WE have a government in Scotland who can’t get the bins emptied but who think they can solve the Gaza crisis.
Which just about sums up why our country is crumbling to rubble that we won’t have the money to clear away.
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Earlier this month, First Minister-for-now John Swinney received a request for a meeting with Israel’s deputy ambassador to the UK, Daniela Grudsky Ekstein.
He passed this request to his Secretary for External Affairs, Angus Robertson, asking him to do the honours.
When Ms Ekstein then posted a photo of herself with Robertson on social media, SNP members who have been fervently anti-Israel went into meltdown.
Some called for Robertson to be sacked from his Cabinet position.
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One fellow Nat MSP said he had allowed himself to “legitimise a genocidal, apartheid regime”.
The Greens, still raging at being booted out of the coalition that had let them pretend to be important, tabled a motion demanding a government statement promising they weren’t siding with the Israelis.
SNP Friends of Palestine, headed by Nadia El-Nakla, the wife of former FM Humza Yousaf, said they “could not condone” Robertson’s call for “further co-operation between Scotland and Israel”.
Scottish Asians for Independence lobbied for an immediate meeting with party chiefs.
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Nat MP Brendan O’Hara claimed the meeting had “undone months of diligent work” in Westminster to try and bring peace to Gaza.
As for Swinney himself?
Well, here’s the really tickly bit — the joining of the dots which suggests that if the guy who attended the meeting should be removed from office, then surely the same should apply to the guy who told him to.
A premise that really is very hard to argue with. Not to mention one that leaves you asking why the hell Swinney would allow something so pointless to cause him so much extra grief at a time when he already has way more than enough of the stuff to cope with.
Though the answer to this is simple.
It’s because the SNP are and always have been playing at politics.
It’s because they genuinely see themselves as major players on the world stage, that their input on issues that the UN and Nato and The Justice League of America can’t solve is somehow crucial.
They are beyond delusional. Their arrogance is off the chart. Worse still, their naivety and their inability to read rooms and see big pictures is absolutely frightening.
I mean, is this really how dim Swinney is?
That he thinks: “Right, me meeting Israel will go down like a cup of cold sick.
“But me dingying Israel won’t be a good look either.
“So how about I send an underling? Yeah, that’s the plan. No one will notice that . . . ”
You know, until its on Insta. At which point it all goes a bit raaaar. So, yes, it appears he IS that dim.
A fact that should surprise absolutely no one who’s been paying attention throughout his career
He’s dim because the job of a First Minister should be to make Scotland run efficiently and only once they get that bit right will they maybe, just maybe, be taken seriously by the wider world.
Right now, though, Scotland isn’t running efficiently. It’s being run into the ground by 17 years of SNP complacency, belligerence and downright incompetence.
We see this in their failures over — altogether now, you know the words — the mess of widening the A9, the ferries fiasco, the state of our health service and schools, the ongoing police investigation into party funds, the way they go through leaders at a rate that makes football management seem a job for life and so much more.
But nowhere is their dereliction of everyday duty clearer to see than in the ongoing pay wrangle with council workers that has just cost you and I another £300million, not to improve vital services but somehow at the risk of them getting even worse.
That might not seem possible, but brace yourselves, because this country’s finances are in such a mess that it seems we can either have manky streets or mass redundancies, that if a binman gets an extra four-and-a-bit per cent on their wage then a clerk somewhere has to go on the dole.
This government’s morality is so skewed that we’re hearing MSPs on £72,196 a year calling those binmen greedy for wanting a minimum of £24,000.
But then, so much about this government’s thinking is skewed when it comes to what really matters.
Their attitude to public services, to the needs of business, to their rights and opinions of anyone who doesn’t follow their doctrine to the letter, is horrendous.
They are the epitome of the desire for power without the will to take responsibility.
Yet even by their standards, this meeting with Israel is a quite spectacular own goal.
Here they are, all publicly right-on with their demand for a ceasefire in Gaza, all bluster and outrage about Israel’s scorched-earth reaction to a terrorist attack, the full Free Palestine package.
Then as soon as Tel Aviv’s on the line asking for a chat?
They go all weak-kneed and star-struck. They lack the backbone to tell them where to stick it.
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Worse still, their leader doesn’t even have the balls to handle it himself, so he throws a minister under the bus.
Though you get the feeling that bus might be about to reverse right back over Swinney himself.
