Latest news with #Indyref2
Daily Mail
5 days ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
EUAN McCOLM: Streeting's taken the gloves off over analogue John's neglect of Scots NHS - and the SNP don't like it up 'em, not one bit
For years, the SNP 's failures in government were shielded by the prospect of a second independence referendum. Any and all inadequacies were ignored or excused by the party's supporters so long as Indyref 2 appeared to be within reach. This willingness to put The Project before the SNP's performance allowed the party to record a string of election victories despite its catalogue of catastrophe. Falling standards in schools, terrifyingly high drug death numbers, the ongoing ferries scandal… all of these, and more, failed to shake the SNP's popularity during years when former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon was promising independence supporters a second referendum was just one last heave away. These days, nobody thinks a sequel to 2014's vote is anywhere close to being imminent. The legal position - that the power to stage a constitutional referendum lies with the UK Government - is settled. And, anyway, the last thing First Minister John Swinney wants, right now, is another grinding referendum campaign. The SNP is tired and fractured. Mr Swinney's focus is on trying to shore up support before next May's Holyrood election. For a long time, it was understood within SNP circles that to criticise a political decision was to undermine the independence movement. Anyone daring to express disquiet over a policy was urged to 'Wheesht for Indy'. The main thing was to win independence then begin building a beautiful new nation. And if there were downsides, winning the prize was worth any amount of pain. There is nobody more cynical than the idealist, is there? Now, the SNP can no longer use the prospect of another referendum to deflect criticism. When John Swinney's opponents point to the things his government has got so badly wrong, he cannot - as Nicola Sturgeon so often did - dangle the shiny bauble of Indyref 2 in front of supporters. It is customary for SNP health secretaries, when confronted with the failings of the NHS in Scotland, to point to greater problems in England. What poverty of ambition in the wail: 'At least we're not as bad as them.' In fact, it is that bad. There are areas where NHS Scotland outperforms - or, more accurately, doesn't underperform as badly as - the service in England but there are others where it lags behind. Anyway, comparisons with the NHS in England should be regarded as an irrelevance. Health is a fully devolved matter, the Scottish Government has the power to raise taxes and invest further in the service, should it choose to do so. The SNP - and the SNP, alone - is responsible for the parlous state of NHS Scotland. This is a truth the UK's Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting decided, this week, to highlight. During an interview about an improved App for NHS patients in England and Wales, Mr Streeting pointed out that a promised NHS Scotland App is still years from launch. John Swinney was 'an analogue politician in a digital age', a smart line that pithily summed up the situation while also serving as a neat critique of the SNP's stewardship of the NHS since the party came to power at Holyrood in 2007. Twenty years ago, Scotland's health service was undergoing a major process of reform under the guidance of internationally renowned oncologist and academic Professor David Kerr, who created a blueprint for a more efficient and effective NHS. Professor Kerr began his work under a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition at Holyrood but the SNP was quite happy with his ideas, which included the creation of centres of excellence for certain life saving procedures and the closure of failing facilities. While Professor's Kerr's reforms were being put in place, the SNP spent a great deal of time and effort positioning itself as the natural guardian of the NHS. In 2004, private polling commissioned by the SNP found that when the party attacked Labour over the NHS, Labour supporters took it personally. So emotionally connected were many voters to the NHS that to suggest the party they backed had neglected the health service was to accuse them of personally failing it. The SNP adopted a new approach. Then health spokesperson Nicola Sturgeon spoke about what her party would do with the NHS rather than about Labour's failures. Ms Sturgeon gave a series of impressive speeches in the years between 2004-07 in which she made a persuasive case for the SNP as natural heirs to the NHS. In opposition the SNP carefully nurtured and grew the idea that only it could be trusted to look after the NHS. In power, the party has neglected it. Beyond the extension of the provision of free prescriptions to include the wealthy and the gift of a 'baby box' to new parents, the nationalists have done next to nothing to address the health needs of an ever-growing elderly population and the demands of an NHS already failing to keep up with innovation. Inaction is not passive. There are real consequences to the SNP's failure to address the needs of the health service. Waiting time guarantees are so often broken as to be meaningless and stories of desperately ill patients forced to wait on trolleys in corridors while medics struggle to deal with intolerable workloads are routine. So Wes Streeting was quite right, this week, to take the gloves off and start throwing punches. More commonly, minister-on-minister attacks emanate from Edinburgh. The SNP is never more alive than when it is pointing out the stupidity and moral vacuity of the Unionist foe. And it is never more brittle than when a nerve is struck. They don't like it up 'em. Not one bit. The new NHS App stands to make life considerably easier for patients in England and Wales and it is certainly true that Scotland should not be lagging behind. But the SNP's failure when it comes to NHS runs far deeper and wider. While ministers preened and blustered about a second independence referendum, they neglected the health service. In election campaign after election campaign, they promised waiting and treatment targets that could, and would, never be met. And when these failures caught up with ministers, they created a new law, guaranteeing targets would be met (Laughably, no sanction was written into this law so it may be broken with impunity. Which, given the current state of the NHS, is just as well). Over the past 18 years, the SNP has brought Scotland's NHS to its knees. Wes Streeting's criticisms were entirely justified. But pointing out problems is not enough. If Scottish Labour is to win back voters' trust over the NHS, it will have to start - just as the SNP did two decades ago - telling a positive story of what it would do differently.
