Scotland’s thirdworld decline
THE First Minister sounds very confused about the idea of mandate. I’ll explain it for him. He and close colleagues have had a mandate to serve the people of Scotland in devolved government for an impressively long time.
The first years were very promising and I sensed improvement when I visited on a work trip in 2013.
The last 10 years have been a stealthy plunge in the direction of the third world. The administration has very little time to nurse the mandate idea.
Problem one has been an authoritarian secrecy which has fuelled all the other problems. Money is secretly squandered. Tenders and contracts are concealed. Gigantic sums are spent on having no ferries to the Isles. That is the physical structure of corruption and it could cost lives.
I’ve not heard threnodies of joy about the trains either.
Secrecy has been backed with menaces in national and local
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government. That is a clear taste of the third world.
The NHS and its staff are exhausted. They may be just as exhausted in England and Wales, but the NHS is a devolved issue and the buck should have stopped with a serially incompetent devolved minister. Waiting times cost lives.
Drug deaths? Education attainment? Let’s just point to one supremely important question. It’s a giant failure in the rest of the UK as well, but it’s a devolved portfolio. Here goes: a high proportion of children living in poverty is third-world performance in one of the richest countries in the world. Now let’s get back to the mandate thing.
The administration’s mandate to serve the Scots runs until 2026. If they don’t make the effort to govern properly well ahead of that, they’re out of office. No mandate and no dreams. No EU passport and no fresh and modern institutions. No imaginative Nordic foreign policy at all. No social democratic rescaling of spending. Whatever rises from the dust of all that will be up to new people.
The First Minister may be savouring an abrupt rebuke with breakfast on July 5. That ought to warn SNP leadership that it’s time – and very late – for getting real about the job they have. That’s the only mandate they have. Any other is up to the public and the public will not reward any more failure.
Tim Cox,
Bern, Switzerland.