Bankrupt
Bankrupt
The SNP is not only out of money, it is out of ideas
There is no doubt the state of public finances across the UK is bleak.
Not since Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897 has the opening up of books apparently caused so much horror and trepidation.
In Westminster, Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are warning of hard times ahead.
Departments are being asked to find savings. Some taxes – perhaps inheritance and capital gains – may be increased.
Things will get worse, as they say, before they get better.
Remarkably, the situation in Scotland is even bleaker still.
Once again, a Scottish Government budget has been ripped up just months after it was approved.
Emergency spending controls have been imposed by the least imposing Finance Secretary of the devolution era.
Everything* from spending on mental health services to universities has been cut, while an almost £500million fund raised by the Scottish Government selling licenses for offshore wind will now be used to cover day-to-day spending, rather than long-term infrastructure investment.
As the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton wryly noted of the debacle: “It’s Scotland’s wind, and they’ve gone and blown it.”
Even Scotland’s much-vaunted social contract – giving benefits to rich people as well as poor people – is under threat.
When the SNP embraced Scottish exceptionalism, this is not, presumably, what it had in mind.
It will come as little surprise to even the most cursory observer of Scottish politics over the last decade that the nationalists are laying the blame for all this woe firmly at the door of Number 10. “This is the consequence,” the SNP’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn warned, “of a new era of austerity…”.
The problem – as that same cursory observer will know well – is that that simply is not the case. The current issues in the Scottish Government’s budget are not the result of Westminster cuts, but SNP profligacy and mismanagement.
As the Scottish Fiscal Commission noted recently: “… Much of the pressure [on the Scottish Government budget] comes from the Scottish Government’s own decisions” – decisions, it would add, were it not an impartial body, that were made entirely for political, not economic or social, reasons.
The ruinously expensive council tax freeze was introduced at SNP conference last year purely to prop up Humza Yousaf’s floundering premiership in the aftermath of the devastating defeat in the Rutherglen by-election.
Social security spending was set at a higher level in Scotland purely to create a dividing line with the allegedly callous system at Westminster.
Public sector workers were awarded massive pay deals purely so the SNP could claim Scotland was the only part of the UK to avoid strike action.
The SNP has, in short, managed the Scottish Government budget as a buy-now, pay-later electoral bribery machine, creating a state with Scandinavian-style inputs for Soviet-style outcomes.
And yet, this tactic did not emerge out of a void. It is, in fact, not even a recent phenomenon.
The reality is that the SNP has always treated Scotland’s public finances as a blank cheque to try and persuade more people to back independence.
The persistent extension of universal benefits – now apparently under threat – is a prime example of how the nationalists have sought to manipulate middle Scotland through the exchequer.
Certainly, for Scottish nationalists it was never the role of government to act as a steward of public finances, but to use them as a campaigning tool in a perpetual final push for independence.
Such an attitude was always going to be unsustainable, and we are now - quite literally - paying the price.
For Scottish Labour, this presents a major opportunity. In their mismanagement, the nationalists will now be forced to rip up much of the social contract they ineptly created, while simultaneously lacking the intellectual and political capital to replace it with something new.
Much of Scottish Labour’s electoral success will hinge on its ability to fill that void and create a new, sustainable vision for Scotland, which recognises the scale of both the economic and societal challenges facing the country.
In the meantime, however, we all unfortunately must live with the SNP’s continuing incompetence for at least another 18 months.
In that respect, things really will get worse before they get better.
*Inevitably, independence is the one policy area where the Scottish Government is reticent about whether it will reduce spending.
Stand-up comedy must be one of the finest arts in the entertainment business.
Making people laugh is, after all, never easy.
But that difficulty is compounded a hundred times or more in a packed auditorium full of people with different senses of humour and, in many cases, different levels of inebriation.
When politics is involved, the challenge is harder still.
The political comedian Matt Forde – who I saw at the Edinburgh Fringe and more recently at the Holyrood Magazine Garden Party – does, however, make it seem easy.
His impressions are a delight, but it is his incisive wit and irreverence that really make his show genuinely hilarious.
What made it particularly remarkable, however, was Forde himself.
At the end of last year’s Fringe, Forde was diagnosed and shortly afterwards treated for chordoma, a rare type of bone cancer.
He talked with deep emotion, but also startling good humour, about his diagnosis, treatment and recovery, and the ongoing impact that has on his life today.
As a young(ish) man who has recently been through a similar experience, that not only resonated with me deeply, but made me laugh out loud too.
And that really is an art.