The alternative universe of SNP First Minister John Swinney - Sue Webber
If ever proof was needed that our First Minster John Swinney is living in some sort of parallel universe in which the SNP is the best government we could ever hope for, it was his address to the SNP conference on Monday.
I know these speeches are primarily aimed at the party faithful, but it’s not as if the rest of us - well, those of us whose job it is - aren’t paying attention so he can get away with any old claptrap just to get applause.
His plan for walk-in, out-of-hours GP surgeries might have sounded attractive, but it will cost £30 million he doesn’t have and will need hundreds more GPs the SNP already promised and has failed to deliver.
Oh, why can’t we be a fairer place like Ireland, except in “fairer” Ireland you must pay for a GP appointment.
He claimed a record number of hip and knee operations were performed but ignored the two-year-waiting list. He promised to see off “creeping Westminster privatisation” while thousands are forced to go private for orthopaedic surgery.
Then there was his claim to be some sort of saviour of Scottish jobs because of a furlough scheme to preserve employment at Falkirk’s Alexander Dennis bus factory. For six months.
It’s not that those 400 jobs aren’t worth saving, because Scotland needs all the manufacturing capability it can get, but then he pledged to end “the obscenity of nuclear weapons on the Clyde,” the Faslane nuclear submarine base, where over 6500 people work, with over 4000 indirectly employed in the supply chain.
Are we really supposed to believe that temporarily saving 400 jobs deserves our eternal gratitude, but throwing nearly 11,000 people on the dole for ideology is perfectly acceptable?
Or that sheltering under Nato’s nuclear shield at a time of global instability and a rising nuclear threat from Russia is compatible with disrupting the whole basis of the alliance’s strategy?
And how do those 400 jobs compare with the hundreds more facing extinction because of the rejection of North Sea oil and gas, and then having the gall to claim that renewable energy is cheap just because the wind doesn’t come with a meter?
He bragged about the long list of SNP giveaways, like prescriptions and university tuition fees, but financially the NHS and higher education are on their knees. He spoke about staff shortages in care homes, while boasting about the millions spent on welfare ─ this year’s budget is up 11 per cent ─ which encourages able people to stay at home doing nothing at taxpayers’ expense.
It was all said with a straight face, but I don’t really think John Swinney is that stupid and he understands the absurdity of his own contradictions.
He knows fine well that ripping Scotland out the Union of the United Kingdom against the will of the majority to would be ruinous, and joining the European one would give Scotland less influence at vast cost.
It was a speech built on the same old falsehoods with which the SNP has been duping Scotland for the best part of 20 years.
He spoke about being a man of faith and he showed once again just how blind it is. Honest John is nothing more than a retread SNP con man.
Scottish Conservative MSP for Lothian