The SNP (Scottish National Party) are currently looking for a new leader with the recent resignation of Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister.

I’m doing a brief series on Sturgeon’s time in office. Part 1 appeared last week (please open all links in a new tab for the time being, as I am still awaiting a response from WordPress on this loss of functionality).

Style over substance

Sturgeon will long be remembered for her expensive suits and shoes.

She prioritised style over substance and often had a grand project in mind, such as a publicly owned not-for-profit energy company announced in 2017, which never saw the light of day:

In 2019, she gave us her reading list, which, ironically, included 1984. A Twitter user reminded her that the SNP were imitating Orwell’s dystopia rather too well. Their Named Person project would have seen a government representative monitor each child’s upbringing:

During the 2021 election campaign, a local one for much of England but one of governance for the devolved nations, Sturgeon felt the need to announce her pronouns:

While Sturgeon did participate in some debates during the 2021 campaign …

… she pulled out of the BBC Question Time special. Guido Fawkes pointed out that, suddenly, after giving coronavirus press briefings nearly every day, she became camera-shy (red emphases his):

When Boris refused to debate Sturgeon in 2019, the SNP put out a Facebook graphic accusing him of “running scared” and being a “big feartie”.

Sturgeon hasn’t been having a great campaign, getting dragged into debate scraps with Douglas Ross, and appearing relatively low-energy. Today’s poll has the SNP’s constituency vote share down by 3%, and their list voting intention down to 38%. It’s amazing someone who’s hosted unchallenging live television briefings almost every day throughout the last year has suddenly become camera-shy…

When put on the spot, Sturgeon does not react well. In this BBC interview, fellow Scot Andrew Neil gave her a grilling over her poor record on almost everything north of the border. Unfortunately, the following clip does not include her response, but her facial expression is a familiar one, often seen at First Minister’s Questions when Scottish Conservatives leader Douglas Ross and Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar question her government’s shortcomings:

Scotland’s drug deaths highest in Europe

One of Sturgeon’s most appalling failures is the number of drug deaths in Scotland.

During the 2021 election campaign, Douglas Ross asked her about them.

Guido had the story and a video:

Nicola Sturgeon was put on the back foot last night during STV’s Scottish leadership debate. Pressed by Douglas Ross over her appalling record on Scotland’s escalating drug crisis – drug deaths have doubled since she became First Minister – Sturgeon floundered, saying:

I think we took our eye off the ball with drug deaths and I’ve said as much to the Scottish Parliament […] I set out at the start of this year £250 million investment programme to build up rehabilitation services including residential rehabilitation to make sure we give more support to community services, to make sure we provide faster access to treatment.

… Taking her eye off the ball is putting it mildly…

On August 2 that year, Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack, a retired Presbyterian minister, wrote an article for The Conservative Woman: ‘Sturgeon’s catalogue of catastrophe’.

On the drug deaths, he says (purple emphases mine):

… some SNP failures enter the realm of the tragic. If we are to judge a government on how they treat society’s most vulnerable members, the SNP have a long way to go before their practice matches their pronouncements on the country’s drug crisis.

A report released by the National Records Scotland on Friday shows that for the seventh year running Scotland had a record number of drug deaths last year with 1,339. The rate of drug deaths in Scotland, 231 people per million, is more than three and a half times higher than that in the rest of the UK and is the worst in Europe, 15 times higher than the European average. Statistics from developing countries are hard to come by but it is generally acknowledged that Scotland’s record is one of the worst in the world. 

The SNP government, which has devolved power over health, has been in place since 2007. The number of drug deaths in 2007, when it came to power, was 455. This was considered scandalous at the time.

Nicola Sturgeon said the number of lives lost ‘is unacceptable, each one a human tragedy’. She added, ‘Today, my thoughts are with every family who has lost a loved one – I am sorry for the loss you have suffered.’ Ms Sturgeon, however, has previously admitted some responsibility, saying that her government ‘took our eye off the ball’ on drug deaths.

Not surprisingly, the SNP blame the UK government for not allowing Scotland to have supervised shooting galleries for drug users.

