Scandal and Incompetence Stalk the SNP

Kevin McKenna writes:

Those SNP activists looking forward to purchasing T-shirts and millinery with the figure 56 embroidered on them won’t be the only ones looking sullen in Aberdeen this week at the party’s autumn conference. (In case you hadn’t noticed, its numbers are now 55 after the suspension of Michelle Thomson.) 

Many others who will throng the conference halls will do so in a similarly black mood when they were, instead, expecting a three-day jolly, full of hugs and triumphant tales of battle.

Their party is set fair for government, it seems, for a generation to come, while its 55/56 MPs have stormed the citadels of Westminster intent on showing the Labour party how an opposition ought to work.

Yet its advisers – those sovereign few who haven’t yet left the party to advise millionaires how to make more money in fair and equal Scotland – ought to be celebrating the fact that the party has recently been encountering squalls and turbulence.

So accustomed has the SNP recently been to achieving spectacular success that, until last month, many of its supporters watched the national lottery show each Saturday more in expectation than hope. A reality check was long overdue.

The conference will convene with the storm surrounding Thomson’s property empire still to blow itself out.

And there are still accusations of cronyism stemming from how a £150,000 government grant found its way into the pockets of the multimillion profit gravy train otherwise known as T in the Park. 

The response to these stories by several senior figures in the party who really ought to know better has been tiresome and immature. 

“It’s all a vile unionist media storm about nothing,” they cry. “It would be different if it were Labour politicians.” 

The SNP should know all about how to whip up a storm over trivial matters. It hounded Henry McLeish from his post as first minister in 2001 for Officegate in the knowledge that he hadn’t committed any crime.

And in 2008 the low-water mark for Holyrood skulduggery and vindictiveness was reached by the SNP’s role in forcing Wendy Alexander’s resignation as leader of the Labour party in Scotland. 

The allegations for which Thomson has resigned the party whip are far more serious than either of these misdemeanours and the party knows it. 

Some activists visiting Aberdeen might also ask themselves why this party of fairness and justice has allowed Jennifer Dempsie, the PR specialist at the heart of the T in the Park imbroglio, to walk the plank for it alone. 

Dempsie, a former adviser to Alex Salmond, simply did her job by using her contacts to put her client in front of government. 

As a result of the adverse publicity, Dempsie, a talented and committed young woman, has given up on her attempt to stand for Holyrood at next year’s elections. 

Does this mean that former party advisers such as Kevin Pringle and Geoff Aberdein, who have recently departed for the private sector, are to have their future dealings with government similarly scrutinised and judged?

The party had better now become accustomed to attacks from both within and without.

The Thomson affair and the T in the Park funding issue may soon turn out to be the least of the party’s concerns. 

It continues to be buoyed by opinion polls, the most recent of which puts it on 59% and Labour on 21%, but the spell on the electorate won’t last for much longer if there isn’t soon some clear evidence of progress in three key sectors of government: health, education and justice. 

Almost a year into their tenures in these offices, Shona Robison, Angela Constance and Michael Matheson have done little to dispel a growing realisation within the SNP and in the country that they simply aren’t up to the job. 

Each of them looks distinctly ill at ease in the face of the most benign examinations and none emits a sense of confidence or competence. 

In health, the pressures on acute services remain overwhelming because the SNP’s eight-year conversation about maximising primary care has yet to bear fruit. 

Meanwhile, many of our consultants, whose degrees were funded by the state, are still allowed to make a mockery of the system by filling their boots in private wards while queues and shortages accumulate in the public sector for which we trained them. 

In education, there is no sign that the SNP has a clue about what to do about addressing the scandal whereby gifted children from our most disadvantaged families will rarely get to see what a lecture theatre looks like in our top five universities. 

Any proposal that carries even the whiff of risk or imagination in breaking the moratorium on new thinking about education imposed by the SNP is always rejected by this most conservative of governments.

Meanwhile, Matheson is showing all the early signs of the affliction that seems to befall all SNP justice ministers, Ploditis; this being a condition that attacks the central nervous system and reduces the victim to a jelly-like state in the presence of top brass from le vieux Guillaume. 

Under the SNP, Scotland has become one of the most over-policed states in western Europe and Matheson doesn’t look like he has the stomach for the fight to take Police Scotland down a notch or two. 

The SNP will win handsomely at next year’s Holyrood election and, until recently, it was odds-on to repeat its 2011 feat of doing so with an overall majority. 

But at the Scottish Labour party’s annual fundraiser at the Central Hotel Glasgow on Friday night there was a discernible optimism abroad in the room. 

No one is daring to believe that the party will dislodge the SNP from government soon, but there is a feeling that it can prevent the SNP from achieving its hallowed majority. 

Kezia Dugdale and Jeremy Corbyn are also beginning to forge an effective and mutually respectful working relationship. 

Allowing its members a free vote in a second independence referendum, as I suggested here eight weeks ago, is simply sensible while Corbyn’s pledge to let Labour in Scotland go its own way is a prerequisite to any recovery.

Gaps are appearing all over the façade of the SNP’s social policy and will present further opportunities for Labour in Scotland if it is still up to the task of taking them.