IT WOULD make a niche Scottish parlour game: guess what “emergency” the SNP will declare next. If the criterion is crises that have peaked on their watch, then it’s a pretty large field.
We’ve already ticked off “climate”, “drugs deaths” and, just last week, “housing”. How about an ambulance emergency, or a prisons emergency or a culture emergency? Or, wait, I’ve got it - a ferries emergency?
It’s an odd notion, isn’t it, that a problem you have been unable to solve in 17 years as the party of government (and may have actively exacerbated) should suddenly become manageable because you publicly acknowledge it?
Odder still that the crises in question should be presented as divorced from the policies you have introduced (or failed to introduce) and accompanied by an air of astonishment. This despite the fact they fall directly within your remit, and have been brewing for years.
It’s not as if campaigners didn’t warn the SNP about the impact of successive cuts in funding to the Alcohol and Drug Partnerships before the death toll started its sharp rise, or that Shelter and other housing charities haven’t been highlighting the increase in homelessness, and the undersupply of affordable housing required to address it.
Yet, earlier this year, the Scottish Government cut £196 million from its affordable housing programme. You have to ask yourself: what did ministers expect to happen?
Every declaration of an emergency is first and foremost an admission of failure. And unless it comes with a fully-funded plan of action, and a commitment to change, it also risks being an admission of defeat.
Like Scotland’s drug deaths toll (still the highest per capita in western Europe), our record on housing ought to be a source of shame. According to Shelter Scotland, almost 10,000 children are now "trapped" in temporary accommodation, a rise of 138% since 2014.
It also found there had been a 10% increase in households becoming homeless compared to last year.........