Why Scotland needs a short and snappy plan with real priorities

I thought it might be useful to go to the original source in search of a strategic reassessment of how the Scottish Government – or perhaps more accurately the Scottish civil service – could make the best use of diminishing resources. I didn’t really find that. 

The report tells us the Scottish Government has four priorities: eradicating child poverty; growing the economy; tackling the climate emergency, and ensuring high quality and sustainable public services. Scrolling down the considerable length of the meaty central section it is difficult to find any Scottish Government operations which are not included.

John Swinney delivered his first Programme for Government as First Minister (Image: PA/Andrew Milligan)

Every time you click “page down” up pops another policy area which seems to have been crowbarred in by an enthusiastic adviser.

Everything is there, but nothing is ranked. And when everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. That’s the central problem. We need to get better at this. We don’t need an exposition of every aspect of what the Scottish Government does. We do need a short, sharp statement of what the government is going to do to make things better than they currently are.

And we need to be clearer with people about the things that cannot be done, and why, explaining whose fault that is. By describing the constraints and limitations of devolution we make the case  for removing them through self-government.

READ MORE: Promising start – now can we go far enough fast enough?

Not doing that creates the space for SNP critics –  now including it seems the co-leader  of the Green Party – to suggest the government is choosing to make cuts of its own volition rather than having them forced upon it.

Whilst some things could be done better, the truth is that the Scottish Government cannot provide everything Scotland needs. We need to stop pretending it can.

The fourth objective is to ensure high quality and sustainable public services. What, all of them? All the time? For everyone? If we could actually achieve that, why would we need to be an independent country?

And how does this aim sit with our capacity to deliver it? Has the Scottish Government not been squeezed year after year by the Tories with block grant funding never enough to meet the demands on services? Aren’t we making cuts ourselves just now because budgets are insufficient? Isn’t the new Labour government threatening things can only get worse?

It is enormously difficult to improve the range and scope of public services in such times, and it doesn’t ring true with people if we claim otherwise.

What we can do is make tangible improvements in things that we can control. Government advisers should be researching the complaints people make about services and acting on them. Sometimes that will mean doing less better.

Take the railways for example. It shouldn’t be so difficult to devise a train timetable which is matched to the staffing available, including having teams on standby to cover unexpected absences.

That will require a political choice to have fewer (advertised) trains, but it would avoid having an entire platform full of people getting pissed off when one is cancelled at five minutes’ notice. It would also improve confidence in and support for a public train service and the people that run it.

It’s also time we stopped setting goals that cannot be achieved.

We want to eradicate child poverty – who wouldn’t? But child poverty is just a type of poverty, and poverty is a feature of capitalism which by its nature places surplus in the private hands of a few rather than socialises it for all.

Without the ability to regulate and control capitalism it is not possible to eradicate poverty.

So, a provincial administration which has no control over the movement of capital or labour within its territory cannot do it. Something to be borne in mind by those who think the Scottish Government can mitigate every Westminster cut with tax increases on earnings.

IF we were an independent country, we could have a go at making poverty history. But that ambition is well beyond the scope of Holyrood.

READ MORE: Quick fixes won't win independence – hard work is on the horizon

We can, of course, make poverty less. And we do. That is laudable and worthy of shouting about. So, let’s say that.

But setting an objective to eradicate poverty is only setting ourselves up to fail. Worse than that it is suggesting that we have responsibility for the problem. It means that if poverty continues to exist then it’s our fault.

The same is true across the policy spectrum. The UK is becoming quite adept at devolving responsibility without the means.

In effect, the causes are reserved but the blame is devolved. It’s time we stopped accepting it.