STEPHEN DAISLEY: The deluded SNP has finally been found out - it never was, and never will be, a party of good government

Truth be told, I was never satisfied with the result of the 2014 referendum.

Fifty-five to 45 per cent was a little too close for my liking.

As such, I am indebted to the SNP for its decision to make last week’s General Election a de facto referendum on ­independence and urging the electorate­, on ‘page one, line one’ of its manifesto, to ‘vote SNP for Scotland to become an independent country’.

In the event, just three in ten electors did so, while a smattering backed other pro-independence parties. 

Pro-Union platforms, on the other hand, raked in almost 65 per cent of the vote between them. So the results of this second, de facto referendum were: Yes 34.4 per cent, No 64.7 per cent.

I wouldn’t normally agree that constitutional preference can be cleanly extrapolated from voting behaviour in a parliamentary poll, but those were the terms on which the SNP fought this contest and I’m happy to accept them.

Scotland has rejected independence in two referendums, the most recent by a margin of almost two to one. 

The Westminster parties have been given an overwhelming mandate to maintain the Union. 

The Scottish Government must honour this and stop using taxpayers’ money to pursue independence. The matter is now settled.

Disconnect

Is the SNP doing the honourable thing and accepting defeat on the issue? Not a bit of it. 

I’ve lost count of the number of Nationalist politicians who have tried to disconnect Thursday night’s results from independence.

We shouldn’t dismiss this point sight unseen. Savanta’s final pre-election poll showed a high Yes vote (49 per cent), a majority (51 per cent) for another ­referendum in the next five years, and a sizeable segment (39 per cent) who say the case for independence is stronger today than it was in 2014.

And let’s not forget demography. If only under-55s voted, Yes would win a referendum handily. The greying of the No vote is bad news for the Unionist cause and only a fool would dismiss it.

But rather than lessening the scale of the SNP’s defeat, these facts aggravate it. Almost half of Scots support independence, yet fewer than a third voted for the main pro-independence party.

For a significant number of electors, the link between Yes and SNP has been severed, and the Nationalists cannot console themselves that these voters retreated to other separatist parties.

Between them, the Scottish Greens and Alba took 4.3 per cent, meaning just one in three Scots voted for a pro-­independence party. No, what happened on Thursday is the SNP’s Yellow Wall was smashed to smithereens by an electoral bulldozer called the Labour Party.

All those Central Belt seats that had been intergenerationally Labour but which switched to the SNP in 2015 snapped back into the red column, a feat for which Anas Sarwar deserves much credit.

Another crutch the Nationalists are leaning on is that the SNP’s vote was depressed by this being a ‘get the Tories out’ election. This is unconvincing because it assumes voters in Scotland are unsophisticated and unable to understand how elections work.

Scottish voters were well aware that the next government would be Labour; the only question was the size of its majority.

We know this because every single opinion poll published between October 2022 and polling day – every single one – gave Labour a double-digit lead.

You had to go back to December 2021 to find a poll putting the Tories ahead. If ever there was an election in which Scottish voters could feel safe to cast a ballot for the SNP without risking a Tory government, it was this one.

Catastrophic

The Nationalists can try from now till Judgment Day to spin this result but it will always be a catastrophic defeat.

Unfortunately for the SNP, it only has till 2026, when voters go back to the polls to choose their next devolved government. 

It would be premature to say the outcome is a foregone conclusion: a great deal can happen in two years. 

But on the basis of Thursday’s result and recent polling, the SNP is heading back to the Holyrood opposition benches.

Of course, opposition is their metier. The SNP was cracking in opposition, at least under Alex Salmond, and turned blootering the Labour-Liberal Democrat Scottish Executive into an art form. 

As the third party at Westminster, and with no chance of making law or changing policy, the Nationalists mastered parliamentary spectacle, dramatically walking out in protest over this or that and piggy-backing on progressive pet causes to boost their media profile.

Nowhere has the SNP been a firmer opposition than in government at ­Holyrood. For 17 years they have kept the reins of power by acting as though someone else was holding them.

When they failed to keep their ­promises on education, they blamed the Treasury for not giving them enough money. 

When they couldn’t meet their own ­targets on NHS waiting times, they blamed the pandemic even though they hadn’t been delivering on emergency, cancer, mental health and diagnostic waits long before Covid came along.

When their long-vowed road upgrades never materialised, they blamed the ­climate emergency.

Crisis

When they abandoned a key climate target, they blamed ‘cuts and UK ­backtracking’. When they recruited a fraction of the nurses they pledged, they blamed a Brexit that took place a ­decade into NHS Scotland’s staffing ­crisis. 

When Scotland recorded the highest drugs deaths rate in Europe, they blamed Margaret Thatcher.

When the economy failed to grow, they blamed austerity, then the block grant, then their lack of fiscal powers, then immigration policy, then Brexit, then Boris Johnson, then Covid, then Ukraine, then the global energy crisis, then Liz Truss and then Rishi Sunak.

When their Deposit Return Scheme collapsed, they blamed Westminster. When their gender legislation risked interfering with Britain-wide law, they blamed Westminster. 

Need I say who they blamed when the Supreme Court ruled against their Indyref 2 gambit?

For almost two decades, they have squandered an unparalleled electoral monopoly, an ever-expanding suite of devolved powers and a panoply of ­political opportunities.

Not only have they failed to improve outcomes, they have often set them back further. On the attainment

gap, health, drugs deaths, transport ­infrastructure and government ­transparency, Scotland would be better off today if SNP ministers had just left their predecessors’ policies in place.

The SNP never was and never will be a party of government. It is in politics not to transform but to wreck, not to build up Scotland but to break up Britain. They are all volume and no substance.

That is why they now have only nine MPs. They finally got found out.

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