Scots face five more years of lost opportunity

AT election times, it’s the job of opposition parties to highlight the failings of incumbents and make a better offer. What’s unusual about the current campaign is that we have a government party sounding as if they have been in opposition for 14 years.

One local manifestation of this was Kate Forbes, the Finance Secretary, winning headlines with the discovery that rural housing is a problem. Ms Forbes represents parts of Scotland, including Skye and Wester Ross, in which hen’s teeth are easier to find than affordable homes for young people wanting to stay in their own communities.

The problem has mounted around her. People have cried out. And absolutely nothing has been done. In fact, the situation has got much, much worse as the second home market boomed and the collapse of crofting regulation destroyed any protection against the free market.

Ms Forbes has been perfectly placed to understand these issues and apply creativity to addressing them. This is not just about building the occasional block of social housing, welcome though that might be in places it hasn’t happened in for decades. It is also about forcing the release of land, enforcing crofting regulation, disturbing the silos of bureaucratic government – all too much like hard work for our Braveheart politicians.

The same point was well made by Andy Wightman, now standing as an independent for a Highlands and Islands list seat and with a wider reputation for his work on land reform. He supports independence but is not so lazy and useless as to use that as a shield for doing nothing in the meantime.

Last week, a nationalist luminary posted on Twitter: “Once independence is restored it will be time to tackle land ownership and the landowners. It will be time for Scotland’s citizens to take control…” Mr Wightman responded drily: “Parliament could do this now if it had the will. Doesn’t need to wait for independence”.

That’s the thought which strikes horror into the hearts of the one-dimensional placemen and women voted in as SNP MSPS. Doing things “now” requires creativity and commitment. It requires competence rather than a litany of reasons why things cannot change, due to a supposed lack of powers or money. Scotland is sold short with lazy politics.

Before anyone believes a word of current promises, it would be worth checking out the last lot from 2016. Air Passenger Duty would be abolished to “boost Scotland’s economy”. That soon disappeared into the ether. Or how about the Scottish Energy Company, which would transform the electricity bills of the poor? After spending £400,000 on the publicity, the whole back-of-an-envelope wheeze was quietly abandoned, along with the poor.

In fairness, the promise to set up a Scottish National Investment Bank has finally been delivered. The question now is why they bothered? It is well on its way to becoming another complete fiasco, so far with just two customers both of which were in receipt of public funding anyway.

A friend who is launching a new business made inquiries and found that the Scottish National Investment Bank would lend to him with a 6-8 per cent rate of interest – treble what he could get from a commercial lender. And the Sturgeon Bank wanted equity as part of a deal. It was not a difficult offer to decline.

Crying out for additional powers is smart politics in nationalist terms because it feeds into the narrative of persecution at the hands of Westminster. Using these powers involves risk so that most of the fiscal powers on offer since 2016 have not been used. Our economic performance is so stagnant that raising our own taxes brings in less money than the Barnett formula, so why bother?

The record of actual achievements over the past 14 years is incredibly threadbare. Can anyone – even among their own supporters – list reforms which have made radical, progressive impacts on Scottish society? Go on, try! I certainly can’t, but I could list a catalogue of landmark reforms from which we all continue to benefit, from previous decades.

Sometimes the governments which delivered them got little thanks for their efforts but now politics is judged by a different yardstick. It is not what a government does that matters but what it talks about doing in a world that is not going to exist within any definable timescale. And that is what half of Scottish voters seem willing to settle for.

The editor of Holyrood magazine, Mandy Rhodes, is by no means unfriendly to the SNP but she too marvelled at how they are “cleverly positioning themselves as an opposition” while Scotland has “the poorest life expectancy across the UK, child poverty is at record levels, drug deaths are our eternal shame, education has gone backwards, businesses feel ignored”. And that was only a fraction of her indictment.

Those who vote for more of the same may think they are demanding a referendum, which isn’t going to happen anyway. Or endorsing pandemic “leadership”, the self-image of which is not remotely supported by the statistics. In fact, what they are voting for is another five years of mediocre government and squandered opportunities.

As Andy Wightman said: “Parliament could do this [fill in as appropriate] now if it had the will”. But what use is that to politicians whose vested interest is in constantly demonstrating what, according to their overarching narrative, Holyrood cannot do – not what it can?

Crying out for additional powers is smart in nationalist terms because it feeds into the narrative of persecution