For nearly 20 years the big-picture story of the United Kingdom has been the gradual but persistent decline in the state’s ability to function as it should. This is the super-sized unifying theory of our history since the financial crash of 2008. Appreciate that and you understand almost everything else. The state has been battered by a series of shocks which would have challenged first-class political leaders and have consequently overwhelmed those with whom an increasingly sullen electorate has been obliged to put up with.
Bailouts and austerity; pandemic and Brexit; war in Europe and inflation’s return; all these and more have sponsored the sense that Britain’s political class has been found wanting by events. The country has not been governed as it should. Fourteen years of Conservative administration came to a necessary end last summer but Sir Keir Starmer has discovered what voters intuitively sensed: swapping the manager does not necessarily guarantee an immediate improvement in results.
As both contribution to and consequence of this, nothing more surely confirms the essential Britishness of the SNP than its failure. Though shielded from the requirement to take the largest financial decisions, the SNP’s time in office has, at best, been a struggle to keep its head above water.
Some straightforward questions demonstrate as much. Is Scotland’s health service better than it was in 2007? Have the schools improved in the past 17 years? The answer to each of these is an obvious “No”. Likewise, the criminal justice system is under severe pressure and the government’s record on transport is, if we are being kind, best judged as “mixed”.
Of course there have been successes. It would be hard to govern for 17 years without some. The Scottish child payment, now worth £1,400 a year for every eligible young person, is a genuine act of redistribution making a measurable difference to the lives of those families that receive it.
But, in general, this has been an era in which government has been only just about managing. Two transport projects serve as metaphors for the state’s declining capacity to get things done. There is no need to mention the ferries again but just as the ruin of HS2 south of the border has become a metaphor for the government’s inability to set a clear courts or manage its responsibilities effectively so the saga of the A9 demonstrates something similar in Scotland, albeit on a smaller scale.
It is a decade since it was announced that the road between Perth and Inverness would be upgraded to dual carriageway status. Since then progress — if it may be deemed such — has limped along at not much more than a mile a year. Big talk; tiny outcomes.
Delivery is not the only thing that counts but no government can succeed without it. Yet across Britain, government often seems close to paralysed. Echoing Tony Blair, Starmer promises “delivery, delivery, delivery”, but just six months into his ministry the sense gathers that the prime minister is already losing the room.
That fear of losing the room helped prompt Nicola Sturgeon’s departure from Bute House. Her successor, poor Humza Yousaf, never had the room in the first place. Now John Swinney promises stability and a ministry that will put in the “hard yards” necessary for national improvement. Well, we’ll see.
One difficulty is that our governing class no longer has faith in its own abilities. Much of the government’s work is contracted out. Nothing can be done without first establishing a working group, a strategic review or a public consultation. “Here is an issue” the government says, “now what would you like us to do about it?”
Clearly there are times when these exercises are necessary. Governments must listen as well as act. Nevertheless, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. That is an invitation to the paralysis of inaction. And it is hard to avoid the suspicion that in Scotland we now suffer from precisely that condition.
Thus, a national care service was deemed essential until it became too difficult to take forward. Vested interests — sorry, “key stakeholders” — opposed the government’s proposals. And that was that. Shrinking from the fight the government retreated, hiding behind its own consultations. If this were a one-off it might not matter, but it is not. In 2018 the educational establishment effectively vetoed the government’s education bill and, not wanting to pick a fight, the government was easily persuaded to drop ideas that had, until then, also been deemed essential.
The objections to each of these plans may have been cogent but it is troubling that the government can be so easily blown off course. Then again, it is sometimes reasonable to wonder if the government knows its own course in the first place. To govern is to choose but too often this government prefers to duck choices. It is as though ministers believe omelettes may be made without breaking eggs. In place of clarity and a keen ministerial grip there is too often just the slush of melted promises.
Contradictions abound, too. Like Starmer, Swinney insists that economic growth is prerequisite for everything else. This is true. But just as Rachel Reeves’s budget sharply increased costs for business, so Shona Robison’s slashed funding for Scottish Enterprise and the Scottish National Investment Bank by a third. These had previously — correctly or not — been considered essential drivers of growth. Again, a lack of coherence, a lack of consistency, a lack of clarity and the sense the government is neither coming nor going.
The Scottish parliament was established, in the words of Donald Dewar, to offer the possibility of “Scottish solutions to Scottish problems”. This was a flattering conceit, to be sure, since it buttressed the notion this small lump of rock and peat had bespoke difficulties all of its own. In truth, there are vanishingly few distinctly or uniquely “Scottish problems”. Instead there are Caledonian variations on problems evident elsewhere in the United Kingdom.
Since the problems — economic, social and cultural — are much the same across Britain it should hardly be a surprise that the solutions are just as elusive in Scotland as elsewhere. The UK’s successes are largely shared and its shortcomings are pooled too. Britain isn’t working and nor is Scotland. In this, the SNP is every bit as British as the Labour Party and the Conservatives.