STEPHEN DAISLEY: A report card to make the SNP squirm. Is this REALLY what 'stronger for Scotland' looks like?

Daily Mail​

4 days ago

It was a day of reckoning for the SNP, a rendezvous with a governing record 18 years in the making.
The pace of revelations was relentless, as one damning report after another rained down thunk, thunk, thunk on ministers' desks.
The statistics were bleak and their mounting volume, accumulating by the hour, meant they could not be spun away. It was all there in grim black and white: death by a thousand bar charts.
There was the Crime and Justice Survey, in which the former was more in evidence than the latter.
Violent offences were up 73 per cent since 2021. How could this be? Ministers have repeatedly assured us that lawbreaking is on the decline.
No wonder it seems that way: eight in ten offences are no longer reported to the police. Eight in ten.
House-breaking is on the rise, one in ten of us have been defrauded, and criminal violence among children is climbing, too.
Hardly surprising, then, that only 45 per cent of Scots rate the job their local bobbies are doing.
The figure used to be 61 per cent before the 2013 shotgun wedding of the old constabularies into Police Scotland.
No one doubts the hard, usually thankless, work the rank and file do, but the force's reputation has been tainted by constant gaslighting about crime trends, the decision to stop investigating 'low level' criminality, and the perception that the police have become politicised.
Too many tweets investigated, too many pronouns shared, and the scandal of a senior officer attending John Swinney 's anti-Reform summit.
Yet nothing has debased public trust in the thin blue line like the SNP's complacency over officer numbers.
The Scottish Government has hindered Police Scotland's crime-fighting ability and left the constabulary to take the blame for it.
SNP ministers have presided over a collapse in public confidence in the justice system, and who could blame the public when judges are told to jail criminals under 25 only as a last resort?
When 56 per cent say punishment doesn't fit the crime, they are delivering their verdict on a soft-touch set-up.
The SNP's many inadequacies are more than just a political talking point. In some instances, they are a matter of life and death.
Another statistical update that landed yesterday was the quarterly release on drugs deaths.
At 308, they were up by one-third on the previous quarter, the highest spike since 2019.
It is easy to become inured to the scale of lives lost when you live in Europe's drugs death blackspot, but the human toll is not diminished by indifference.
This is a social catastrophe that ought to be as unthinkable as it is unconscionable.
For ministers, the misery did not end there.
Hospital records laid bare the crisis in emergency care: just 65.5 per cent of patients are being seen within four hours at A&E. The target is 95 per cent.
The labour market data was next to take a swing. Not only had unemployment leapt by 14,000, but it had done so as the number of taxpayer-funded Scottish Government staff had ticked up higher still.
The coup de grace came with the emissions figures.
Remember how ministers ditched some of their key climate targets? Lucky for them that they did because yesterday brought the news that they would have missed them anyway.
The government's opponents will seize on all these numbers, but it ought to be ministers seizing on them first.
When the cabinet sees this litany of failures, its first instinct should not be how to spin the problem, but how to fix it.
One day Scotland will have a government that thinks first of solutions rather than PR strategies but it won't be today. The government we're stuck with, at least for now, met an overwhelming body of evidence with an underwhelming series of excuses.
Does it not embarrass them that, after 18 years under their control, Scotland's public services are in this state?
Do they feel even a skerrick of shame for having promised so much only to deliver so little? Is this what 'stronger for Scotland' looks like?
The SNP is accomplished at politics and abject at policy.
It knows how to win power but not how to use it, and so asks to be judged on inputs rather than outcomes.
What matters is not that ministers consistently miss their targets but that they introduced the targets in the first place.
Government by good intentions might give off positive vibes but it is unpardonable vanity, prioritising the feelings of politicians over the material realities face by ordinary people.
There is nothing progressive about promising what you cannot or will not deliver. It is a cruel deception that drives cynicism and frustration deeper into the hearts of the electorate.
The SNP thoroughly deserved to squirm as it received its report card in real time, but the people who rely on the police, the NHS and other public services do not deserve the outcomes meted out to them.
They will continue, however, as long as this feckless, hopeless shower remain in office.