When will Scottish nationalists come clean about devolution? |
The Programme for Government – picture a dour, cheapo version of the King’s Speech – is an annual statement by the Scottish First Minister outlining his legislative plans for the coming year. SNP leader John Swinney delivered his latest PfG (even the acronym is soulless) on Tuesday and the word of the day was ‘reform’. Swinney proposed to scrap 12 health boards, redraw local council boundaries, reduce the number of public bodies, and generally make government more streamlined and responsive to the needs of service users.
There is no force on this Earth as conservative as the Scottish public sector
There is no force on this Earth as conservative as the Scottish public sector
There are some decent ideas in there, but none likely to survive contact with the public sector unions whose members form a large segment of the Nationalists’ electoral coalition. Swinney vowed to ‘rewire the Scottish state to ensure services fit around people, rather than expecting them to fit around a static system’, which might sound appealing to you or me but is positive heresy to the lanyard mafia. There is no force on this Earth as conservative as the Scottish public sector.
This is one area where the unions might do us all a favour, for the SNP’s track record on reform is not exactly shining. There was the scrapping of Scotland’s historical constabularies and their replacement by Police Scotland, a source of near-constant controversy more than a decade on. There was the creation of the Education Scotland quango and the Curriculum for Excellence policy that tried to rewrite the fundamentals of teaching, both of which are being overhauled after failing to command the confidence of teachers or parents. There was the attempt to reorganise community and residential provision into a National Care Service, to standardise recycling practices into a national scheme, to give ministers the........