The SNP Circus comes to town

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

This was politics as showbiz – Nicola as Lady Gaga, Stewart Hosie greeted by screaming fans (yes, that Stewart Hosie), and the usual suspects such as Eddi Reader and the Red Hot Chilli Pipers providing the music. To round it all off was the inevitable Dougie McLean singing the SNP’s now inevitable anthem Caledonia - a song about some guy who loves Scotland so much he is always leaving the place.

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.