However, the other three nations of the UK do not have the same problem:

Whilst it is possible to make an argument for a health-based approach to drug use, one wonders why if present drug laws do so much supposed harm in Scotland they don’t do equivalent harm in England and Wales? Scotland’s drug problem cannot be argued away by saying ‘It wisnae me, a big boy did it and ran away’. The SNP have to take responsibility for their actions.

Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack alleges some drug users are so desperate for rehabilitation treatment that they commit a crime in order to get it in prison:

Rather than funding more rehab facilities and restoring the budgets of local alcohol and drug partnerships, which is within their power, the SNP have taken the easy way out by accusing the UK government of binding their hands by blocking plans for their innovative policies such as safe consumption rooms where addicts could shoot up in sanitary conditions rather than in underpasses and waste ground.

There is such an acute shortage of publicly funded rehabilitation places and cuts to local multi-agency drugs services that Scotland has entered Kafkaland where some addicts pursue what seems to them a logical course of action: they choose to commit crimes ensuring a prison sentence rather than remaining in the community because they know they have a better chance of accessing treatment behind bars. For Scotland’s addicts, HMP Barlinnie beats NHS Scotland.

A failed lawyer [Sturgeon] leading a failed government is leading almost inexorably to a failed country, and the most vulnerable are paying the price.

On February 19, 2023, four days after Sturgeon stood down as SNP leader, veteran political journalist Simon Heffer wrote an article for The Telegraph: ‘Nicola Sturgeon’s dreamland is over — Scotland faces a painful reckoning’.

Since 2021, there have been only nine fewer drug deaths — 1,330 instead of 1,339:

An indication of the state of Scottish society is that nearly 60,000 people in a country whose population is five and a half million have a drug addiction problem. That is a higher proportion of addicts than any other country in Europe. Recent figures showed that Scotland had an annual rate of 1,330 deaths from drug addiction. In Slovakia, which has an identical-sized population, the number of deaths (in 2017) was 19.

In Scotland, the government-run treatment services for addicts are dismal. Around 40pc of Scottish addicts are in treatment, compared with 60pc in England. The rate of around 25.2 deaths per 100,000 of the population is three and a half times England’s.

Incredibly, Sturgeon’s government blames Margaret Thatcher, who left office in 1990:

When being forced to admit this shocking failure, the SNP blames Margaret Thatcher and the legacy of her economic policies for closing down much (inefficient and obsolete) Scottish heavy industry. In other words, the failure of the British state (which the SNP purports to loathe) to use the money of predominantly English taxpayers to subsidise the inefficiency and restrictive practices that undermined so much Scottish industry is the cause of the country’s out-of-control drugs problem.

Mrs Thatcher left office more than 32 years ago; an SNP administration has run Scotland since 2007. There are, frankly, no excuses. If parts of Scotland are enduring poverty it is largely down to the failings of those who have ruled the country for the last 16 years, whose hostility to capitalism and incomprehension of business were proved by the many businesses that planned to relocate in England had the referendum in 2014 gone the other way.

Education disaster

Simon Heffer reminds us that Scottish schools were, until recently, the envy of the world. They aren’t anymore:

Education has also been a disaster under the SNP. Scotland’s schools were once among the finest in Europe; in the 18th and 19th centuries they sent young people to university from social classes that would not get inside an English university until the 1940s.

In June 2021, however, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said that the SNP administration had no long-term strategy or vision for schools, and had failed to keep abreast of best practice. It attacked the examinations system, curriculum development, the management of teachers and the availability of data for measuring schools’ performance. John Swinney, who has proved an entirely incapable education minister, was so embarrassed that he delayed publishing the report until after that year’s Holyrood elections.

For maths and sciences, in which high attainment is now considered essential for the prosperity and development of any society, Scotland ranks 25th and 24th respectively among OECD countries. In 2019-20, the proportion of pupils in Scottish schools passing three or more Highers was 43pc lower than in any other year since 2015, when another international report from the Programme for International Student Assessment [PISA] condemned the standards of attainment in reading, maths and science.

