Owen Polley: Unionists can take heart from Humza Yousaf's troubles and the collapse of the SNP

In Scotland, the obnoxious power-sharing coalition between Scots separatists and Greens fell apart, after a meeting on Thursday. It was just the latest blow to the Scottish National Party, which is now led by the hapless first minister, Humza Yousaf, and finds itself trailing Labour in opinion polls.

The SNP will try to continue as a minority government, but Mr Yousaf must win a vote of confidence in the Scottish Parliament if he’s to stay in office. His political survival may be in the hands of an MSP from Alba, the dissident nationalist party formed by Alex Salmond after he fell out with Nicola Sturgeon.

For unionists here, these are interesting and heartening developments.

Back in 1997, when Tony Blair’s incoming Labour government proposed that Wales and Scotland should get devolved institutions, it was supposed to ‘kill nationalism stone dead’. That prediction, from the former shadow Scottish secretary, George Robertson, could scarcely have been less accurate.

Right across the UK, devolved administrations failed to take difficult decisions or deliver responsible governance. It was always more politically profitable, at least in the short-term, to make crowd-pleasing announcements and blame any problems on national government.

As a result, expensive populist policies flourished, grievances against Westminster proliferated and, in Scotland at least, nationalism prospered.

Labour’s idea was that Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish identities would not harden into separatism if they could be expressed through devolution instead. But that rather ignored the damage that devolved institutions do to good government and the way that they dilute the sense of Britishness that binds us together.

None of that is any less true just because the SNP is currently struggling, but its plight shows there are limits to the ‘blame Westminster’ tactic, and to policies of being different for difference’s sake.

Like other separatists across the British Isles, Scottish nationalists have mixed old-fashioned anti-British sentiments with new fangled ‘progressive’ ideas that they claim distinguish Scotland from supposedly ‘reactionary’, ‘Tory’ England.

The Scots government has tax-varying powers, so the SNP raised income tax for higher earners, with the result that many are now leaving for other parts of the UK. It imposed damaging and unrealistic targets for cutting carbon emissions. And, notably, it embraced with extraordinary zeal the idea that people can change gender and be treated exactly the same as those who were born into that biological sex.

The SNP’s extreme Gender Recognition Bill, in many respects, marked the start of its problems in the opinion polls. Now, it’s also been forced to drop its climate change plans, with the result that the deal with the Greens has collapsed.

Meanwhile, voters in Scotland are exploring the possibility that declining educational standards, soaring drug deaths and increased levels of poverty cannot all be blamed on Westminster.

In Northern Ireland, we have a very different political landscape, and that process is less advanced.

As the executive finally agreed a budget on Thursday, albeit with the Ulster Unionist Party voting against, there was consensus that the Treasury should have provided more money. When power-sharing resumed earlier this year, the new first and deputy first ministers both dismissed most practical means by which they could have raised revenues themselves.

In the assembly, the Alliance Party last week pushed its sinister proposals for an ‘inclusive’ schools curriculum on Relationships and Sex Education. Its critics believe that, if it were enacted, this policy would be used to promote contentious theories on changing gender. And there was a backlash against Alliance’s argument that parents should be stopped from exempting their children from these lessons.

In the rest of the UK, the Cass Review into gender identity services in the NHS is causing a rethink on the issue. The independent report reinforced worries that a craze for ‘trans’ ideology was allowed to override medical evidence and the interests of children.

None of this seems to have caused the ‘progressives’ at Stormont to pause for thought. But then, they are new-fangled with these ideas, and like all recent converts, they’re charged up with the certainty of their current convictions.

Voters, though, are not stupid.

There might be a growing constituency that adopts all the latest fashionable notions, but most people will only be pushed so far.

More importantly, they see that the executive is yet to publish its Programme for Government. That’s supposed to be the document that sets out its aims and priorities; in other words, it is the foundation on which any power-sharing administration is supposed to be built.

I’ve previously quoted Lord Bew’s observation, delivered to the Northern Ireland Select Committee last year, that devolution is not necessarily intended to encourage good government. For this province, he said, it was meant to provide ‘peace and stability’.

That may be so, but as Scotland shows, voters eventually get exasperated if they are constantly fed populist distractions and parochial politics, while society is allowed to deteriorate. In Northern Ireland, that’s certainly been our experience of devolution so far.

The SNP could decide to change direction, or replace its leader with a more formidable politician, and stop its decline.

Hopefully not. Its current troubles show that populist nationalism and ‘progressive’ posturing have their limits. Let’s hope that Northern Ireland’s parties are next to learn that lesson.