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One power the SNP will NEVER be able to grab

THERE was a delicious moment during Prime Minister’s Questions this week when Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle gave the floor to Ian Blackford, the SNP’s leader in Westminster.

In a House hugely divided over the Downing Street partygate debacle, where less-than-parliamentary asides were being hurled over the benches like so much confetti, there was, for a brief period, unity. Because the announcement of the Right Honourable Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber elicited just one sound: a collective groan.

They have my deepest sympathies. Every time the SNP opens its trap – and that, of course, is depressingly often – I hear myself making a similar noise. The sucking in of the teeth. The expelling of air. The slumping of the shoulders.

This week, the SNP have decided to make the most audacious power grab, attempting to bring in legislation that would make temporary powers to fight coronavirus permanent. It would give the SNP the ability to close schools, force people to stay at home and release prisoners from jail at any time in response to other virus outbreaks or contaminations.

DESPITE senior lawyers and, indeed, the Law Society of Scotland warning that such a move could have ‘the potential to result in very significant restrictions on liberty’ and risk ‘powers being used in error’, they seem determined to press ahead. Excuse me while I pick my shoulders up off the floor.

There is nothing surprising about this. The SNP are wedded to the idea of control that governs every aspect of our lives. We saw it with their wrongheaded Named Person scheme, which they pursued even after the Supreme Court ruled that part of the plan breached human rights laws.

We see it with their plans to force restaurants to show how many calories are in each meal, with their ambitions around banning motor vehicles from city centres, their keenness to allow people to work from home in perpetuity and with their proposed Gender Recognition Act.

Sometimes I think the only way this lot will ever be happy is if we all buy bicycles, stay at home, live off lettuce leaves and address everyone as ‘they’.

The strange thing about it all, though, is that in foisting these endless restrictions on our freedoms, the

SNP holds up a fascinating mirror to itself. They are obsessed with control precisely because in reality, they wield so little of it.

It took me years to realise that the most controlling people, who have to be in charge and lash out at anyone who attempts to challenge them, are the ones with the most problems.

Often highly insecure, they find the only way they can navigate a world in which they feel like an imposter is to try to control every aspect of it.

They inevitably fail. The world is a vast, spinning and unpredictable place where anything, whether it be a global pandemic or being knocked down by a bus, could happen tomorrow.

The most confident and stable individuals know this. They live their lives open to opportunity and the unexpected and focus on the things that really matter.

The SNP are determined to be in control of everything because they are collectively suffering from imposter syndrome, and they’re terrified we’re going to work it out. They try to control so many things because they have absolutely no power whatsoever when it comes to one overbearing issue.

All this became crystal clear earlier this week when the First Minister declared in an interview that she was ‘determined’ to hold another independence referendum by the end of 2023. I know, I know, the groans.

Apparently, quoth Nicola Sturgeon: ‘We are hopefully on the downward slope of Omicron, which clears the way for us to do that.’

Leaving aside the glaringly obvious point that the downward slope of Omicron should not be clearing the way to rehash a vote we’ve already had but instead fixing the NHS, repairing our economy and improving our school, this is, once again, a statement about control.

It’s the power grab the SNP will never be able to make, the one thing they will never control, the golden chalice forever out of reach.

If only, for the sake of the rest of us, who must suffer their endless paper cuts inflicted out of powerless frustration, they realised it.

Ukraine On The Brink

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2022-01-29T08:00:00.0000000Z

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