The aggressiveness of the reaction from nationalists to media scrutiny is in direct proportion to how damaging a story is to the SNP. On that basis, the furious response to the revelations that NHS managers discussed introducing charges for health treatment means that story must have been very damaging indeed.
Not for the first time, the BBC were forced to issue a statement defending their own reporters as SNP politicians joined the pile-on against them. I was proud to see my own party leader defending their right to publish what were documents which the public clearly had the right to know about. So why was the reaction so extreme?
Ten years on from claims that those villains down South were coming for our NHS, it is still here. But it has turned out that the bigger threat to the NHS wasn’t from a government in London but rather from the one in Edinburgh. As Neil Mackay writes in the Herald today, it is the SNP who are destroying the NHS:
“If the NHS is a benchmark, then the SNP is unfit for government. It’s becoming hard not to see the SNP as, in essence, an umbrella campaign group that simply wants independence, rather than a party dedicated to making the powers it has work as best they can.”
The Scotsman’s leader today gets to the real point of the story:
“Whether or not this was part of a brainstorming exercise, it is deeply concerning that it has come to this.”
Every day there is a fresh story about the SNP’s mismanagement. In the last few days we have seen reports:
- that GPs are texting patients to say they are only accepting emergencies;
- that there are more than 300 unfilled GP vacancies;
- that nurses are to strike over patient safety with 6,000 nursing vacancies unfilled;
- ambulance service workers also voted to take action over the lack of capacity that is leaving patients waiting hours for an ambulance;
- of the worst-ever waiting times for Accident and Emergency patients in history;
- and of the ongoing tragedy and scandal of drug deaths after cuts to treatment services.
In this context, a two-tier system is already being created. The number of Scots paying to go private for treatment that should be provided by the NHS is up by two-thirds.