THERE’S been a debate rumbling on for years over whether or not we need a better national song than Flower of Scotland. Perhaps we could pick Gerry Rafferty’s Stuck in the Middle With You. He’s a great Scottish musician after all, and his tune neatly sums up exactly where the country is right now.

‘Clowns to the left of me,

jokers to the right,

here I am, stuck in the middle with you.’

Scotland is trapped between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea – between the venal, sleaze-ridden Tory government in London, and the incompetent, stagnant SNP government in Edinburgh. Pity poor Scotland.

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Here we are, with Boris Johnson and his cronies watching fines flood in over Partygate, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Tory administration broke the very laws it inflicted on the nation. It’s a case study in Marie Antoinettism – a metaphor for elitist sneering, a finger-pointing joke on the British public. And no heads will roll – we know that. It wouldn’t matter if Sue Gray found pictures of Johnson playing beer-pong with the 1922 Committee during lockdown – he’ll still walk.

To many, though, Partygate – an absurdly cosy term for a scandal that shames an entire country, let alone a government – is of lesser concern than the way the Tory Party has lined its pockets with Russian cash. And some wonder why it’s taken so long for Britain to crack down on dirty Russian money in the UK.

Johnson is accused of intervening over the heads of the intelligence services to make sure his buddy, Evgeny Lebedev, got a pretty ermine cloak and a warm seat for his billionaire behind in the House of Lords. Baron Lebedev of Siberia, the son of a former KGB man, insists he’s no security risk. The Baron owns the Evening Standard – edited by former Tory Chancellor George Osborne until recently – and The Independent.

We could, of course, focus on how the Tories just passed a millionaire’s budget in the midst of a financial crisis that’s hammering the poor but why bother? Is anyone surprised that Conservatives look after the rich and say to hell with the rest of us? After all, Rishi Sunak is doing just fine. His wife – who’s richer than the Queen – is profiting healthily from her family’s business relations with Russia, even though her husband told UK companies not to trade with Putin’s regime.

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Maybe there’s some gang ritual for Tories when they join the cabinet where they get ‘one rule for us, one rule for them’ tattooed on their most intimate spots?

So that’s the jokers in London. What about the clowns in Edinburgh?

It’s now truly pitiful to watch SNP loyalists trying to defend their increasingly ridiculous government. Sure, we have to start with the ferries – but let’s first stop calling it a ‘fiasco’ and start naming it for what it is: a scandal. In a functioning political system, this would be the stuff that ends governments. Not in Scotland, though. Nicola Sturgeon has learned from Johnson and now just brazens everything out. She refuses to accept responsibility for any mistake while annexing everything that can be portrayed as success.

The most grotesque facet of the ferries scandal (apart from the pretend windows on one ship) was Sturgeon claiming ‘the buck stops’ with her – whilst simultaneously booting disgraced former minister Derek Mackay under an Edinburgh tram. It’s a cowardly administration. Not yet as cowardly as the Tories in London, but give them time and the SNP will get there. The engine of the entire ferries scandal was base political gain, petty electioneering. The Sturgeon government wanted to look smart and competent, but has now been shown as just staggeringly clown-shoed. The escapade backfired spectacularly. Hell mend them.

If a government cannot build some ferries, what hope of governing a nation? That’s the very kernel of this mess. So now we have the SNP trying to manage a disaster while the NHS collapses around Scotland’s ears. People are dying who do not need to die because of the actions – or inactions – of the SNP government. If that doesn’t sicken you to your stomach then you must be gutless.

And like the Tories, we don’t need to hunt for sticks with which to beat the SNP. The ScotWind affair saw the party auction the nation’s seabed to private companies and foreign investors. The SNP still hasn’t established a national energy company – despite years of promises. This week the government said it wouldn’t bring forward council tax reforms until at least 2026 – after the next election. The party first promised reform in 2007. So it’ll be nearly 20 years before they stay good to their word – and even then, we know it’ll never happen under their watch.

Perhaps Sturgeon and her sidekicks are fans of the British artist Billy Childish. He invented the Stuckist movement – and if there’s one thing the SNP government is, it’s stuck: stuck doing nothing but shouting its mouth off about independence. And, as if the irony pyramid couldn’t get any higher, we all know the independence campaign is going nowhere. It’s a ruse to keep the SNP’s zombie base in a state of constant belief and expectation in order to hold on to power.

The Tory government, too, is stuck: it’s hung up on its Brexit fetish; too cruel and useless to create anything but misery, capable of only ramping up cheap anti-European rhetoric and ridiculous ‘woke wars’ in order to play to the most petty, nasty, xenophobic elements of its own base.

The problem with both the Tories and the SNP, it’s clear, is that they’re mere ‘constitutionalists’ not policy-makers or parties of government. It’s all about their own personal political visions, not the country or people. They’re fixated on their own sense of identity, not on making the lives of ordinary folk better or happier.

Yet they’re successful. They’ve hoodwinked enough to us, hijacked politics and spread enough division, to ensure that they hold on to power, as the schisms they’ve created in society prevent alternative voices breaking through. So pity poor Scotland and pity poor Britain. This is it for the foreseeable future.

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