After reading the column in this week’s Evening News by Edinburgh’s SNP leader Simita Kumar, I quickly checked the television listings to see if tomorrow was Red Nose Day.
Surely, I thought, the SNP council group leader and Scottish Parliament candidate couldn’t be that divorced from reality, and the article must have been a fund-raiser for Comic Relief.
But no, Red Nose day was a month ago, yet here were laughable claims about energy, the NHS and public spending which of course ignored the SNP’s responsibility for running basic services into the ground for the past 20 years.
“Why are we facing the highest energy bills in an energy-rich Scotland?” she asked. Well, try starting with the SNP’s ideological ban on the new exploration of North Sea oil and gas fields, or its abandonment of nuclear energy which will cost hundreds of highly-skilled Lothian workers their jobs when Torness closes in 2030 without a replacement.
She said she believed the NHS should stay a public treasure, but no party is arguing it shouldn’t. “An American-style, insurance-based healthcare system should frighten us all,” she said, but no manifesto published so far contains any such plan. It is blatant and unashamed scaremongering.
But the biggest joke of them all was that the “foundations” of Scottish public services were “controlled by a government we didn’t vote for.” I’d have thought Cllr Kumar might have remembered in the last general election Scottish people sent the SNP packing in favour of Labour, and Scotland voted for the current UK government in no uncertain terms, as much as it pains me to say so.
So if it isn’t Red Nose Day and I give Cllr Kumar credit for not being completely stupid, I can only conclude that her column was little more than a shameless attempt to mislead.
But it was revealing that the focus of her article was entirely on the case for independence, and therefore equally bizarre that it should attack the Conservative opposition for pointing out the SNP was, er, prioritising independence.
“An independent Scotland is not just a quest for a better nation; it is the essential mechanism,” she wrote, and then claimed Conservatives have “no plans except their obsession with the SNP.”
It would be a very weird official opposition that did not focus on the party in government’s main policy, so maybe I should take that as a compliment. But no plan for Scotland except that?
Last week Scottish Conservatives published a 96-page election manifesto and seven out of its eight sections were devoted to new policies for the functions for which the Scottish Government is responsible.
Yes, there was a chapter on the constitution and our undiluted commitment to the Union, but it was two pages. The other seven chapters, on big subjects like growing the economy, lowering taxes and caring for health and wellbeing ran to 86 pages.
So if there is one thing we are obsessed with it is making Scotland a better place to live, a thriving, ambitious and aspirational country that can do so much better without the division, disruption and ruinous expense that another referendum and independence would involve.
But as long as Cllr Kumar, John Swinney and the rest of the SNP pursue their threat, we will fight it tooth and nail. And I’m not joking.
