MOTIONS tabled for debate at the SNP’s party conference prove that independence supporters inhabit some sort of fantasy Scot-la-la-land, where economic reality is allowed to stand on its head. Motions that promise an independence campaign that puts “recovery at its heart” and claim that self-determination is “essential” for post-pandemic resurgence, top a make-believe list that would leave Harry Potter scratching his head in wonder.

With other motions that call for a hard border between Scotland and England and the complete removal of Trident within three years of independence, the dream-world politics of the Nats is writ large. We are facing the biggest economic crisis that we have experienced in 300 years as we struggle out of a (hopefully) once in a century pandemic. Yet all the SNP government can focus on is holding another referendum on independence. Their obsession with breaking up the UK has blinded them to the truth.

Since the first lockdown began, over 18 months ago, the UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak has provided Scotland with more than £19 billion assistance on Covid-19 measures like the furlough scheme, self-employment support, help for businesses and the provision of vaccines. This UK Treasury finance has been part of a massive £352 billion package spent right across the UK to alleviate the economic lockdown, protecting literally millions of jobs.

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It is hard to imagine what state Scotland would be in now, had we voted for independence in the 2014 referendum. Where would we have found the £19 billion Covid aid package? Where would we have purchased and how would we have paid for the 10 million vaccines required for Scotland’s population? An independent Scotland with one of the worst GDP deficits in Europe, would have been at the bottom of the waiting list for EU membership, so no hope of handouts there.

But the reality of this situation seems to have bypassed SNP ministers. Instead of welcoming the mutual aid that our partnership in the Union has facilitated, the SNP has demanded an apology from Rishi Sunak for announcing that furlough payments are soon to end, as people return to work.

The SNP’s grudge and grievance agenda has moved into overdrive. The wind-up of the temporary £20 uplift to universal credit, which helped families through the pandemic, has attracted similar faux-fury from the separatists, who claim that it will plunge half a million Scots into poverty. They conveniently fail to mention that poverty rates have steadily risen during the SNP’s 14 incompetent years in power.

Increased poverty amongst children has been particularly marked. A report conducted by Loughborough University in late 2020 showed that Glasgow has suffered the worst increase in child poverty. The SNP government controls all of the primary levers that can be used to address poverty, such as health and social services, education, training, housing, economic development and welfare. It is particularly damning that First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s constituency of Glasgow Southside, has the highest levels of child poverty in Scotland, once again demonstrating how her obsession with breaking up the UK has even taken her focus off looking after her own constituents.

It is disgraceful that drug deaths have increased by 160% during the SNP’s years in power, making Scotland, shamefully, with more than 10,000 fatalities, the drug death capital of Europe.

Scotland’s plummeting reputation in education has been another discreditable milestone in the SNP’s tenure in office. Once the envy of the world, Scottish schools now rank lower in reading, maths and science than Estonia, Slovenia and Poland. Many pupils are leaving school with very poor levels of literacy and numeracy, handicapping their chances of achieving skilled jobs.

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A special report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) was commissioned by the SNP government last year. The OECD’s unflattering findings were withheld until after the May elections, as they highlighted how the SNP’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) has led to teachers being overwhelmed by long hours, poor leadership, constant assessments and a curriculum cluttered with bureaucracy and jargon. Nicola Sturgeon was the education minister in the Scottish government before she became First Minister.

Failings in education have been mirrored by failings in the NHS, with the care homes scandal, where it was revealed that SNP ministers spent five days trying to polish a damaging report into the transfer of Covid-positive elderly patients from hospitals into care homes at the beginning of the pandemic, leading to a large spike in deaths. The repercussions from that will dominate a future public inquiry into the SNP government’s poor handling of the pandemic. Their shambolic supervision of the Sick Kids’ Hospital in Edinburgh and the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow and the soaring waiting lists for cancer patients that is already costing lives, can be added to their manifest failings in health care.

But perhaps worst of all, for a party that aspires to govern an independent Scotland, is the SNP’s abject failure to nurture or sustain Scottish business and industry. The rusting hulks at the nationalised Ferguson Marine Shipyard are only the tip of the ferry catastrophe, with ageing Calmac vessels breaking down around the Scottish coast.

The SNP government’s cack-handed involvement in the Lochaber smelter and their badly misguided purchase of Prestwick Airport have given Scots a taste of what they can expect from a Scotland dragged out of the Union.

Undeterred by their abysmal, Luddite, anti-economic growth record, the SNP have agreed to reward the tiny, rump-minority of seven extremist Green MSPs with two ministerial posts, in exchange for their pledge to support the break up of the UK. The coalition will terrify the 100,000 workers and their families in Scotland’s oil and gas sector, as will the SNP/Green pledge to close the Trident base at Faslane and Coulport, with the immediate loss of over 8,000 jobs.

The SNP’s annual party conference, with all its flag-waving, jingoistic pomposity and its pledges of a Utopian future, must surely sound the long-awaited wake-up call to the people of Scotland. As a slogan on one of Banksy’s famous wall paintings said: “People who enjoy waving flags don't deserve to have one”.

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