Could Kate Forbes survive the SNP snakepit?
ALTHOUGH I have lived in England for most of my life, I remain proud of my Scottish heritage and have traced my ancestors, on my father’s side, back for six generations to the early 1700s in Crawford, Lanarkshire. For such a small nation Scotland has produced a wealth of great men and women involved in all aspects of science, medicine, and culture...
Fast forward to the present. A headline in the Scottish Daily Express in August 2022 read ‘The Nats have destroyed five centuries of Scottish educational excellence in just 15 years‘. This sentiment was echoed by many other publications and reports which demonstrated declining standards in maths, science, and English. Things became so bad that the SNP government withdrew from international comparison tables to avoid embarrassment.
Scottish political events provide much to baffle this distant Derbyshire observer, but the whole piece is well worth reading. "Snakepit" seems about right.
8 comments:
I don't know what I think about the Nats. There is something disheartening about their aggression and vitriol directed towards the English at every turn. But on the other hand, I imagine that if I had a nationalistic offer to cut myself loose from the likes of Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, and Sunak, I'd grab it with both hands.
The problem seems to be with all the woke nonsense that goes along with the nationalism. Surely there would be an opportunity for a conservative nationalist party, people who wanted to clean up the mess, support ordinary people, and protect Scottish interests.
For what they've done to the Scottish schools they should be tied to stakes at the low water mark.
'Good politics' often seems to be struggling to improve matters. but the steady drip of 'bad politics' is very corrosive.
There seems to be more 'bad politics' about generally. I doubt that we are all doomed, but there may be trouble ahead... Let's face the music and dance.
I had first hand experience of Scotch (I call them that to annoy them), education for two years in the 1960s. It was certainly, mostly, very good, but we were schooled with the strap. Excellence in education requires considerable discipline, a point that has been lost on the progressives in the West, of which the Scotch are a leading example. That is why their reputation for education has gone down the tubes, (ours has already done so.)
Goodness that strap hurt!
Sam - a conservative nationalist party sounds like a good idea but would have a constant battle with the media, especially the BBC.
dearieme - and consider themselves lucky that it isn't anything worse.
DJ - maybe 'bad politics' makes a party easier to promote than 'good politics'. In general it requires less analysis and less of a requirement to accept trade-offs.
Tammly - this weekend Mrs H and I were talking with Grandson about school discipline. He knows there is a problem with discipline in schools. You are right, excellence requires considerable discipline. It isn't there, even from the side-lines we can tell how bad it is.
There are scandals involving individuals at the highest level waiting to be exposed in Scotland; what must be remembered, if and when they finally come to light, is that every single one of them has been known about and ignored by the media here for years. Even now, they're still pretending that the reason Peter Murrell resigned was due to misleading SNP membership figures, but there is WAY more to it than that - it should in no way be seen as drawing a line under the matter, which is what they want you to believe.
Stewart - a nest of unreported scandals is the impression I have of SNP politics, even though I've only kept a casual eye on it.
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