Nicola Sturgeon’s Scotland stinks

Nicola Sturgeon is having something of a summer of discontent. It started almost promisingly in July, when the Scottish Government managed to buy off ScotRail drivers with a five per cent pay bump. That brought to an end weeks of travel disruption caused by Aslef members refusing to work overtime on the newly-nationalised rail company. A temporary timetable instituted in response saw 700 services culled from Scotland’s rail network. No sooner was the ink dry on that deal than local government workers rejected a two per cent pay offer and voted to strike. Now 13,000 nursery staff, school janitors, dinner ladies and teaching assistants will walk out for 72 hours next month. In the NHS, nurses and midwives are being balloted on industrial action in September while a BMA survey showed almost eight in ten Scottish doctors prepared to down stethoscopes over pay. To bring things full circle, the RMT is balloting ScotRail conductors and ticket collectors after they knocked back an offer of an extra five per cent plus £300.

But the most visible, and odorous, sign of industrial strife in Scotland this summer are the bin strikes. Bin men in Edinburgh are halfway through a 12-day strike that has crippled the city’s cleansing services. Residents have been told to keep their waste indoors, and all over the city centre tourists are being greeted by overflowing bins and garbage-strewn streets. Auld Reekie is as reeky as ever and, as it’s festival season, the Edinburgh Fringe is in full swing, with performers and audience-members forced to tip-toe around rubbish to get to and from gigs. This has led to some performers documenting the state of Scotland’s capital on Twitter, and they’re not images VisitScotland is going to be including in its ads any time soon.

The SNP’s response has alternated between what Malcolm Tucker liked to call ‘Nomfup’ and blaming Labour, which runs Edinburgh City Council, even though it was running it in coalition with the SNP just four months ago. Anyway, as of lunchtime Wednesday, the Scottish Government are all over the problem, with Sturgeon’s deputy John Swinney announcing a summit with council bosses. In Scotland, council pay is set by Cosla, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, and in finest SNP fashion, Swinney has blamed ‘non-SNP leaders in Cosla’ for failing to agree a deal with the unions. If that sounds like a tortuous formulation, it’s because blaming the ultimate leader of Cosla would be a bit awkward: the president is Shona Morrison, the first ever SNP head of the organisation. Besides, as the opposition parties point out, it isn’t a ‘non-SNP’ government that has spent 15 years in power cutting local authority budgets.

The Scottish Government’s sudden swing into action has more to do with Wednesday’s announcement of strike action in an additional 13 council areas, threatening to bring Edinburgh-style scenes of refuse-caked pavements to towns across Scotland. Rather inconveniently, all this comes one year on from the Glasgow waste crisis which saw the local SNP council desperately try to clean up rat-infested streets in time for Cop26. John Swinney keeps stressing the additional £140 million Holyrood previously gave to local authorities to help make pay offers but he’ll have to do better than that to get a handle on Scotland’s stinky summer. He’ll also have to do it alone. Nicola Sturgeon is in Edinburgh today but not to settle the bin strike. She’s starring in ‘In Conversation with Nicola Sturgeon’ at the Fringe. With organisers charging £15 a ticket, it’s reassuring to know someone is cleaning up in Edinburgh.