Setback for Sturgeon as rubbish piles up in Edinburgh

Traditionally, it is in August that Edinburgh “casts off its staid reputation” and shows itself off to the world as a “vibrant, cosmopolitan, cultural centre”, said The Daily Telegraph. But this year, the hundreds of thousands of people who flocked to the city for the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe met a sight described by some as nothing short of apocalyptic. Owing to a strike by refuse workers, mounds of rubbish bags lay piled up on the streets; noxious slime oozed onto pavements from overflowing public bins; and a foul stench hung heavy in the air.

Initially, the SNP Government tried to pin the blame on Edinburgh’s Labour-run council, said The Times, but that strategy unravelled when workers in a string of other local authorities walked out too. Nor is there yet an end in sight. This week, unions rejected an offer of a 5% pay rise, plus a one-off payment for lower earners, saying it would do too little to help the half of Scottish council workers who are paid less than £25,000pa.

Scotland is in the midst of a summer of discontent, said Tom Harris in the Daily Mail: next week, schools and nurseries will close for three days as a result of strikes by cleaners and other support staff. And though Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP administration has now offered extra funding to help settle the disputes, critics blame it for slashing local authority budgets in the first place, leaving them ill-prepared for the cost-of-living crisis.

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This is yet another setback, to add to the long list the SNP has presided over. It suits Sturgeon to blame Westminster; but the country’s real problem is that it is governed by people who’ve no real interest in the day-to-day grind of government. They haven’t joined the SNP to raise school standards, or cut NHS waiting lists. They have only one real goal: the creation of an independent Scotland.

You might expect the escalating strikes to pose a threat to Sturgeon’s grip on power, said Lukanyo Mnyanda in the FT. But the divisive issue of independence remains very potent in Scotland, and while that debate rages, other matters “tend to take a backseat”. Her Government has survived a barrage of questions about its record, after 15 years in power, so it’s unlikely that the rubbish on the streets will prove a tipping point.