To try to massage the figures, the SNP has relied on a feeble system of continuous assessment rather than rigorous examinations. This has ensured that the gap in attainment between those at the bottom of the ladder economically and those at the top has widened.

The other consequence of this failure to develop Scotland’s human resources through education is that the brains, skills and talent that might improve the Scottish economy are scarce: and for those whose talents are developed, Dr Johnson’s adage that the noblest prospect many of them ever see is the high road that takes them to England remains painfully true.

NHS and National Care Service in dire straits

At First Minister’s Questions, Sturgeon becomes deeply annoyed at questions from Douglas Ross and Anas Sarwar over the lingering problems with the NHS and Scotland’s National Care Service.

It is worth noting that Sturgeon was Scotland’s health secretary for several years before becoming First Minister in 2014. According to Ross and Sarwar, some of the existing problems began then.

Simon Heffer tells us:

If the NHS is said to be on its knees in England, it is prostrate in Scotland. The British Medical Association said last month that the country was 2,000 GPs short and about three in 20 vacancies for consultants were unfilled. There were also 6,400 vacancies in nursing and midwifery. A Royal College of Nursing spokesman said that six in 10 nurses were thinking of leaving their profession because they have had enough of their overloaded working conditions.

The medical and paramedical professions in Scotland have repeatedly savaged Humza Yousaf, the Scottish Health Minister, for having (in the words of a Scottish geriatrician) “no plan, no strategy”, and therefore inspiring “no trust” from the professions.

Waiting times in A&E have reached a record high, with 5,000 people in the last week of 2022 waiting over eight hours, and half of them for over 12 hours. The malfunctioning of Scotland’s National Care Service means hospital beds are filled with people who otherwise could be discharged. Over 600,000 people are awaiting “planned procedures” compared with just over 300,000 when Ms Sturgeon took office in 2014.

High taxation, sluggish economy

The SNP are fond of blaming Brexit and the UK government for Scotland’s economic woes.

However, Heffer says that a report from January 2023 points out that Sturgeon’s government has no clear economic strategy:

The report said there was no clear strategy for innovation, that for the last decade productivity had been “muted” and that Scotland had failed to become a “hotbed of start-up activity”. The SNP blame Brexit for this, which hardly explains why other cities in Britain are performing far better; the SNP will not admit that it has no idea how to encourage and support entrepreneurs …

The entrepreneurs Scotland so desperately needs are driven away by high taxation, the deep economic uncertainty provided by the threat of separatism, and a shrinking skills base.

Independence dream dies

During the 2021 election campaign, Holyrood magazine featured Mandy Rhodes’s highly critical editorial, ‘The mendacity of hope’.

Rhodes takes us back to the 2014 independence referendum campaign:

Back in 2014 in a campaign video for the independence referendum, Nicola Sturgeon asked us to imagine a baby – Kirsty – and to think about what kind of country we wanted her to grow up in.

It was a brilliant, evocative message, a hopeful one, with a positive vision that things could only get better, that our children could live their best lives. And who wouldn’t want that?

Two years later, after the SNP were re-elected, Sturgeon made this pledge:

Let’s all resolve that, when this parliament dissolves five years from now, we’ll be able to say we’ve done everything we can to give all of Scotland’s young people the best possible future.

Rhodes continues:

Well, we are now five years on, with independence no closer and Baby Kirsty now seven. The SNP heads into an election that it will win, still stuck on repeat, pledging to make Scotland the best country for any child to grow up in.

The SNP has been in power for 14 years and despite cleverly positioning itself as the party of opposition, lest you blame it for any of the country’s ills, it is set to return to power on the back of yet more promises for that same change.

So, when is it coming?

… Yet here we are, with the SNP still winning votes on the back of a promise to build a fairer, more equal, Scotland. If it’s window dressing you are after, then artifice has won over substance.

Every opinion poll has the SNP winning this next election. The only question now, is by how much.

