SNP: Sturgeon needs to purge narcissists waging civil war in party, by Neil Mackay

With opposition parties barely worth the name, many voters saw Nicola Sturgeon as the only person with the ability to lead. But Sturgeon isn’t her party. Her party is filled with grifters and charlatans – in it for themselves and their egos, not the Scottish people. If they were in it for the Scottish people, they’d get their heads down and do the work needed. Instead the psychodramas return.

There’s been three resignations since the weekend. Douglas Chapman MP quit as the party’s treasurer, saying he’d “not received the support or financial information to carry out” his job.

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Former Scottish Government minister Marco Biagi resigned as head of the party’s ‘independence taskforce’. Biagi reportedly said the position had become the “worst job” he’d ever had. It was also reported Biagi said he was disappointed that his former constituency, Edinburgh Central, decided to “have a pompous impressionable idiot than me”. That’s taken as a reference to Angus Robertson, selected as the party candidate ahead of the election, defeating Biagi.

An SNP source described Biagi as “ineffective”. An SNP source also described Chapman as a “malcontent” who “wants to take on the leadership”, and was “one of the first people many suspected would jump to the Alba party”.

Well, there’s certainly been enough of those in the recent past.

Joanna Cherry shortly arrived on the scene, using social media – of course – to resign from the SNP’s ruling body, the National Executive Committee. Cherry claimed she’d been “prevented” from doing the job properly.

Are the people of Scotland supposed to care about this? About the petty internal squabbles of a political party whose elected members should be diligently running this country – as we’ve instructed them to do, as we pay them to do.

These feuds stink of privilege and narcissism. The issues are petty and interfere with the good governance of Scotland, especially now at a time of crisis and pandemic. The behaviour of the feuders is that of spoiled children. If they don’t like being in the party of government, then quit. Find another job. Go join Alba. Retire. Volunteer for a charity. Do something other than waste the time of the Scottish people.

These feuds must drain the resources and abilities of Nicola Sturgeon – such endless disruption must sap time she needs to expend working for this country. It doesn’t matter how diligent or committed an individual might be – if you’ve a dozen squalling children at your feet you’ll inevitably become distracted.

These feuds only matter because they pose a risk to Scotland. Their substance is nonsensical but their impact could be grave. This country, like every other nation on Earth, faces a desperate struggle to recover from pandemic. We may be at start of a third wave. Yet what are we offered by the SNP – feuds and infighting by the selfish and overweening, who put their ego-projects ahead of country.

These feuds go on as doctors, nurses and teachers face health and education systems buckling under the pressure of pandemic.

One SNP source was quoted the other day describing the party as a “sh*t show”. How perspicacious. Key information, it seems, isn’t being shared within the party as the SNP is paranoid about leaks and disloyalty. Leaders worry that treacherous members in senior positions will share secrets with the Alba Party.

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Everything the SNP now does falls short. We have to ask why. The Jimmy Reid Foundation says the flagship employment programme, Fair Work, is limited, weak and oversold. Rhetoric hasn’t matched action. It’s “improbable” goals will be met. Most workplace improvements are down to trade unions not the Fair Work programme – another Potemkin village.

It’s probably easier to throw up phoney PR, than really work to change the country for the better, if half your energies are consumed by squabbling.

Asking who is ‘right’ and who is ‘wrong’ in this SNP feud misses the point entirely. Internecine party squabbles mean nothing to ordinary people beyond the fact that such feuds distract from running the country properly.

What does Scotland do about this insulting nonsense from the party of government? We’re in something of a bad bind now. Labour, Tories and LibDems are incapable of holding the SNP to account or offering an alternative vision for the country. The SNP is literally “the best of a bad bunch”. That’s Scotland’s dilemma. We’ve got the best on offer and it sucks.

Even if you’re a diehard SNP supporter, this must be soul-destroying. How can the party even concentrate on its flagship policy – independence – when it’s so riven? No wonder the prospectus for independence has gone nowhere since 2014.

Metaphors like ‘fiddling while Rome burns’ don’t do justice to the juvenilia of the SNP’s feuding contingent. That gives them some status – some grandeur. In truth, the best metaphor for the SNP and its wearisome bands of malcontents is to be found in the pages of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

Lilliput – fittingly, the island of the little people – has a long history of pointless, idiotic civil war. Some Lilliputians open their boiled eggs from the big end, others from the small end. They’re the Big-Endians and Small-Endians – and they hate each other. Lilliput is a chaotic mess but Big-Endians and Small-Endians don’t care – they’ve a petty war to finish, and the country and its people can go hang for all they care.

The SNP won’t stop this feuding nonsense. There’s nobody to knock heads together. We’ve got to endure this insulting idiocy for another five years. Perhaps, a brutal purge by Sturgeon is the only answer.

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