I thought of trying to get people to pronounce John Swinney’s surname to rhyme with Tiny, but it won’t catch on. Swinney in his long dull career is merely a party loyalist. I compared him to being savaged by a dead pig in a reference to Geoffrey Howe, but the point is that people still remember the Howe being compared to a dead sheep, while even those of us who follow Scottish politics closely will struggle to remember Swinney even while he is First Minister.

The greatest fault of British politics since the Second World War is that it manages decline. Apart from a brief decade when Margaret Thatcher changed direction, we merely increase our debts, lower our productivity, and see our living standards become more mediocre. Swinney will manage the decline of the SNP.

Swinney is like one of the old Bolsheviks. He was there in the decades before the SNP were popular. Being a Scottish nationalist is not something he put on when it became easier to ditch the Labour Party and join the SNP. I strongly suspect that Swinney was born with Scottish nationalism.

Want to see more SNP fails? – Health Matters