to improve the
country’s social well-being rather than
spends Scottish taxpayers’ hard-earned cash on vacuous 650-page White Papers
punting the SNP’s separation dream.
But how well this
story will be told in the run-up to the 2015 General Election and more
importantly the 2016 Holyrood election will depend on how quickly the UK
Parties’ Scottish operations get their act together. And let’s have no more
nonsense about “paying the price for standing shoulder to shoulder with the
Tories”. That is simply more hypocrisy and mischief making from an ex-First
Minister who from 2007 until 2011 was more than happy to stand shoulder to
shoulder with the Tories’ Annabel Goldie to get the SNP’s way at Holyrood.
So of course the UK
Parties should be making common cause with each other now to slay the
Nationalist dragon which we all thought had already been killed in September
2014 by the democratic view of voters. Get to it, guys. Project Rebuttal starts
now.
The football
bit at the end
If nothing else the
Referendum has given us some good football jokes following last week’s
Scotland-England friendly at Celtic Park. Despite some hoo-ha over the booing
of the two countries’ respective anthems (a proud if probably not very PC
tradition which long predates any Indy business, and in truth both songs are
more dirge than anthem anyway), it actually was a reasonably friendly occasion
and a decent game of football.
Although not quite
reaching the levels of the recent qualifying games, Gordon Strachan definitely
has the Scotland team playing to its strengths now, and we were a bit unlucky
to encounter an England team with the mercurial Wayne Rooney turning on his
best form at exactly the wrong time. England were the better team on the night
and undeniably worth their 3-1 win. But of course it wasn’t a defeat for
Scotland anyway, just a deferred victory. The real result is in a carrier bag
behind the Asda supermarket in London Road. So watch out for the video on
YouTube. Naomi Wolf will no doubt be denouncing it in her speech to the next
Dopes Over Beer rally in Glasgow’s George Square.
Next up – Scottish
Labour’s leadership election and why it matters. But that’s for another day.
