Alex Massie Alex Massie

The SNP is using Covid to bury bad news

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

This, everyone agrees, is no time for politics as normal. We are – all of us – engaged in a great national struggle. Partisanship is for yesterday and tomorrow; these are different times and the ordinary rules of politics have been suspended.

Even so, the occasional green shoot of normality can still be seen and for some of us this is a joyous thing indeed. So yesterday I was delighted to see the Scottish government announce that an inconvenient and controversial review of Scottish education, due to be led by officials from the OECD, will not report its findings until June 2021 at the earliest.

Elections to the Scottish parliament are due to be held in May 2021 and clearly there is no connection between these two events, just as there is no connection between the election date and the fact that the Scottish government’s proposed reforms to gender recognition laws have also been delayed until some, as yet unspecified, time after the election.

This is a good time to be burying controversy and, from the SNP’s perspective, this is eminently sensible. Why take the risk of allowing bad news to derail the party’s campaign for a fourth term in office?

Never waste a crisis, as all the smart types are fond of saying these days

Still, the shamelessness of it all is in one sense immensely entertaining; a reminder that despite everything else there is still room for politics. Never waste a crisis, as all the smart types are fond of saying these days.

The education review was forced upon the Scottish government in a rare instance of the opposition parties at Holyrood working together to inconvenience the minority SNP administration. As such it was most unwelcome.

Worse still, the review into Scottish education – and specifically the question of whether the country’s Curriculum for Excellence is working – could not possibly end well for the nationalists.

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