The implosion of the Scottish National Party (SNP) is fast becoming more of a popcorn fest than binge-watching Taggart. Last April we gaped as police seized a £110,000 Niesmann + Bischoff camper van from a house in Fife following the arrest of Nicola Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell, who was charged last week in connection with the embezzlement of party funds ( he denies the accusations).
Next week we will open the Butterbox again to see how Humza Yousaf, Sturgeon’s successor as Scotland’s first minister, faces a vote of no confidence in Holyrood. The potentially career-ending vote comes after Yousaf suddenly abolished the SNP’s power-sharing arrangement with the Greens with a spectacular own goal that leaves him on the brink of collapse after just a year in office.
Even more hilariously, the decisive vote will take place in the hands of Ash Regan, whose defection to Alex Salmond’s Alba Party last October was labeled by Yousaf as “no big loss” for the SNP. If there has been a more unfortunate politician in the kilt-clad history of Holyrood, I struggle to think of one.
Yet Yousaf – dubbed ‘Humza Useless’ by his critics – is hardly the only inadequate politician to have gained power under decentralization. Sturgeon, Mark Drakeford, Sadiq Khan, Vaughan Gething – is this really the best our political system can do?
Decentralization was intended to bring power closer to the people, resulting in more effective decision-making. Instead, all it seems to have achieved is bringing to power complete non-entities who think their role is to beg for money from Westminster – and then spend it on insane policies and their own incompetent governance.
This does not only apply to Scotland, although the SNP’s performance has been particularly shocking. The Saltire-draped side has done so much so badly that it’s hard to think of anything good.
The country mishandled the pandemic and despite stricter restrictions had a similar death rate to England. Thanks to the so-called ‘progressive’ tax rate system, people earning more than £28,000 in Scotland are taxed more than in England. Yet there is still a huge black hole in the public finances, while Scotland’s deficit as a share of GDP remains significantly larger than that of Britain as a whole.
Other SNP failures include dangerous and unwanted gender reforms, the ferry fiasco, a finding by Scotland’s children’s commissioner that Sturgeon had “absolutely failed” to deliver results for young people, with Scotland sliding down the rankings education rankings, and a “stunningly dismal” audit. Scotland reports “a picture of a healthcare service in crisis”, according to the British Medical Association. The SNP is so useless it hasn’t even been able to achieve independence, for heaven’s sake.
Wales is no better, with new First Minister Gething now having to partially row back to his predecessor Drakeford’s 20mph zones, after a call to scrap the limit broke Senedd records for the most signed petition on its website. Other crazy ideas from Welsh Labor include a four-day working week and a pilot for a universal basic income, where you get a salary whether you work or not.
During his remarkably unimpressive tenure, virtue signaling Drakeford spent much of his time piggybacking on every ‘progressive’ cause he could find, wasting almost £9 million of Welsh taxpayers’ money every year on woke jobs. After even emulating Sturgeon’s draconian approach to lockdown, Drakeford also introduced her minimum alcohol price policy, only to see the number of alcohol-related deaths in Wales rise to record levels. At one point, his government even considered banning energy drinks, ludicrously suggesting they were a “gateway” to smoking and drinking.
In December we found that Welsh pupils are the worst performers in Britain in maths, reading and science, according to the latest results from the Program for International Student Assessment, which is based on tests taken by 15-year-olds from all over the world. the world. Yet Drakeford’s health record has perhaps been even worse, with hospital waiting lists recently reaching their highest ever.
London has become a similar case under Khan, a mayor who was accused this week by Foreign Secretary James Cleverly of saying more about Gaza than about “black children being murdered in south-east London”. Such is the arrogance of the former Labor MP for Tooting that his spokesman dismissed the ‘despicable’ comment as it ‘did not deserve the dignity of a response’, rather than addressing the fact that in London in the 12 months to the end there were 14,626 knife offenses. of December last year – thousands more than the 2022 total.
Ostensibly a mayor in denial, he was reprimanded by the official statistics regulator last December for claiming knife crime had fallen under his watch even though it had “significantly increased” according to the Bureau of Statistics Regulations.
The mayor’s record on housing has been described as “uniquely poor.” Research shows that as of November last year, none of the 23,900 to 27,200 affordable homes that the mayor had promised between 2021 and 2026 under the second phase of the capital’s government-funded housing program have started.
Yet earlier last year he announced that he had achieved the target of 116,000 homes being ‘launched’ between 2016 and 2023 – studiously ignoring the fact that this figure included 7,189 when Boris Johnson was mayor.
This week, Khan – along with his Tory rival Susan Hall – apparently shunned a house storm organized by Shelter. Presumably he would rather spend his time talking about how much he hates Donald Trump than about his failures on crime, housing, the rail strikes and London’s weak night-time economy. I suppose it’s also easier than dealing with the outrage over his Ulez plan, one of many green vanity projects designed to make Khan look down on the Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion kids, who are busy to wreak havoc on the roads and galleries of London. sporting events.
The truth is that Tony Blair’s devolution experiment didn’t work. In the US, bad state governments are being punished by people choosing to move elsewhere, with thousands fleeing the likes of California for Florida to enjoy lower taxes. Here we are left with this over-promoted collection of inadequates.
A vote of no confidence in Yousaf seems to tell only half the story of how disastrous devolution has actually been for Britain.