Five more years of nationalist power is an exhausting prospect - Sue Webber
By the time you are reading this there will only be a few hours to go before the polls close, and the end of one of the most gruelling election campaigns I’ve known.
It’s hard to put a finger on why this election has been so exhausting compared to others, but perhaps it’s because the most likely outcome is five more years of the SNP in charge, facilitated by egotists in Reform who prioritised their own interests ahead of mounting an effective opposition.
For 19 years the Nationalists have been in power at Holyrood, in which time by every measure except the size of the welfare bill, Scotland has gone backwards and the SNP has accepted no responsibility for abject failure whatsoever.
Of course, with complex constitutional arrangements like devolution, it’s not difficult to find excuses for your own shortcomings and the SNP are past masters at blaming everything on London, even when the fault lies squarely with them.
On health, NHS spending in Scotland is the same as England, yet, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, English hospitals are handling more outpatient appointments and hospital admissions than in 2019, but in Scotland it is less.
English NHS staffing levels have increased 25 per cent since 2019, but in Scotland by just 14 per cent. Fewer jobs, fewer patients seen, but the same cost shows all the SNP is achieving is increased inefficiency.
This has serious consequences, such as Scotland’s shameful record on drug addiction and deaths. The same social and economic pressures exist in poorer English communities as in Scotland, the same health funding is available, the law is the same, yet Scottish drug deaths are three times higher than England.
Scottish people are not more genetically predisposed to serious drug problems, so the problem is the way services are run, the SNP’s responsibility since 2007. In that time rehabilitation services have been systematically dismantled and the SNP’s answer is to park people on methadone and to provide official facilities for taking illegal drugs without fear of arrest.
Glasgow’s legalised “shooting gallery” is a magnet for addicts across the city and now the SNP plan is to open one in the heart of Edinburgh’s Old Town World Heritage site.
In education, international benchmarking shows Scottish children are less capable at reading, maths and science than they were 20 years ago, yet they are no more or less intelligent than their forebears or their English counterparts. Yet the SNP is incapable of doing anything about it, except to bury the evidence.
On law and order, under the SNP a teenager can kill a bus driver, be freed from custody after just two years and still be entitled to a free bus pass. It is a joke to call it a justice system.
As we are seeing in this campaign, the SNP only has one priority and we know John Swinney’s plan if he returns to Bute House after the results are announced tomorrow is to force a vote next week on independence and then to hook up with Irish and Welsh Nationalists to plot the United Kingdom’s destruction.
His hare-brained stunt of claiming he can control supermarket food prices only makes sense as a means to fuel division. Who wouldn’t be exhausted at the thought of five more years of this?