Let’s be quite clear what this means.
It means that the new Westminster leader of the SNP thinks it’s “absurd” to even try to achieve independence while the UK is in a crisis.
(And let’s leave aside the fact that Holyrood has, by design, almost no powers over the economy or the cost of living anyway.)
It means he wants to wait for the UK government to end that crisis before taking any meaningful action. And given that the SNP thinks (quite correctly) that the Tories are not fit to run the UK economy, that means waiting until someone else is in power, which is unlikely to be for at least two more years.
It therefore means that everyone suffering from the cost of living crisis must wait at least that long before the SNP tries to do anything about it.
At least two more years of shivering in homes they can’t afford to heat. At least two more years of parents going hungry so their children can have something to eat, while SNP MPs scoff down seared corn-fed chicken breast with slow-cooked pancetta, rosemary dauphine potato and sauteed wild mushrooms in the subsidised Commons dining room, paid for out of their £85,000 salaries.
(Or better yet, out of the £25 daily food allowance they get on top when staying in London – more than enough to cover three courses with sides and double pudding.)
At least two more years of getting slowly poorer and poorer as wages fall further and further behind inflation, because few people have strong trade unions. At least two more years of enduring the collapse of public services, accelerated by the Scottish Government’s own plans to cut tens of thousands of public-sector jobs.
Two years, in other words, that a lot of people simply don’t have to play around in. The SNP has already squandered more than eight years on achieving absolutely nothing since the indyref, and is content to tell you that it plans to waste at least the next two as well rather than risk its MPs’ cushy lives.
(Flynn barely even tried to hide the self-interest.)
It’s also content to tell you that it wants to hang around until the UK is in a much better condition to tell people they need to get out of it – until it has a healthy economy, no crises and a less unpopular government – and to try to achieve that in an election which is much less likely for half-a-dozen incredibly obvious reasons to produce a majority of votes for independence.
Because when you’re sitting in Westminster on a vast salary, racking up generous pension contributions with absolutely no meaningful responsibilities other than to haul yourself to your feet once or twice a week, insist that Scotland won’t put up with this and then sit back down again, what’s the big rush?
Meet the new boss, folks. Very, very much the same as the old boss.
