The SNP can no longer hide from its calamitous misrule
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It is a measure of how badly things are going for Humza Yousaf, the leader of the Scottish National Party, that Rishi Sunak – despite being pretty beleaguered himself – could score a direct hit on him last week in remarks to Scottish Conservatives before their annual conference. The Prime Minister said that the two great achievements of Mr Yousaf’s first year as Scotland’s first minister were the courts throwing out Nicola Sturgeon’s preposterous self-ID gender laws, and the loss of his health minister, Michael Matheson, after running up an £11,000 bill for roaming charges on his departmental iPad while on holiday in Morocco.
It is not clear why Mr Sunak stopped there. He could have cited plenty more evidence of Mr Yousaf running Scotland into the ground. The main pledge Mr Yousaf made to his party conference last autumn – a freeze on council tax – has just been blown apart by news that Argyll and Bute are raising theirs by 10 per cent, to help meet a £40 million hole in their budget.
Using money from Westminster, Mr Yousaf promised grants to councils equivalent to a 5 per cent rise: but Argyll and Bute is not alone in finding that inadequate. The SNP council that runs Glasgow – the party’s heartland – is threatening to cut 172 teaching posts to reduce costs, thus helping it spare Mr Yousaf further embarrassment.
The SNP has also been exposed as incapable of running the National Health Service. The country’s spending watchdog, Audit Scotland, reported last week that the service could not cope with rising demand, and that there was no “overall vision” for it.
And although passing himself off as a devotee of green politics, Mr Yousaf has picked a fight with Anas Sarwar, the leader of Scottish Labour, criticising that party’s policy of a windfall tax on the North Sea oil and gas industries. Despite his own hostility to fossil fuels, Mr Yousaf dares advocate nothing that might put Scottish workers in the North Sea out of work.
Apart from the SNP’s responsibility for the decline of Scotland’s public services, economy and infrastructure, it must also await the outcome of a police investigation – Operation Branchform – into alleged financial irregularities within its own party organisation.
It is unsurprising therefore that Mr Yousaf should cast around desperately for distractions from his own inability to run his country, and to keep even his party under control.
He was lucky last week that his party at Westminster appeared to have been badly wronged. Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the Commons, defied convention by allowing a vote on a Labour amendment to an SNP motion on a ceasefire in Gaza, enabling Labour to escape an embarrassing rebellion.
The allegation that the Speaker had been bullied by senior Labour figures allowed an outburst of SNP righteousness, with Sir Lindsay’s actions criticised as an English insult to the whole of Scotland in the Nationalist press.
For the SNP, however, it was merely another distraction: and no distraction is better for the SNP than calling the English names, for it is part of SNP folklore that everything wrong with Scotland is not because of the utter incompetence of Mr Yousaf and his friends, but because of the chronic wickedness of the English. Ironically, despite the failures of the SNP and its leader, the tribal and essentially racist, anti-English nature of much of their support could well stop Labour picking up the large number of seats in Scotland that would help give them a large majority at the general election.
