Coalition of stasis
SNP-Green deal is about securing Nicola Sturgeon's position, not moving Scotland forward.
It is the most overhyped piece of paper in Scottish politics since The Vow.
The partnership agreement between the Nationalists and the nationalists who call themselves Greens was inked last week but there was no vellum, no pomp — and no wonder. Sold as a great innovation in the operation of government in Scotland, it is in fact a tawdry treaty planned, drafted, agreed and signed for one purpose only: meeting the present political needs of the First Minister.
Nicola Sturgeon has never excelled as a minister but as a backroom plotter she is second to none. There is a delicious villainy to what she has done and as she detailed the scheme on Friday afternoon, her oblivious prey on either side of her, I am certain I detected a Machiavellian twinkle in her eye. Her snare could not have been more obvious if it had the word ‘trap’ beside it in flashing neon lights, and still they leapt right into it.
The Scottish Greens believe they have joined a government. They have actually just undergone a hostile takeover. Not a permanent one, for they will be dropped when they are no longer needed and all the baggage from their time in government will crash down on their heads swiftly thereafter. They might protest that they got red lines written into the agreement but there is not one of them that will have pained Sturgeon to concede. Who cares what Ross Greer thinks about private schools? Given how many on the SNP benches attended one, the party will be only too happy to let the Greens have that issue.
A couple of Greens will become ministers but their actual function will be as human shields and co-conspirators, there to split the blame for decisions over which they will enjoy minimal, if any, influence and to shore up the SNP’s left flank. Nationalists impatient with Sturgeon’s failure to deliver Indyref2 or with her government’s Blair-esque triangulation will no longer have an alternative party to defect to. The Greens will be implicated in every compromise and every delay to the agenda of the pro-independence left, and the blame will fall heavier on them because these voters already factor in the SNP’s faint-hearted managerialism.
The Greens have not signed up to a cooperation agreement, they’ve entered into a one-sided suicide pact.
Her strategic cunning does not excuse Nicola Sturgeon’s decision to bring a party of cranks and extremists into the governing fold. Scotland has many problems but the one no one wants to talk about is the sheer paucity of political talent, an Emperor’s New Clothes situation that requires us to pretend an unremarkable Glasgow solicitor is an internationally renowned stateswoman. Still, Sturgeon is Indira Gandhi compared to her new coalition colleagues in the Scottish Greens, the parliamentary wing of an undergraduate sociology tutorial.
The choreographed announcement, with Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater flanking Sturgeon, each behind their own podium, was supposed to make them look like credible stewards of the nation. The sight was more akin to a low-budget revival of a Nineties game show. Like Wheel of Fortune, only this time every segment on the wheel read ‘bankrupt’.
We are currently contending with a pandemic, planning for a recovery, a £36 billion deficit, a growing crisis in the NHS, and a scandal-pocked qualifications body that ministers say must be scrapped but which will go on overseeing exams until they can get round to it. It’s difficult to fathom the mind that surveys these challenges and thinks the answer to any of them is Patrick Harvie.
One of the most unfortunate side effects of the 2014 referendum was an unduly heightened interest in politics that has remained ever since. This curiosity is wholly unearned. There is more wit and wisdom heard at any given bus stop on any given day than there is in the entirety of the Scottish Parliament Official Report. Yet, the more Holyrood has been treated seriously, the less serious it has become.
The SNP-Green pact is the apotheosis of this unseriousness. Watching the trio of chancers play-acting as leaders did not enhance their standing. It served to underscore how protean their principles are and how small they each are in political stature — the Three Amoebas.
As if to confirm this, the agreement is a shallow exercise in kicking almost every matter of substance into the long grass, be it taxation or local government reform. The Greens have agreed to this in exchange for two junior ministerial posts. They have been bought for bargain basement prices and the basement is where they will be kept.
There is a lot of talk about how bold and new and exciting this rejigged government is but there is little scope in the agreement for meaningful movement. This will be a coalition of stasis.
Of course, it must be so because this deal has almost nothing to do with how government is run and almost everything to do with how internal frictions in the SNP are managed. The compact is clever politics on Sturgeon’s part, recruiting some scapegoats to share the blame for the next five years of missed targets and failed policies, but more importantly it gives her some protection from party critics who feel her progress on securing a second referendum is sluggish. She may be unserious but she is not without savvy.
The motions need to be gone through on the constitution but Sturgeon will do so purely for a domestic audience. So when it comes time to rattle the separatism sabre once more, she will claim the combined votes of the SNP and the Greens as a mandate for a second referendum. She knows one will not be forthcoming, or at least not the kind of ‘gold standard’ plebiscite which she once claimed to revere. She calculates this will be enough to sate her hardliners and hopes the image of Boris Johnson saying No will help her with undecideds. Scotland is getting a new government as a tactic in a phoney war that Sturgeon hopes to heat up but not too much. All is positioning with her.
To some extent, this can be traced back to Alex Salmond. It is his strategy that Sturgeon has continued to operate, one that says the SNP must do nothing that could alienate potential supporters of independence. Sturgeon is clearly impatient of such conservatism but she lacks a viable alternative. So the Salmond approach is followed in the main but with regular detours into virtuous crusading as the First Minister marches from one fashionable cause to the next, in search of the legacy that eludes her still after seven years.
The constitution of the SNP lists two aims for the party: ‘independence for Scotland’ and ‘the furtherance of all Scottish interests’. At some point after 2014, a third clause was added in invisible ink: ‘Securing Nicola Sturgeon’s place on the right side of history’.
It is becoming clearer by the day that, absent an extraordinary political upset, Sturgeon will not be the SNP leader who realises independence and it is highly unlikely that she will even lead her party into the campaign in a legally binding referendum. She is the face of a deficit twice the size of the annual NHS Scotland budget, of education promises betrayed, of health targets unmet, of equanimity at the prospect of putting thousands of north-easterners on the dole, of identity politics battles as unfathomable to most voters as they are marginal to their everyday lives. Most of all, she is the face of an undelivered and undeliverable referendum — unless, that is, she decides to go down the Catalonia route and because she won’t her leadership has a shelf life.
If her deal with the Greens reeks of cynicism, it is because she is a cynical operator, and if it drips with desperation, it is because the horizon is getting closer. The agreement itself is a masterful stitching up of the Greens — it couldn’t happen to a nicer lot — but its brilliance lies in plucking an expediency out of a dwindling set of options. Sturgeon has bought herself time but she has no plan for how to use it.
Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on August 23, 2021.
an unduly heightened interest in politics that has remained ever since.
Could not possibly agree more with this and it’s a worldwide problem, we need to go back to a world where my interest in politics marked me out as somewhat eccentric, before every idiot with a Facebook account decided they were political experts despite never reading a book and not caring one whit for boring stuff like legislation, economic policy or anything outside the never ending culture War
We desperately need all the ppl who discovered politics in 2014 (Scotland) 2015 (England, Corbyn) 2016 (England, Brexit) or 2016 (US & rest of world, Trump) and now the COVID made me interested in politics nuts to immediately rediscover their penis apathy
An absolutely first class analysis of a desperate connivance by Sturgeon.
Scotland is now a dictatorship brought together by two parties with no intention other than independence.
All we can hope for is that common sense and the continued failure of their policies will bring about their downfall.