We suppose we should talk about the general election for a bit.
It’s going to be awful. Will that do?
Robin McAlpine has already done a pretty thorough job of assessing John Swinney’s mind-bogglingly dishonest and, more to the point, cretinously stupid performance at FMQs yesterday, but we can’t help echoing it because it was astounding.
Even 62% of SNP voters think that Michael Matheson should resign as an MSP. Many people, this site included, do not understand why he’s not facing criminal charges for attempting to defraud taxpayers of £11,000 to which he knew he was not entitled. If Matheson sat at Westminster rather than Holyrood, voters would be entitled to recall (ie sack) him, as happened to Margaret Ferrier.
A month’s suspension from Parliament, then, seems like a massive let-off. And yet the First Minister refuses, on a ludicrously abstract nitpicking technicality, to even uphold the decision of the cross-party committee which recommended the sanction.
He left himself open to a sustained public battering at the hands of Douglas Ross and Anas Sarwar yesterday, bleating time and time again that because Matheson had – eventually, reluctantly, grudgingly, and after telling a string of lies about it – paid back the money, there had been no cost to the public purse.
That isn’t even true. The deliberations of the standards committee cost the public money. But it misses the point by a thousand miles anyway. If you steal an £11,000 car and then give it back after the police catch you, you still get prosecuted.
The general public doesn’t give a tuppenny damn about the arcane procedures of the standards committee, but it does care about being taken for a bunch of mugs, and for Swinney to compound that ire by so grossly insulting their intelligence on the first day of a general election campaign is simply beyond rational explanation.
What can he possibly hope to achieve? Even if he whips his MSPs to vote against the ban, regardless of how terrible that’d look, it’ll surely still pass – we presume Matheson himself can’t vote, but even if he could the SNP don’t have a majority. So all the acres of bad press and all the political self-harm will have been for absolutely nothing.
We must assume that if Swinney isn’t actively trying to lose the election, he at best just doesn’t give a damn about it. Maybe he knows that because it comes so soon into his leadership, there’s no way he can be blamed no matter how badly it goes for the SNP and so his own job is safe.
Even so, you’d expect him to at least be bothered about the serious financial damage losing dozens of MPs would do to his near-bankrupt party. Perhaps he’s so sure the SNP are going to get a brutal kicking from the electorate that it won’t make any odds.
But if even John Swinney doesn’t care about the election, it’s hard to see why any of the rest of us should. There’s next to zero doubt about its outcome. Labour are going to win a landslide at Westminster, the only question is whether it’ll be a Rest And Be Thankful-scale landslide – a setback for their opponents, but one that can be cleared up after a while – or a full Pompeii-scale burial for the Tories and SNP.
Swinney’s already tried a half-hearted attempt at sounding like a blackmailing Mafia boss, telling SNP voters there’s no way of achieving independence without the SNP.
But his threat has zero credibility. Not a single person in Scotland with an IQ or mental age above 12 thinks that voting SNP at this election will take us one step nearer to independence. Electing 56 SNP MPs out of 59 in 2015 didn’t do it, and half, a quarter or even fewer of that many this time certainly won’t. “Give our useless benchwarmers a licence to sook up gravy for five more years” is not an “independence strategy”.
The SNP have proven for almost a decade that even when they hold the numerical balance of power in the House Of Commons they have neither the wit nor the courage to leverage it, and there isn’t one chance in a million of them doing that this time, when Labour’s majority is likely to be counted in the hundreds.
Their MPs are SUCH boneheads that half of them spent Wednesday wittering about the election being an opportunity for “change”, apparently not having worked out that if you’re an incumbent and you tell voters to bring about “change” that means VOTING YOU OUT. These people are clowns.
(There’s no “change” on offer at this election anyway. At UK level Labour are all but indistinguishable from the Tories, and other than on the constitution in Scotland they’re all but indistinguishable from the SNP. Their only real tactic in both countries is to say as little as possible and just get elected by default because people on both sides of the border hate the ruling parties so much.)
The party’s other main emerging election line seems to be that we need SNP MPs to give Scotland a voice at Westminster, but anybody in Scotland who wants to actually have a voice in Westminster would rationally be better off voting Labour, because at least then their MPs, however hapless – and they WILL be hapless, because Scottish Labour’s talent puddle is even shallower and more dried-up than the SNP’s – will be in the room and have the ear of the Prime Minister and have a theoretical chance of getting something done.
So Labour are going to win in a canter, the SNP are going to be a total irrelevance and independence is going to be off the agenda. Six weeks out from the actual vote, we can already state all of these things with 100% certainty, so what is there to talk about?
Precisely how low the turnout is going to be? (Particularly in Scotland, where much of the country will be in the school holidays.) Exactly how much carnage Reform UK can wreak on the Tories without winning any seats for themselves? Whether Green/Alba candidates will do the same to the SNP? (We hope so.) All matters of passing interest to politics nerds, sure, but none of them will make any difference to the electorate.
You certainly don’t seem all that fussed either:
So we’re tempted to take an extended holiday, or just spend June watching the Euros and posting ice-lolly reviews. We’ll see how it goes.
But if we’d ever harboured any thoughts about taking this election seriously, they were destroyed by John Swinney’s suicidally idiotic performance yesterday. The next six weeks are going to be a grotesque and pointless waste of everyone in the UK’s time.
