Black is white in the political version of Alice in Wonderland
THE Queen in Alice in Wonderland said it was possible to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
And you might recall that Humpty Dumpty said when he used a word it meant ‘just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less’.
The works of Lewis Carroll seem to have provided Nicola Sturgeon with a useful template for her modus operandi as the queen of denial — moulding reality for her own ends.
Even Carroll might have baulked at some of the Jedi mind-tricks the First Minister has tried to pull off in recent months, like a hammy stage hypnotist: ‘Look into my eyes, the last 15 years have been an unalloyed success story.’
Black is white in Sturgeon’s Wonderland — any link with the real world is tenuous, if it exists at all — and the best of luck to anyone who tries to keep up with her unrelenting Trumpian revisionism.
One idea that belonged firmly in a fantasy realm was the plan to cut the bottom off classroom doors at a cost of £300,000 to provide better ventilation, and keep Covid at bay.
The fact it was a fire hazard hadn’t occurred to the sharp strategic minds who came up with this lunacy, and there was a fierce backlash, mixed with outright ridicule, which left SNP ministers humiliated.
Miss Sturgeon offered a not entirely convincing defence of the policy, accusing her critics of ‘infantile’ behaviour, before adding: ‘We are not requiring local authorities to chop the bottom off every door in classrooms across the country.’
The tendency to airbrush history to suit the demands of political expediency is a trait shared by some of the First Minister’s colleagues.
The Education Secretary, Shirley-Anne Somerville, later denied there was any proposal to perform emergency surgery on classroom doors, telling MSPs it had merely been an ‘example’ of work that councils might carry out.
Anyone trying to make sense of all of this might have questioned whether the suggestion had ever been made — and if, like Alice, they’d been dreaming all along.
The same might be said for the row over whether state pensions would be paid by the UK Government in an independent Scotland, the kind of politics in which the SNP excels — legislating for a parallel universe.
Ian Blackford was feted as a pensions ‘expert’ by finance secretary Kate Forbes for claiming that taxpayers in the rest of the UK would pick up the tab.
Miss Sturgeon asserted that pensions payment would be ‘subject to negotiation when Scotland becomes independent’, and that nothing had changed since the White Paper in 2014.
But that document, masterminded by Miss Sturgeon, committed the government of an independent Scotland to ‘protecting your state pension, with stronger guarantees that the real value of your pension will not fall’.
She did concede, finally, that it was for a ‘Scottish government to be responsible for the payment of pensions’ in the event of independence, while Miss Forbes kept a determinedly low profile.
Again, what would the average observer make of all of this flip-flopping, as they try to figure out whether their state pension would be safe?
Miss Sturgeon contributed to the confusion, while Mr Blackford stuck to his guns, even as a government economist and the Scottish parliament’s own researchers tore his claims apart.
Then there was the SNP’s decision to freeze out the Press from its local government campaign launch, in another example of its pathological secrecy and paranoia.
Many of the party’s supporters argued that it wasn’t a formal launch and indeed there was a concerted attempt to rewrite history and portray it as a Press call about the cost of living crisis, albeit one from which newspaper journalists were barred.
Miss Sturgeon blamed ‘capacity issues’ and appeared to channel Donald Trump when she said: ‘I think probably if you go back over the last couple of years, in particular, I’ll have answered more questions from the Press than any other politician in the entirety of the UK.’
On the Ferguson Marine debacle, Audit Scotland condemned missing paperwork, prompting a call for a police investigation from former First Minister Lord McConnell.
Miss Sturgeon dismissed these concerns by claiming that ‘it was simply that this particular piece of written evidence, this particular decision, hadn’t been recorded’.
So did Audit Scotland really highlight a black hole in the evidence trail, or did we imagine it?
We’re well into Mad Hatter territory by now, as we were when Miss Sturgeon repeatedly dismissed criticism of failing schools as politically motivated in the face of overwhelming evidence of her woeful record on education since making it her top priority back in 2014.
Her justice secretary Keith Brown, who believes it is ‘puerile’ to keep locking up criminals, is also in the business of denial and revisionism.
This column recently drew attention to warnings from the top of policing of a £200million funding shortfall with major consequences for technology and vehicle upgrades.
Mr Brown — commendably a close reader of the Mail — replied on Twitter, claiming that ‘we have far more police officers per capita, they are more highly paid and the Tories made no proposal to increase spending at all in the budget’.
Presumably he meant more officers per capita than England, though he didn’t stick around to clarify.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, he didn’t reply when confronted with on-the-record statements — made at a public board meeting of the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) — about the extent of the capital funding crisis.
That meeting was a just a figment of our collective imagination, clearly, including the part where the SPA chairman, Martyn Evans, said Police Scotland, set up by the SNP, had ‘less access to technology on average than every other police service in the UK’.
And if you’re struggling to book a dental check-up, remember Miss Sturgeon’s claim in late March at First Minister’s Questions, that Scotland has more dentists per capita than England (it’s just that they’re not all treating NHS patients) — again, you must be imagining things…
Kevin Pringle, once the SNP’s spin doctor-in-chief, recently wrote that the infamous and oft-repeated pledge that the 2014 referendum was a ‘once in a lifetime’ or ‘once in a generation’ event was more of an ‘observation’ than a solid commitment.
It was billed as a ‘once in a generation opportunity’ in the foreword to the White Paper — which is still on the Scottish Government website — but then maybe you misremembered it.
And how many other SNP pledges, from good schools to functioning ferries, were intended to be ‘observational’ rather than actual?
Don’t fall under the spell — it really is as bad as it looks , despite the many deceits of a failed political leader and her lieutenants, desperate to convince you otherwise.
- This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on April 26th, 2022.
- Follow me on Twitter: @GrahamGGrant