The National
07-05-2025
- Politics
- The National
Reform set to overtake Scottish Labour in Holyrood, polling finds
Nigel Farage's party are set to take 19% on the constituency ballot and 20% on the regional list, research by Survation has found, putting them in second place behind the SNP. Seat projections show there would be an independence majority with 66 Yes MSPs elected if these figures were borne out. Scottish Labour are neck and neck with Reform in the constituency ballot but slip behind on the regional list where they are expected to pick up 18%. The polling, commissioned by True North Advisors, showed that the SNP could expect to pick up 33% of the constituency vote. The results for the Tories are bruising, with Russell Findlay's troops expected to pick up just 11% on the constituency ballot. And the research found that both sides of the constitutional divide remain roughly equal in terms of support, with Yes on 49% and No on 51%. Projections from Prof Sir John Curtice on these figures would return the SNP on 58 seats, Labour on 18 and the Conservatives on 13. Reform would move into second place as the main opposition party on 21 seats, with the Lib Dems and Greens on 10 and eight seats respectively. READ MORE: Indyref2 possible if SNP 'do really well' in Holyrood elections, John Swinney says He said: "After its success in last week's English local elections, Reform now pose a significant threat to the Conservatives' and Labour's prospects at Holyrood, too. 'More than one in four of those who voted Conservative in last year's Westminster election and nearly one in five of those who backed Labour have now switched to Reform. 'As a result, Reform's poll rating in Scotland has risen to 20% for the first time and the party is now a serious competitor for the position of principal opposition party at Holyrood. 'The fracturing of the Unionist vote is good news for John Swinney. Even though the party's share of the vote is now well down on May 2021, it could still win the bulk of Holyrood's first past the post seats, and as a result, be left with only a little short of its current tally of MSPs at Holyrood. (Image: Andrew Milligan/PA) 'Crucially, the fragmentation of Scotland's politics could help ease the path towards another pro-independence majority at Holyrood at a time when, still, almost half of Scotland would like to leave the UK.' Fergus Mutch, managing partner of True North, added: "The SNP remains, by some distance, the largest party but will have to look to other parties for the support needed to secure a working majority. 'The party of independence will, however, be asking itself why its electoral support lags so far behind the 49% of voters who wish to see Scotland go it alone. 'Reform UK, buoyed by their recent success in English local elections, are nipping at Labour's heels on the constituency vote in Scotland and now a nose ahead on the list. 'Converting these figures into seats, we're at a tipping point where they emerge as the second party in Scottish politics heading into a May 2026 election – representing a significant breakthrough north of the border." Mutch blamed the "woes" of UK Labour for the Scottish branch's poor performance in opinion polling.
Telegraph
12-03-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Sturgeon need only look in mirror to see why her legacy is failure
It appears that it was never Nicola Sturgeon's fault that so many of her enterprises ended in failure; someone else was always to blame. And at the top of her list were the 'bully boy alpha males' who appeared to have dogged her footsteps throughout a long career that she says she is soon to bring to a close by not standing in the Scottish parliament elections next year. Those were the single most destructive of her enemies, she reckons, during a near three decades at the top of Scottish politics, a period that also saw her clamber up the greasy pole of international elected office. The fact that it was a brief entry into such an elite grouping is, in her view, all due to the bad guys. For someone who watched almost all of her years striving to get to the top and, in at least Scottish terms, briefly getting there, I think Nicola Sturgeon is doing herself a disservice because to decide who is responsible, she should look no further than the mirror. I wasn't the only one who believed her to be a rising political star while the SNP was in opposition, able to more than hold her own in the admittedly lacklustre world of the Holyrood parliament. She was no slouch, either, when confronted by so-called superior beings from Westminster; in fact, I can't remember her losing in any such contest. However, in a swansong delivered one week before her announcement that she plans to resign as an MSP next year, she appeared to apportion most of the blame for her failure in government to those nasty bully boys. It's true that in 2015, she won an election that will take some beating, when as first minister the SNP won 56 of Scotland's then 59 Commons seats. But that total has withered ever since, until there are now nine SNP MPs – a collapse due almost entirely to her legacy. Alpha males had nothing to do with this fall from grace, but a hard-nosed female who surrounded herself with acolytes and who brooked no argument was the main reason. In Glaswegian patois, she was the kind of woman to whom a working man would ever return home on a Friday night with a 'broken pay packet'. Furthermore, in terms of legacy, two subsequent SNP leaders and first ministers, Humza Yousaf and now John Swinney, discovered their main task was to prove to voters that Sturgeon rule was a thing of the past. To do that, they had to prove that the daft coalition deal with the ultra-Leftist Scottish Greens had gone and that support for her gender recognition bill is no more, thanks to a veto from the UK Government. Certainly on Swinney's watch, independence is still an SNP priority, even if it now lags somewhere behind 'bread and butter' issues like health, education and the economy, and as none of these three look like getting a great deal better, maybe the dreaded Indyref2 demand will slip further down the Nat agenda. Sturgeon believes that the Donald Trump presidency will see politics becoming 'more grim', except that if she'd stayed around wouldn't it get grimmer still, with her perpetual demand for the break-up of Britain that hardly anyone now supports? But of course, as she prepares herself for retirement from active politics, one large question remains unanswered: What happened to the £660,000 that went missing nearly five years ago from SNP coffers? Peter Murrell, her former husband and lately chief executive of the SNP, has been arrested and charged in connection with that missing money, but there has been no further development. Both Sturgeon and a former party treasurer have been arrested and then freed pending further inquiries. Police Scotland say that the report of their investigation – codenamed Operation Branchform – was handed to the Crown Office, Scotland's prosecuting authority, last August and that they 'await direction'.
