Loopy Lorna adds to SNP-Green’s record of chaos - Sue Webber

Like many Edinburgh folk, I fondly remember Loopy Lorna’s lovely tea house at Morningside Station and although its founder is sadly no longer with us, the spirit of her nickname lives on with the minster trying to turn the pig’s ear of the SNP-Green deposit return scheme into a silk purse.

Sue Webber MSP

It was certainly well earned on Tuesday as circular economy minster Lorna Slater desperately attempted to portray the sensible intervention by the UK Government to stop her scheme ruining hundreds of businesses as a greater threat to democracy than Vladimir Putin, but she sounded quite calm compared to her boss Humza Yousaf who then claimed the UK government was trying to “destroy” devolution in the next 18 months.

It's not hard to see where all this is heading because with a track record of chaos and failure the only thing the increasingly bitter SNP has left to offer after 16 years of misrule is to stoke grievance in the hope it will save their skins at the next General Election.

No-one with any grasp of political reality is talking about dismantling devolution, but the majority still believe in the United Kingdom so it is only right that when the SNP and their Green bullies, either wilfully or through characteristic ineptitude, threaten UK-wide laws and systems that the UK Government can intervene. That’s not destroying devolution, it’s making it work the way it was supposed to.

The very fact the SNP is using taxpayers’ money to fund a ministerial department dedicated to breaking up Britain says all you need to know about a government which faces crisis in every area of its responsibilities, which just happen to be the most important services on which we all rely.

This week is a perfect example, in which new Public Health Scotland figures revealed there were 479,725 Scots waiting for treatment, a 14.5 per cent increase since last year and 87 per cent up since March 2020. Of them, 6,985 have been kept waiting for two years for outpatient or day care treatment, 962 in Lothian, yet in England, the 18-month waiting list has fallen to just 10,737 by April, down 90 per cent in 18 months.

Given the population difference and more health funding per head than the NHS in England, it is an extraordinary failure, one which, as health secretary until March, Humza Yousaf is directly responsible.

But yesterday, “independence minister” Jamie Hepburn was bleating on about what Gordon Brown did or didn’t promise during the 2014 referendum campaign, conveniently ignoring the rubbish in the SNP’s prospectus for independence the Scottish public was wise enough to reject. 18 months to destroy devolution? Remember the SNP said it would only take 18 months to destroy the United Kingdom if they had won.

It’s not devolution which needs dismantling, but the SNP’s gross manipulation and distortion of what devolution was supposed to deliver, which was two governments working together for the benefit of all Scots. If the deposit recovery scheme has demonstrated anything, it’s how the SNP-Green alliance will always return to their default state of outrage to cover up their own incompetence.

Like toddlers who don’t get their own way, it’s up to the grown-ups to let them have their tantrum until they calm down. Or grow up themselves.

Sue Webber is a Scottish Conservative MSP for Lothian