When will the SNP learn they don’t speak for all of us in Scotland?
NO less a political heavyweight than former Brexit mastermind Michael Gove lauded a staunchly pro-Remain MSP this weekend as a ‘very smart guy’.
The grateful recipient of this Trump-like accolade, Mike Russell, laid aside his tribal loathing of Tories for a nanosecond and gladly accepted the plaudit.
And yet the smartness of Nicola Sturgeon’s ‘Minister for UK Negotiations on Scotland’s Place in Europe’ was called into question when he described the outcome of the Brexit vote in Scotland last year.
He claimed that ‘five million citizens’ had ‘quite clearly said they do not want to give up their European citizenship’.
Even for a party notorious for its fumbling grasp of numbers (remember those fantastical assumptions about soaring oil prices in the discredited White Paper?), this was a flight of fancy too far.
Blunder or not, it was the most Freudian of slips and illustrated a key truth about the Nationalist mindset.
Increasingly, it conflates its own ideology with the wider opinion of the Scottish people — as if the SNP were a mouthpiece for the views of the entire population.
The ‘very smart’ Mr Russell has also criticised Scottish Secretary David Mundell for warning against another ‘divisive’ referendum on Scottish independence.
Mr Russell said: ‘David Mundell twisted and turned when repeatedly asked if he would block an independence referendum but the Tory leadership must realise that it is the people of Scotland, not them, who have the right to choose.’
‘The people of Scotland’, of course, utterly rejected separatism in 2014, when they were falsely assured that the poll was a once-in-a-generation chance to fall out with your friends and relatives.
What a festival of democracy it proved to be: one that mobilised large sections of Scottish society to participate in a process that would define our constitutional future.
That, at least, is the propaganda the independence movement seeks to spread in the build-up to a re-run of the vote it comprehensively lost less than three years ago (‘indyrefnew’, as it may be known — new poll, same tired old grievances).
The reality in 2014 was bitterness and division, as social media was annexed by spiteful web trolls, many of them former saloon bar bores who had droned on about ‘our oil’ for decades.
Even Kevin Pringle, Alex Salmond’s one-time top spin doctor, now acknowledges this toxic tribalism was counterproductive.
He suggests that next time around, everyone should ‘should sign up to a clean campaign commitment’ — a call the hordes of cybernats are certain to heed.
Doubtless SNP MSP John Mason — who last week compared the IRA to Nelson Mandela — will be among the first to sign up to Mr Pringle’s ambitious pledge for a detox of public discourse.
A recent opinion poll showed support for another independence referendum before the Brexit negotiations are complete has fallen to just 27 per cent.
Perhaps another referendum should be held to determine public backing for a replay of the initial poll.
It would be sure to find next to no appetite for another prolonged period of constitutional warfare (although, in fairness, the last bout never really ended).
And yet, almost surreally, we are all being encouraged to think ‘indyrefnew’ is just around the corner.
We are assured by no less an authority than Green MSP Ross Greer, the youngest elected member ay Holyrood, that ‘indyrefnew’ will be called within weeks, and a revitalised successor to Yes Scotland is taking shape.
In reality, as Mr Russell well knows, the ‘people of Scotland’ will not decide if or when ‘indyrefnew’ will take place.
The inconvenient fact is that another poll hinges on the approval of the UK Government, one of whose ministers, Sir Michael Fallon, shot down the idea in flames last week.
If the go-ahead were to be given, the First Minster and her husband, SNP chief executive Peter Murrell — consulting with Mr Greer and his Green colleagues — would be the ones who decide on the timing.
But will the shiny new push for independence, shorn of the bile and vitriol of the last one, rest on policy foundations any firmer than in 2014?
The answer, like the result of the referendum, is a resounding no.
As former Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill has observed, the ‘Achilles heels of the last vote have not changed’.
He has said ‘the currency is a question that remains unanswered but hangs like a dark cloud over any future independence campaign’.
In other words, the inevitability of embracing the euro is the ultimate vote-killer.
The strategy appears to be to paper over the cracks and hope for the best.
The assumption that the entire country voted to remain in the EU, as Mr Russell suggested, is also a slap in the face for many veteran SNP voters — about a third of them — who backed Brexit.
This is a party with deep Eurosceptic roots; according to former Health Secretary Alex Neil, at least six of its MSPs voted for the UK to leave the EU.
Indeed a million Scots rejected the fiction of universal Europhilia that Miss Sturgeon has, for entirely cynical ends, attempted to foist on Scotland.
That diversity of opinion is of no consequence to a party with the narrowest possible political horizons.
It relentlessly seeks to portray all Scots as implacably opposed to Brexit, long before the final shape of the deal is known.
While denouncing Donald Trump for his isolationism, the SNP with no apparent irony seeks to sever ties with the rest of the UK.
It also refuses to recognise the possibility of a welter of new powers for Holyrood as a result of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU.
Many have voted for the SNP on the basis that while they did not want independence, the party had proved itself to be an able manager of government: you don’t have to support separatism to vote SNP.
That argument has long since been exposed as wilful naivety, borne of a lack of any credible opposition at Holyrood for much of the last decade.
Have the ‘people of Scotland’ been adequately represented by the SNP’s creation of a single police force, which took an axe to one of our most prized public services?
Who, precisely, has been well-represented or served by the decision to implement a dumbed-down curriculum that has seen our pupils falling behind their counterparts in former Soviet bloc nations?
The thousands of public sector professionals — such as teachers, doctors and nurses — denounced as ‘rich’ by economically illiterate Finance Secretary Derek Mackay are certainly not well-served by the SNP’s punitive new tax regime (made possible by Mr Greer and his cohorts last week).
With Scottish economic growth lagging behind the UK average, the Nationalists and their supporters still believe that voters will opt for Scottish independence over the uncertainties of Brexit.
The underlying assumption is that the wider population shares their cult-like devotion to the cause, in defiance of all the available evidence.
There may well be years of economic malaise, or indeed catastrophe, following an independence vote, adherents to the cause concede.
Nonetheless, it will be worth the pain and the higher taxes for the noble end of a separate Scottish state.
But what of the countless casualties? The businesses which will go to the wall, the children stripped of life chances — and the populist perks of ‘free’ higher education and prescriptions a fast-fading memory?
By then, it is entirely possible that the SNP would have been forced from office, leaving someone else to clear up the wreckage — and to represent the ‘people of Scotland’.
