We’ll pay the price for Nicola’s new agenda

AFTER indolent months in which Holyrood barely passed any legislation as the SNP obsessed over the constitution, Nicola Sturgeon’s new programme for government was supposed to be a complete reset of her party’s agenda.

Having had her fingers burned in the General Election – 21 MPs lost to a hardcore independence/anti-Brexit agenda – Miss Sturgeon steered clear of any mention of breaking up Britain.

Instead we got a curate’s egg, good in parts, and the biggest issue remains unanswered: How will all this be funded?

Many might argue the cap on public sector wages had to be lifted as inflation bites, but there has to be pragmatism. How will it be paid for? Likewise Frank’s Law to help those with early-onset degenerative diseases is laudable – and expensive.

Yet more taxation – and remember Scots workers already pay the highest income tax rates in the UK – seems the likely answer. Miss Sturgeon fudged the issue, waffling about ‘progressive taxes’ and taking aboard the ideas of others.

Given Labour and the Lib Dems are always in favour of having more of other people’s money to spend, and that the spendthrift Greens have been annexed by the SNP, proposals to squeeze the hard-working harder still look certainties.

There was good news on a bottle deposit scheme to tackle plastic junk. The mood music on education, in a parlous state after a decade of SNP mismanagement, seems better, though detail is sketchy.

But it beggars belief that a party so out of touch with the public on justice is to abandon jail terms of less than 12 months. Under the SNP’s soft-touch policies, horrific crimes – sex attacks, assaults, domestic abuse – can attract sentences of 12 months. In a modish bid to empty jails, the SNP has lost sight of victims.

And only a party leader who cannot drive could deliver the SNP’s transport manifesto with a straight face. No new petrol and diesel cars by 2032 is university moot stuff. We don’t have the generating capacity, or the charging points, and electric cars haven’t the range to be useful in Scotland.

And as Quentin Willson argues on Page Seven, manufacturers cannot hope to keep pace with this precipitous agenda.

This may be the SNP getting back to the day job. Taxpayers can only sit nervously waiting for the bill to arrive.