Going up in flames

Burned out government founders on a Non Crime Heat Incident

In the life of every doomed government comes a moment when they finally lose touch with the majority of the electorate and begin the inexorable slide towards electoral defeat. It’s unusual for that point to be marked by a row over wood burning stoves. Yet it feels like the SNP has reached that point.

As so often in this country, the Scottish public found out almost by accident that their government had quietly made their lives a little less comfortable, banning stoves in new homes, then trying to row back in the face of a furious backlash. They may take our lives but they’ll never take our wood burners…

So many unnecessary defeats, each severing another of the threads connecting the once unassailable party to the people who once made them such an indomitable force.

Did it start with the gender recognition reform bill that brought Nicola Sturgeon low, scuppered by the refusal of a majority of even loyal voters to accept that a male rapist was a woman?

Or was it the unworkable deposit return scheme fronted by the feckless and tone-deaf Green minister Lorna Slater that fell apart when retailers and Westminster lost patience?

The unnecessary and unloved Hate Crime Act that excluded the rights of women and encouraged police to create a list of anyone accused of hurting someone else’s feelings?

On and on it goes. A big planned rise in the minimum price of alcohol ahead of a general election looks like a decision Yes Minister’s Sir Humphrey Appleby would describe as “courageous”*”.

* (“Controversial only means this will lose you votes. Courageous means this will lose you the election!”)

Next year should bring a bill to create an offence of misogyny that everyone knows will include a definition of women that includes men who say they are women.

There’s even talk of interfering in actual life and death with a bill on assisted dying. 

Ferries that didn’t sail. A First Minister who seems more interested in Gaza than Glasgow. The highest rate of drug deaths in Europe. 

And then they came for the wood burning stoves and looked around and discovered that it was just them and a few die-hard supporters left and everyone else was fading away.

At what point did patience snap? Probably at different points for different people. But as Labour discovered in 2015, when it snaps, it takes a long time to repair. 

Why does the stoves row matter? Because so many people immediately believed it was true. Whether or not stoves were actually banned, it was exactly the sort of thing they expected the SNP and their Green partners in government to do.

It was something so far away from most ordinary people’s priorities - health, education, cost of living - that they sighed and shrugged and turned up Radio 2, where the words of Scots popsters Travis wafted from the speakers: “I'm sorry that you turned to driftwood, but you've been drifting for a long, long time.”