Tony Blair’s great devolution experiment has been an unmitigated disaster

The implosion of the Scottish National Party (SNP) is fast becoming more of a popcorn fest than binge-watching Last April, we stared open-mouthed as the police seized a £110,000 Niesmann + Bischoff motorhome from a house in Fife following the arrest of Nicola Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell, who was last week charged in connection with the embezzlement of party funds (he denies the allegations).

Next week, we’ll be breaking open the Butterkist once more to see

Humza Yousaf, Sturgeon’s successor as Scotland’s First Minister, face a vote of no confidence at Holyrood. The potentially career-ending ballot comes after Yousaf suddenly axed the SNP’s power-sharing arrangement with the Greens in a spectacular own goal that has left him teetering on the brink after just a year in office.

Even more hilariously, the deciding vote is set to be held by Ash Regan, whose defection to Alex Salmond’s Alba Party last October was labelled by Yousaf as “no great loss” to the SNP. If there has been a more hapless politician in Holyrood’s kilt-clad history, then I’m struggling to think of one.

Yet Yousaf – dubbed “Humza Useless” by his critics – is hardly the only inadequate politician to have won power under devolution. Sturgeon, Mark Drakeford, Sadiq Khan, Vaughan Gething – is this really the best our political system can do?

Devolution was meant to bring power closer to the people, resulting in more effective decision-making. Instead, all it seems to have achieved is the propelling to power of complete non-entities who think their role is to beg for money from Westminster – only to spend it on insane policies and their own incompetent governance.

It is not just in Scotland, although the SNP’s record has been particularly shocking. The Saltire-draped party has done so much so badly, it’s hard to think of anything it has done well.

It mishandled the pandemic, enduring a similar Covid fatality rate to England despite harsher restrictions. Thanks to its so-called “progressive” tax rate system, people earning more than £28,000 in Scotland are taxed more than they would be in England. Yet still, there is an enormous black hole in the public finances, while Scotland’s deficit as a percentage of GDP remains substantially bigger than the UK’s as a whole.

Other SNP failures include its dangerous and unwanted gender reforms, the ferry fiasco, a finding by

Scotland’s children’s commissioner that Sturgeon had “absolutely failed” to deliver for young people, with Scotland having slipped down the education rankings, and a “staggeringly bleak” Audit Scotland report painting “a picture of a health service in crisis” according to the British Medical Association. The SNP is so useless it hasn’t even been able to deliver independence, for pity’s sake.

Wales is no better, with new First Minister Gething now having to partially row back on his predecessor Drakeford’s nanny state 20mph zones after a call for the limit to be scrapped broke Senedd records for the mostsigned petition on its website. Other bonkers ideas dreamt up by Welsh Labour include a four-day week and a universal basic income pilot that pays you a salary regardless of whether you’re working or not.

During his remarkably unimpressive tenure, virtue signalling Drakeford spent much of his time piggybacking on every “progressive” cause he could find, splashing nearly £9million of Welsh taxpayers’ cash a year on woke jobs. Having aped even Sturgeon’s draconian approach to lockdown, Drakeford also adopted her minimum alcohol pricing policy, only for alcohol-related deaths in Wales to reach record levels. At one point, his government even considered banning energy drinks, ludicrously suggesting they were a “gateway” to smoking and drinking.

In December, we learnt that Welsh pupils were performing the worst out of the UK in maths, reading and science, according to the latest results from the Programme for International Student Assessment, which is based on tests taken by 15-year-olds from around the world. Yet Drakeford’s record on health was perhaps even worse, with hospital waiting lists recently reaching the highest ever recorded.

London has become a similar sort of basket case under Khan, a mayor accused this week by Foreign Secretary James Cleverly of saying more about Gaza than “black kids getting murdered in south-east London”. Such is the arrogance of the former Labour MP for Tooting that his spokesman dismissed the “vile” comment as not deserving “the dignity of a response” rather than addressing the fact that there were 14,626 knife offences in London in the 12 months to the end of December last year – thousands more than the total for 2022.

Seemingly a mayor in denial, last December he was rebuked by the official statistics regulator for claiming knife crime had fallen under his watch when, according to the Office for Statistics Regulation, it had “significantly increased”.

The mayor’s record on housing has been described as “uniquely poor”. Research revealed that, as of

November last year, none of the 23,900 to 27,200 affordable homes that the mayor had promised between 2021 and 2026, under the second phase of the capital’s Governmentfunded housing programme, have been started.

First Minister Humza Yousaf at Bute House after ending the power-sharing agreement with the Green Party on Thursday

Yet earlier last year, he announced that he had hit a target of “starting” 116,000 homes between 2016-23 – studiously ignoring the fact that this figure included 7,189 started when Boris Johnson was still mayor.

This week Khan – along with his Tory rival Susan Hall – apparently shunned a housing hustings hosted by Shelter. Presumably, he would rather spend his time talking about how much he dislikes Donald Trump than his failures on crime, housing, the rail strikes and London’s flagging nighttime economy. I suppose it’s also easier than addressing the outrage over his Ulez scheme, one of many green vanity projects designed to make Khan look down with the Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion kids, who have been busily wreaking havoc on London’s roads and inside its galleries and sporting events.

The truth is that Tony Blair’s devolution experiment has not worked. In the US, bad state governments are punished by people choosing to move elsewhere, with thousands fleeing the likes of California for Florida to enjoy lower taxes. Here, we’re just left with this over-promoted collection of inadequates.

A no confidence vote in Yousaf would only appear to tell half the story of how disastrous devolution has actually been for Britain. properly interrogated, it would have been discovered that he had left Morocco in 2007 after having a “problem” with the intelligence services, and that he had been refused asylum in Germany.

(According to the UN Refugee Agency, 94 per cent of asylum applications from Morocco are rejected – presumably because it’s actually a safe country where Sir Richard Branson has a home).

Asked during his trial if he had been successful in applying for asylum during the three years he spent in “dispersal” lodgings in Hartlepool, he said: “I didn’t have any answer”. So he was basically left to kill.

How many other people have entered the UK illegally, and pose a similar threat to the safety and wellbeing of the British public?

The Home Office already has some serious questions to answer – as does the Ministry of Justice, which ultimately oversees legal aid. I can disclose that Alid received such help to fund his defence. Is that really the best use of public money?

Instead of resulting in better governance, it has elevated to high office a series of inadequates