Why SNP fairy tales disguise a culture of burying bad news

NO less a political heavyweight than James Dornan launched an impassioned attack at the weekend on the sinister machinations of the UK state.

Highlighting a BBC story online, the Nationalist MSP for Glasgow Cathcart pointed to damning claims of an on-going cover-up over the Profumo Affair.

It showed that the UK was strictly for the ‘rich and powerful’ and ‘not for the plebs’, he said, making a mockery of the notion of an ‘open and transparent society’.

This was risky territory for SNP politicians (even linking to the BBC would be a cardinal sin for many of his fans): do they really want to pontificate about secrecy, or indeed sex scandals?

Doubtless if challenged, Mr Dornan would dismiss any suggestion of hypocrisy – though as Mandy Rice-Davies, a protagonist in the Profumo scandal, once said: ‘Well he would say that, wouldn’t he?’

He was tweeting as his party faced accusations that it had tried to bury news of Scotland’s growing fiscal deficit – an alleged cover-up of exactly the kind that raised Mr Dornan’s blood pressure on Sunday.

We’re not talking small change that you might lose down the back of a sofa, either – our Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the value of economic activity, has been slashed by 3 per cent, or £5billion, from £180billion to £175billion.

Scotland’s deficit has risen from seven to 7.2 per cent of GDP – more than six times greater than the figure of 1.1 per cent for the UK.

That data was sneaked out last week without the usual publicity, and didn’t materialise on the Government’s statistical website, so an economist, John McLaren, had to contact officials and ask for the information.

But bear in mind that it was a busy week for the SNP: there were publicity stunts to organise, including drawing a message in the sand at Portobello Beach to promote European solidarity – appropriately one that would be washed away by the incoming tide.

That message was also projected onto the side of the European Commission building in Brussels – indeed, Nicola Sturgeon excitedly tweeted a picture of it, adding that ‘if you look carefully you’ll see that they do appear to have left a light on for us!’

Amid the histrionic rhetoric, and the damp squib of a statement from Miss Sturgeon on Friday about the much-hyped ‘next steps’ in her campaign for independence (more of a tentative shuffle than a confident stride), there really wasn’t much time for talk about the deficit.

Mind you, it was perhaps a little pertinent to the wider question of an independent Scotland’s bid to join the EU – as rather inconvenient rules mean a country can only be admitted if its ratio of annual government deficit to GDP is under 3 per cent.

A bit of a spanner in the works, then, but the SNP’s Brexit Minister Mike Russell intervened on Twitter to reassure everyone that this wasn’t a rock-solid stipulation.

An indignant Mr Russell rebuked a politician – Lib Dem MSP Alex Cole-Hamilton – who drew attention to the problems the deficit might pose for EU membership, asking him if he was attempting to ‘deliberately mislead or can you simply not grasp the truth?’

The minister even linked to a thorough ‘fact-check’ (albeit in a slavishly pro-independence newspaper) to back up his point.

Ah – in that case, panic over – it’s all a misunderstanding, and Scotland could waltz into the willing embrace of the EU without any undue anxiety over the state of its books.

Senior Nationalists are also at pains to stress that we wouldn’t have to join the euro – yet another dispensation that would be granted to us, though it’s not entirely clear why.

(Secrets and lies of the Profumo Affair – but does the SNP have some cover-ups of its own?)

As breathlessly reported on BBC Scotland bulletins on Sunday, former European Council president Donald Tusk spoke of the ‘empathy’ Brussels feels towards the idea of Scotland joining the EU after splitting from the rest of the UK.

How much ‘empathy’ would those Eurocrats show, one wonders, if the Scottish Government tried to resist a demand for about £1billion of taxpayers’ money for the EU bailout fund – the pot of cash set aside to salvage failing economies?

And how empathetic should we be towards the SNP for keeping tight-lipped about the £5billion downwards revision in our GDP, and the consequences for that stubborn deficit – the one that Mr Russell believes would be such a footling matter for the EU mandarins deciding our destiny?

It’s not the kind of ‘open and transparent’ approach that Mr Dornan rightly advocates, which should trouble us all ahead of the Scottish Budget on Thursday, when we can expect more detail on the SNP’s green light for local authorities to hike council tax.

Finance Secretary Derek Mackay has already decided on a cap of 4.84 per cent, but some of the more shameless local authority finance chiefs appear to be planning increases of 5 per cent – more than double the rate of inflation.

Tax-grabs on all fronts – whether imposed by central or local government – haven’t produced many tangible dividends.

Craterous roads, failing schools and rife homelessness raise questions over exactly where the extra cash prised from our pay-packets has gone.

There was a clue at the weekend, when it emerged that two CalMac ferries had been allowed to rust by the Clyde, only partly built, despite an initial completion date of 2018.

The Ferguson Marine shipyard was owned by tycoon Jim McColl, but collapsed into administration last year and was nationalised by the SNP Government.

Inevitably, a Holyrood inquiry into the soaring price-tag – the final bill is likely to be around £200million – has been launched, while Scottish Government adviser Roy Pederson claimed last week that the contract was awarded out of ‘incompetence’ or ‘corruption’.

In addition, a serving judge, Lord Brodie, is to head a public inquiry into the two botched hospital projects – probing the ‘quality of our NHS major infrastructure’.

There’s an implicit understanding in any modern democracy that we pay our taxes, and in return adequate public services are delivered.

But the contract goes further: we also expect to be ‘copied in’ to pedestrian matters such as a steep fall in GDP, particularly when it undermines the governing party’s narrative about an independent Scotland securing EU membership – which is more or less a done deal, if you believe Mr Russell and some of his colleagues.

Granted, spin and obfuscation are the hallmarks of many governments, and when they’re as long-lived as this one it’s easy to see why resorting to the dark arts, as utterly reprehensible as they are, might be an irresistible temptation.

But trying to bury bad news about a deepening financial black hole – while perpetuating a fairy tale that even its most ardent supporters are beginning to doubt – has taken the SNP’s truth deficit to giddying new heights.

*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on February 4, 2020.