Yet contrast that 2014 video message of hope, that forward-looking vision for a more positive future, with the dystopian styled, party-political broadcast issued by the SNP last week and the difference is clear. Fourteen years in government, and the SNP can’t offer a positive narrative for its record, it can only blame Westminster for everything that is still wrong …

But if the Scottish Parliament does not have the powers to find Scottish solutions to Scottish problems, then what is its point? What is the point of a party of independence being in power for so long but not delivering on independence? What is the point of having a woman in power but who lets women down?

What is the point in an election that will merely deliver more of the same? And what is the point in promising a better future for children when those already growing up under the SNP’s watch have been let down?

Come on. Nicola Sturgeon has said she hopes that this election will breathe fresh air onto the toxicity of our politics, but those winds of change need to sweep over her and her party too. It needs a clear out. Some fresh thinking. Some challenge, and some ambition to make the change it has promised over and over again.

There is something very sour about the SNP right now – a party that doesn’t take well to criticism; that sneers at opposition; that hectors journalists, and silences its detractors.

Too often, political commentators are assumed to be people who care too much about party politics. We are accused of having an agenda, of being too close to power, of having nefarious causes that we are trying to promote. That in fact we are political stooges. But none of that is remotely true.

In the main, we are here to see change, to hold truth to power …

During the 2021 campaign, Sturgeon said she wanted to sort out the coronavirus crisis before holding a second independence referendum.

The Revd Stu Campbell of Wings Over Scotland took issue with Sturgeon’s preference for ‘patient persuasion’ before a second referendum. On April 30 that year, he wrote:

As we noted earlier today, her “patient persuasion” has taken Yes from a 10-point lead to an 8-point deficit in the last four months. She’s going backwards at a rate of knots, and in the most favourable circumstances she could ever dream of – Brexit, a pandemic in which she’s been (erroneously) seen to have performed well, and a wildly unpopular and almost comically crooked complete buffoon in 10 Downing Street.

She HAD a majority for independence, and she’s blown it. It’s almost impossible to imagine anything that could possibly provide a bigger boost to the Yes vote than what she’s already had and wasted.

She used to promise that she’d deliver a second indyref “before it is too late” to avoid the effects of Brexit. But Brexit happened 15 months ago and now we have to wait for some unspecified point at which the effects of COVID are over before she’ll even begin to try. There’s always an excuse, and there always will be …

The truth of the matter is that Nicola Sturgeon has poisoned the Yes movement. Every part of it is now at war with every other part, and so bitterly that it’s hard to imagine the peace and unity of 2014 returning even if and when she’s finally dragged kicking and screaming out of Bute House.

Simon Heffer, writing in 2023, seems to be of the same opinion:

… the nationalist movement may well become more of a minority sport. It is already split following the creation of the Alba party by Alex Salmond, who fell out with Ms Sturgeon over her handling of complaints of sexual misconduct against him. He was later acquitted of 13 offences in a criminal trial.

And although the fanatics will endure any hardship to be shot of the colonial oppressor, many others won’t. Scotland reached peak Sturgeon a couple of years ago, after her polished performance in the pandemic, when she enjoyed being more welfarist at every turn than the English government.

It will require a remarkable achievement by her successor to lift support for nationalism to the point where it would look likely that the Scottish people would back separatism in a referendum. The SNP has scrapped a special conference it was holding on the question. Talk of the next UK election being a referendum on separatism is ending.

When SNP sources say, as they have in recent days, that a second referendum is off the agenda for the next five years, what they really mean – all being equal – is 10, 15 or 20 years. Every further failure in health, education, infrastructure planning and social care lines up more voters against them: for in the extensively devolved system, only they are responsible.

Heffer tells us how important English subsidies are to Scotland:

It is one thing to tell an opinion pollster that you, as a Scottish voter, would like to be shot of England; quite another to vote in a referendum, were there to be one, to cut the umbilical cord to the Treasury in Whitehall, whose subventions to Scotland under the block grant are around £41bn per year.

For every £100 the government spends per person in England, it spends £126 in Scotland. As the IFS’s comments on the country’s economic future imply, the SNP has nothing but pie in the sky to suggest as the source of that money post-independence.

The SNP never had a detailed plan for independence.

More on that tomorrow.