ALL FROTH AND NO BEER!

Schools, welfare, health – the SNP promised to transform Scotland. But what has it actu ally de liver ed?

IT IS only five months since the Scottish parliamentary election but already Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP Government looks tired. Search in vain for the big idea. A game-changing policy that can transform Scottish society? Don’t hold your breath. Education reform was supposed to be the highlight of the SNP’s programme for government. But nearly half a year since the election there is neither sight nor sound of legislation to put the parliament’s powers where the Government’s words are. What are they waiting for? Instead of moving ahead with the delivery of newly devolved social security powers, the talk at Holyrood this week was about how difficult it all is and how long it will all take.

Having moaned for years about how few welfare powers the Scottish parliament used to have, why is the SNP dragging its feet now that social security devolution is upon us?

There is an exception to this, of course. There is one policy of which the Nationalists never tire – independence. But fixating on their constitutional obsession is not the job they were elected in May to do.

Their job is to get on with running the country. And there is plenty they should be doing – fixing the NHS staffing crisis, liberating schools, investing in our cities, growing the skills economy rather than slashing college places, cutting the attainment gap rather than cutting the bursaries poorer students rely on to access higher education.

It is a national disgrace that fewer students from Scotland’s most deprived areas attend university than is the case elsewhere in the UK.

Instead of addressing such problems – many of which are of the SNP’s own making after nearly a decade in power – the Nationalists dither and delay. The SNP has become a study in inertia: all froth and no beer.

THIS is inexcusable. Scotland has a higher rate of economic inactivity than the rest of the UK, a lower employment rate than the rest of Britain, and the lowest employment growth rate anywhere in the UK. London has an employment growth rate five times that of Scotland.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party lurches ever further to the extremes. That way oblivion lies.

It isn’t his ineffectiveness as leader of his party, where only 40 of his 230 MPs support him. It isn’t even that he is palpably unelectable. It’s what he believes – and has always believed.

Conservatives have long known Labour cannot be trusted with Britain’s economic security. But under Corbyn Labour cannot be trusted with Britain’s national security, either.

This is a man who wanted the IRA to win, let us not forget. And this is a man who considers Nato to be a greater threat to the UK and our allies than Vladimir Putin’s Russia is. Corbyn isn’t just deluded, he’s dangerous.

As the Nationalists dawdle and as Labour retreats to the fringes of politics, there is a once-in-ageneration opportunity for the Scottish Conservatives to seize both the initiative and the centre ground. Under Ruth Davidson’s leadership, that is precisely what we are doing.

Labour’s traditional voters need not feel abandoned by the lunacy that has overtaken the party’s leadership – and they certainly shouldn’t feel their only home now resides in the competing nationalisms of Ukip or the SNP.

The Scottish Conservatives are a modern, progressive, outward-looking and forwardfacing party. Our ambitions for a low tax, high growth, inclusive and sustainable economy are for all of Scotland: urban and rural, younger and older, wealthier and poorer.

For too long in Scotland we have allowed the myth to fester that it is only the political Left which is interested in poverty, regeneration and renewal. The truth is quite the opposite: it is the solutions offered by the Left that have been shown to fail.

Don’t take my word for it. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has led the UK’s research into poverty for decades. Its most recent report, published a few weeks ago, is a comprehensive strategy for how the UK can ‘solve poverty’. Much of it is music to a Conservative’s ears.

‘For those who can, work represents the best route out of poverty,’ the report states. Amen to that: we have been saying this for years. Our programme of welfare reform is expressly designed to smooth the journey from welfare to work.

Work should always pay. That’s why we have lifted the low-paid out of income tax and why we are legislating for a national living wage.

That’s why we have invested in employability programmes to ease the longer-term unemployed back into the workplace.

And that’s why David Cameron’s greatest achievement as Prime Minister was to oversee an economic recovery that led to record job creation in the UK – Scotland included.

BUT the Rowntree Foundation’s home truths do not end there. Additional spending on benefits without addressing root causes ‘has failed to reduce poverty’, it says. That is a damning indictment of the Left’s abject failure to address the underlying causes of poverty.

Both Labour and the SNP take a sticking-plaster approach to poverty, preferring short-term fixes that focus only on the symptoms and not the causes.

Yet, those causes are no mystery. We know what they are. Addiction, family breakdown, worklessness and educational under-attainment are prime among them.

Tackling these causes is not ‘blaming poverty on the poor’, as our opponents would have it. It is simply being honest about what is needed if we are serious, as we should be, about eradicating poverty from our society.

So what has the SNP done? Consider addiction. In last year’s Budget the SNP cut drug and alcohol funding by a shocking 20%. This, despite 2015 seeing the highest number of drugsrelated deaths on record – more than double the figure for 2005.

The Scottish Government seems more interesting in parking people on methadone than in funding meaningful treatment.

Or take family breakdown. Instead of targeting support on those who need it most, Scottish Ministers stick like leeches to their hated Named Person policy, despite it being ruled unlawful by the UK’s highest court.

The Scottish Conservatives would replace Named Persons with a crisis family fund, providing tailored support to those with the most complex needs.

Over the coming months expect to hear a lot more from the Conservatives about social justice and social reform. The Left has had its say, and has failed. The Nationalists are tired, out of ideas, uninterested in government, and fixated on the constitution.

But there is one party bursting with ideas to make Scotland fairer, more prosperous, and an even better place to live, whatever your walk of life. A party unafraid to take the initiative, to take the fight to our opponents, and to take the new centreground of politics.

l Adam Tomkins is a Conservative MSP for Glasgow.

They’re tired, out of ideas, fixated on the constitution