Voters can make things simple for SNP MPs thinking of boycotting Westminster – Christine Jardine

Often it seems that a grand, pointless gesture to grab the headlines is more important than doing the hard work to win improvements for constituents. Seldom more so than the recent, self-serving tantrums of the SNP at Westminster.

Immediately after the Chancellor’s Budget speech, the SNP insisted that we all waste time voting on whether some procedures, which happen anyway, could get started. Why? To disrupt things. Good for them. Make a scene. Hold things up, prevent the Labour leader making his speech for 15 minutes because that will help your constituents pay their bills.

At best, it let people interested in what the biggest financial statement of the year might mean for their family, their job, their mortgage, rent or fuel prices have time to make a cuppa. But that was all it did. And while last week they were threatening not to take up their seats if they were re-elected, this week I wondered what they actually do. In that instant it didn’t seem to be about serving the public.

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Doubts are beginning to be expressed here too about whether the nationalists are being completely up front about what they are up to in Holyrood. In a recent interview, the director of Shelter Scotland, Alison Watson, said the First Minister was “gaslighting” Scotland following steep cuts to the housing budget.

Last year the organisation called on the First Minister to declare a housing emergency, the need for a political response to the crisis being obvious. Local authorities in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Argyll and Bute have all declared a housing emergency.

In contrast, I turned on the radio on Friday morning to hear that British politics is about to lose Theresa May. Even if I often disagreed with her politics, I would never have accused the former Prime Minister of doing anything other than what she believed best for this country.

In the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, in which she had supported Remain, she put national unity first to try to get what she thought was the best deal. I suspect history will be much kinder in recording her efforts than many of her own party members were in their treatment.

On the opposition benches too, there is now a widespread recognition that perhaps we did not appreciate the scale of the challenge which she had taken on. A divided country, led by a divided party whose right wing she was, in retrospect, perhaps defending us all against. I found myself wondering this weekend how differently she might have handled Covid and its aftermath.

However, there is little doubt that the divisions we saw emerge during her premiership led us down the road to the petty, tantrum-like behaviour so many seem to think is appropriate now. Fortunately, I believe the public is more than capable of seeing through them. Perhaps next time they’ll save SNP politicians the trouble of deciding whether to travel to Westminster.

Christine Jardine is the Scottish Liberal Democrat MP for Edinburgh West