This election has seen policing ignored. Where's the justice in that? |
The key election battlegrounds used to be health, education and policing – but this time around, the last of those three has been very much the poor relation, argues Herald columnist Calum Steele
When it comes to the delivery of public services, elections historically had three main battlegrounds – health, education and policing – usually in that order, even if the top two would occasionally interchange – but a predictable top three nonetheless.
But no more. Policing has been unceremoniously dumped into the also-rans, slipping steadily down the league table of political priorities behind nebulous slogans like “climate justice”, “fairness”, and “inclusion”. These self-righteous sound bites now devour far more political oxygen than concrete policies for which governments can actually be held to account. Like much in modern Scotland, performative virtue has become more important than delivering results.
All three of the historic big-ticket issues are portfolio headaches for any government. Cabinet Secretaries are assigned the brief for each but largely have little to do with the actual delivery of the service. Health and education policy largely revolve around throwing even more money at them, whilst policing is reduced to cannibalising itself simply to balance the books – putting accounting ahead of increasingly unfashionable pass-times like locking up those who wreak havoc on our streets.
The health portfolio has long since been canonised, as consecutive governments persuaded voters that the solution to its problems is to keep pouring money into it. Demographic changes clearly have an impact, as an ageing population comes with obvious health challenges, but a more than doubling of real-terms costs since devolution points to less of a strategy and more of a wishing-well approach to addressing........