At the end of last month, we stopped by to take an overview of the many and varied scandals and failures besetting the Scottish Government.
Unfortunately, none of this was sufficient to prevent the SNP winning a record haul in this month’s local elections. Devolution seems to have created an unhappy dynamic where electoral success and quality of governance have decoupled.
Still, amidst acres of Protocol discourse let’s check in and see how the Nationalists are faring now the elections are out of the way.
The Daily Telegraph reports that the Scottish Government has formally abandoned its mission to close the attainment gap between rich school pupils and poor by 2026.
In a move which has been described as “a betrayal of Scotland’s children”, the Nationalists’ education secretary announced that the “arbitrary date” could no longer be met.
Bear in mind, Nicola Sturgeon first made her grand promise on school outcomes in 2016. By 2026, the SNP will have had a full decade to deliver on it – and that’s only if you exclude the five years they had a majority after the 2011 election and the four years they led a minority government before that.
Yet a party which claims it could set up an independent Scottish state in a matter of years, it turns out, has decided it won’t be able to deliver better school outcomes after almost 20 years in power.
Doubtless the First Minister is now rather less keen on voters taking her up on her call for pupil performance to be the yardstick by which voters measured her success. Not that they seem inclined to do so.
In the meantime, Sturgeon has been getting down to her actual priority: independence. On a trip to the United States to drum up support for separation, the First Minister claimed the war in Ukraine strengthened her conviction that an independent Scotland would join NATO.
This question continues to divide the separatist movement. The Greens came out against it immediately, and even the more pragmatic Nationalists have yet to overcome their party’s historic antipathy to nuclear weapons. Potential NATO partner are unlikely to be impressed by a prospective member seeking to shelter under the allied nuclear umbrella whilst shuttering Faslane.
Dissent in the ranks?
This morning, the News Letter reported on a fiery meeting of the Northern Irish Conservatives in which both Boris Johnson and Brandon Lewis were criticised for the lack of any central support by local activists.
Although the national leadership was defended by Matthew Robinson, who was the sole Tory candidate in this month’s Assembly elections, other members of the Ulster party have got in touch to set out their case against CCHQ:
“Apparently when the local Party has appealed for support from the leadership the Party centrally has demanded that they activists raise £100,000 of funding before even an article can appear from the Prime Minister in the local media supporting their endeavours.
“Likewise, it is apparently not possible for the PM or the Chancellor to appear at a Party event in NI to help raise profile and funds until the local party guarantees funds to the Party centrally. This is surely somewhat of a chicken and egg situation?”
Furthermore, members in Wales report “unconfirmed “rumours that Andrew RT Davies, the leader of the Conservatives in the Welsh Assembly, “may be about to try and separate the Welsh party from the UK one”, launching the process at this weekend’s Welsh Conference. So that’s something to keep an eye on.