Liz Truss was just latest reason why Scotland needs to leave sinking UK ship – Christine Grahame

Well Liz Truss’s gorn but only after she trashed the economy.

More importantly for her MPs, she trashed Tory re-election prospects so with the ominous visitation of the Grim Reaper, Sir Graham Brady, chair of the Tory 1922 committee, she was handed her cards.

Give the Tories their due they are rubbish at government but ace at stabbing their own (and in the front) when self-preservation calls. Her legacy? Destined to enter the Guinness Book of Records as the PM with the shortest serving record of 44 days, she caused a complete meltdown in the economy. If you had submitted this as a script to Netflix it would be rejected as just too unbelievable.

But it is no fiction it’s a fact that is leading to economic crisis for ordinary people. This is what happens when a few thousand Tories pick the UK PM, the same privileged few who picked Boris Johnson for us. He, of course, was crucial in the rot which has taken the UK economy to the bottom of the heap.

That ‘oven-ready’ Brexit deal was just words like those on the side of a bus. Whatever happened to that £350 million a week for the NHS anybody? Then Number 10 partied while folk died of Covid, families could not visit loved ones in care homes or in their last hours, and businesses went to the wall while the rest of us obeyed the rules.

A fish rots from the head down and that government, which Liz Truss (she previously of cheese and pork fame) was in, was part of that rot. Her madcap economic policies were, give Rishi Sunak his due, “fairytale” economics and they have caused such disruption that mortgages, rents, credit card payments and energy costs are going through the roof. It can’t all be put down to the war in Ukraine. Add to that Brexit and the utter incompetence of Westminster governments.

What can be done? For our UK leader we will have yet another Prime Minister in the coming weeks who will not face the people who really count: not Tory Party members, not Tory MPs but we, the people. We voted for none of this in Scotland with 45 SNP MPs to the Tories’ six and Labour’s one. Is this democracy? Not in my book.

Those of us who believe in Scotland as a nation quite capable of running its own economy have been told over and over that we need the support and protection of the UK, otherwise our economy would go to the wall. Well, UK plc is going to the wall after decades of Westminster governments with an inflation rate the worst (bar Russia) of the G7 countries.

That sinking feeling: Liz Truss is no longer in charge of the country (Picture: Daniel Leal/pool/AFP via Getty Images)

We need a general election, and we need Scottish independence to set us free from the sinking ship which is the UK. It has done Scotland no favours over the years, plundering oil revenues and, unlike Norway with its trillions in the bank, saving not a penny. It has ripped us out of Europe when we voted 62 per cent Remain, landed us with Boris, Brexit, Truss and what else?

Look at other small European countries similar to us: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands and indeed Ireland. If they can do it, why not us?

Postscript, Douglas Ross, any comment?

Christine Grahame is SNP MSP for Midlothian South, Tweeddale and Lauderdale