CHARLIE WHELAN: SNP conveniently forget who paved the way for Margaret Thatcher
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I don’t know why Nicola Sturgeon bothered to pass her driving test given her hubby has now lost possession of a £100,000 plus motorhome and a £90,000 jag both subject of a police corruption probe into the SNP.
I had my old pal Paul Routledge, a political writer for the Daily Mirror, staying with me in the Highlands last week and like many English based journalists he couldn’t understand why anyone would be considering voting for the Scottish Nationalists given their appalling record in government over the past decade.
As we headed to Kyle of Lochalsh on the Highland line we had plenty of time to chew the fat over past times when the Nats were just a fringe party.
He reminded me that it was actually the decision of the SNP to vote with the Tories against Labour that resulted in the election that brought Mrs Thatcher to power. This seemed particularly ironic given that the SNP leader ‘useless’ Yousaf had just attacked Keir Starmer for daring to suggest Thatcher had been a successful Tory leader.
The SNP who are haemorrhaging votes to Labour in the Central Belt still think that the only way to make a comeback is to lurch to the left despite the fact that Kate Forbes, the most socially conservative MSP, came within a whisker of becoming leader herself.
Down south, Paul Routledge told me that the political classes couldn’t believe that some one who had such backward views on gay marriage and children born outside marriage could get so close to being Scottish First Minister.
She’s known in London as a leader for the 18th Century. Kate Forbes would no doubt have approved of the events in Stromeferry that we read about on our Kyle line journey.
In 1883 there were riots when 200 fisherfolk took possession of the railway terminus to prevent unloading the fish on a Sunday.
Ten men were imprisoned as a result. I wonder if any of them were in the same wee free church as Kate?
One thing is for sure though and that’s when the SNP lose heavily at the next election Humza Yousaf will be dumped and replaced by Forbes.
We will then have seen the Nationalists go from one extreme to the other and given up representing the folk in the Central Belt for ever. They will go back to being the fringe party they were when Paul Routledge first started out as a political journalist. What goes around comes around!
• It won’t come as much of a surprise to learn from the Highland Council that there is a significant risk of parts of the region being drained of population.
Trends suggest that people are drifting away from Caithness and the West Highlands.
What’s more worrying is that in the past twenty years the number of people aged 75 and over increased by 60 per cent. The implications for public services including health and social care are stark.
So what does the SNP government do to help local services? They freeze the council tax that benefits the better off and thereby cut the money available for local government to spend on services. You couldn’t make it up.
• It’s unbelievable that the SNP’s health minister Michael Matheson still hasn’t resigned over using his government iPad to rack up a £11,000 bill to watch live football on holiday. It’s worth remembering three former party leaders including a First Minister resigned for less.
Henry McLeish over his failure to register the letting out of his office; Wendy Alexander for neglecting to register a small donation to her election fund and David McLetchie for claiming taxi fares ironically for exactly the same amount as Matheson spent watching a team he allegedly doesn’t support!
• Charlie Whelan (Labour) was spokesman for Gordon Brown.
