Humza failed his way to the top... he can’t complain when ministers do the same thing

WHAT do you have to do to get your jotters in Scottish politics? We learned last week that more than 18,000 Scots died while waiting for NHS treatment in 2022.

You might think that the health secretary at the time should be clearing his desk. But he already did – and moved into Bute house.

Humza Yousaf presided over routinely missed waiting times targets for Accident and Emergency, cancer, psychological therapies, child and adolescent mental health, radiology and endoscopy.

He launched a Covid recovery blueprint widely panned as vague and superficial. on his watch, four in five dentists were refusing new NHS patients. one in three GP surgeries had at least one vacancy.

For this record of achievement, Yousaf was promoted to the top job.

When failure is rewarded, failure is encouraged. A case in point is lorna Slater, one of the most incompetent ministers devolution has yet produced. She has somehow managed to take a deposit Return Scheme with support from left to Right, eco-warriors to business leaders, and turn it into one of the Scottish Government’s most despised policies – a real feat in a competitive field.

Surliness

The DRS has been delayed amid outcry from businesses desperate for details. Supermarkets, who face having to collect used bottles, warn they could exclude beverages from home deliveries altogether.

Ministers only belatedly applied for a trading exemption so the scheme would cover bottlers and distributors based in England but selling to Scotland.

Without this exemption, the scheme would collapse – but instead of securing it in a timely manner, Slater has preferred to pick a fight with Westminster.

The minister greeted with surliness a UK Government offer to grant the exemption if glass was excluded. This compromise would allow Scotland to pioneer a DRS and for England and Wales to follow in its footsteps. here was a chance for Scotland to lead the UK – but Slater and her fellow Nationalist ministers preferred grievance to governance.

Unsurprisingly, Yousaf has kept Slater in post. he is too weak to sack a co-signatory to the SNP-Green cooperation agreement, but he is in another bind, too. A First Minister who has failed his way to the top can’t complain when ministers serving him learn from his example.

The same is true when it comes to ferries, one of the most comprehensive fiascos to come out of holyrood. Something as basic as procuring boats in a nation famed for shipbuilding has turned into an almighty shambles.

The Glen Sannox and hull 802 are five years late and substantially over-budget. A ‘soft launch’ had to be faked for public relations reasons, complete with paintedon windows for a half-built vessel. The shipyard was eventually nationalised, and yet ministers cannot block bonuses being paid out to top executives.

Meanwhile, islanders have been subjected to delays and cancellations. South uist will have to do without ferry services for the remainder of the month. At First Minister’s Questions, Alasdair Allan, Nationalist MSP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, commented tersely: ‘In a statement that could only have been written a long way from South uist, customers were advised that they could instead get to oban and Mallaig via either Barra or Skye.’

That is exactly the problem: whether it’s ferry schedules or ferry procurement, the major decisions are all being made far away from the people who rely on ferries to go about their daily lives. The transport needs of islanders are not a priority for Central Belt ministers and officials.

The ferries scandal has rumbled on for more than half a decade now and yet no one has been required to resign. little wonder. The transport and islands minister during two crucial years of the ferry-building timeline was, of course, humza Yousaf. Failure heaped upon failure by one mediocrity after another.

These are by no means the only examples of institutional disarray. It’s hard to shake the impression that nothing works in Scotland anymore, least of all its government. It’s not just that this minister or that is incompetent, it’s that the whole machinery of government is in the grips of a systems failure, a culture of dysfunction in which processes are still gone through but results no longer expected.

It wouldn’t be so bad if this mob had an ounce of self-awareness, but they all reckon they’re latter-day Thomas Jeffersons. And there’s a devolution industry built around the pretence that this is an improvement on what went before. That the 24-year experience of the Scottish parliament has even remotely lived up to the 1997 referendum’s grand promises.

Yet among political, media and academic elites, indignation is reserved not for holyrood’s failings but for anyone who points them out. When it comes to political turmoil, Scotland’s governing class is farsighted. Westminster’s defects are forever in sharp focus but problems closer to home are blurred by ideology and insiderism. however, unless we are honest about the desperate state of government in Scotland, it’s never going to get any better. Candour is not disloyalty, wanting your country to be governed better is not unpatriotic.

So let’s be candid. William F Buckley Jr, the waspish American commentator, declared: ‘I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 members of the harvard university faculty.’

I’m not sure they still publish the phone book these days, but I submit that Scotland would be better governed by 28 people selected at random from Sauchiehall Street on a Saturday afternoon than by the 28 ministers at holyrood.

In spite of the closed ranks and pervasive groupthink, a few inhabitants of the holyrood constellation privately admit to doubts. Whether they hail from politics, policymaking, delivery, or analysis, they cite the same epiphanies that something might be amiss in how Scotland is run.

Ineptitude

Gender law reform demonstrated how easy it is for outside lobby groups to capture the apparatus of government. The Salmond inquiry revealed a lack of transparency, documentation and proper process in government. The failed attempt to incorporate the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into Scots law put ministerial ineptitude on full display. There will be more epiphanies in time. This is not just about the SNP. They’ve been running the show for 16 years and deserve the lion’s share of the blame but the malady goes beyond party politics. It implicates civil servants, processes and procedures, and an entire mindset about government. It goes to a fact that, however objectionable or discomfiting, is inescapable: devolution isn’t working.

I have argued previously for devolution reform so that holyrood strengthens rather than undermines the union. That’s not what this is about. This is about making holyrood work in a day-to-day sense, something we should all want regardless of our constitutional inclinations.

Holyrood needs to reform itself so that its institutions are more transparent, more independent of ministers, and more rigorous in their scrutiny. MSPs and commentators tend to think of reform in terms of structures and processes – but this is skipping too far ahead.

The starting point has to be deciding what kind of politics we want. Sorely needed at holyrood – and throughout Scottish civic life – is a spirit of openness and pluralism and a commitment to rigour and excellence. We have to recognise that things are going badly wrong and want to put them right before we can figure out how to do that.

Denial will only lead to more dysfunction. More patients stuck on waiting lists and ferries stuck in shipyards. More humza Yousafs and lorna Slaters. More reasons to lament that the opportunities of devolution have been squandered.