Farewell to the many supplicant time-servers, who read their questions to ministers directly from cards supplied by the government. Goodbye to the parliamentary committees that showed a complete lack of independence, their members uniformly breaking down along party lines, with a few honourable exceptions. To this tired, error-strewn, scandal-hit government, and its limp, long-serving, unimaginative apparatchiks, who have overseen a half-decade of decline, secrecy and, let’s be honest, relentless whingeing: off you pop.

Three first ministers. A major police investigation. Ministers caught up in a sequence of scandals, yet defended to the end by the first minister. The administration taken to court twice by its information commissioner for failing to release requested material. Undelivered ferries. Unreformed public services. Astronomical levels of drug deaths. A long list of policy U-turns. Heroic levels of spending on welfare and public sector pay, despite repeated warnings from economists about unaffordability. Scotland the brave?

The opposition parties have, sadly, been no better. They have contributed to the loss of public confidence in Holyrood. It is a savage indictment of their weakness that the polls suggest the SNP will be returned on 7 May for a third decade in power, despite its lamentable track record. Labour’s Anas Sarwar and the Conservatives’ Russell Findlay are unlikely to survive what could be historically poor performances by their parties.

I tuned into First Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, the last such session before parliament closed ahead of the election. I do not always do so, because there is little point: a predictable, stale exchange of views, heavy on heat and light on substance. This was no different. In fact, it was worse than usual, as party leaders boasted of their achievements over the course of the parliament while angrily attacking their rivals’ failures. It was complacent and self-serving. It was entirely of a piece with how this parliament has performed.

In truth, there feels little point in looking back. There is so little to detain us or worthy of serious analysis. This will inform the votes of some in a few weeks’ time, but not, it seems, enough to bring about meaningful change. John Swinney will be back in Bute House, with some new faces around the cabinet table, but this conservative, ultra-cautious first minister is too long in the tooth to change his approach. The can will continue to be kicked down the road for as long as possible. The hard choices that so many warn are necessary will continue to be avoided unless a fiscal crisis forces his hand.

It is sad to say that such a crisis may be just what Holyrood needs if it is finally to grow up. In a paper released this week, the Royal Society of Edinburgh called for an end to the tribalism and timidity that have blocked significant policy change in recent years. This would require more than consensus-building rhetoric: it requires political leaders and institutions to make difficult choices, to explain trade-offs honestly, and to sustain focus on outcomes rather than announcements. The challenge, it argued, is cultural as much as structural – to move away from polarisation and towards a politics that takes lived experience seriously, values evidence over misleading narratives, and is judged by whether it delivers meaningful change. This mirrors the views of the Scottish Fiscal Commission, Audit Scotland, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Fraser of Allander Institute and my own think tank, Enlighten. Surely they are not all wrong.

Projections show that by the end of the decade the Scottish budget will face a perilous £5bn black hole. This fiscal cliff edge is approaching fast and poses a serious challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy that, under devolution, administrations can spend more generously than Westminster on social policy. The universalist, freebie culture must be re-examined. Rising healthcare costs will have to be met. A solution to social care funding must be found. The need for efficiencies will have to be taken more seriously than it has been until now. The public sector can no longer be feather-bedded in the fashion to which it has become accustomed.

None of this will be easy, but politics is not currently an easy business. The problems Scotland faces are reflected across many countries, and leaders everywhere are under extreme financial and democratic stress. This burden will not lessen in the years ahead: the consequences of the Iran war for the cost of living look likely to be severe and potentially long-standing.

An international crisis does not, however, excuse Scotland’s parliamentarians from making those tough choices and explaining those trade-offs to the electorate. It is all Westminster’s fault is a tired and self-diminishing refrain. It is time ministers and MSPs joined the reality-based community, before reality catches up with them.

I was challenged this week by a senior Scottish businessman about whether there was any point to Holyrood. Had the whole devolution experiment been a mistake? He is not the first to pose the question. Among private-sector leaders in particular, the performative nature of Scottish politics and its seeming inability to improve the condition of the nation is deeply frustrating. They would not get away with it in their own organisations.

For all my grumbling, I remain a supporter of Scotland’s parliament, as I was at its foundation. For all its flaws, it is an essential national institution. I remember well the days of Scottish Questions at Westminster and Michael Forsyth’s Scottish Grand Committee. These were not happy times and did not come close to addressing Scotland’s democratic deficit. But what we have today is not good enough either, and more and more Scots are coming to share that view.

Holyrood 2026–31 must be a different beast from the parliament that has preceded it. It simply has to be, for all our sakes.

[Further reading: Reform UK has plans for Scotland]

Lord Offord of Garvel (he has resigned from the House of Lords but retains his peerage) has made a fortune over many decades working in private equity. He has a gilded life – large houses, sports cars, a boat, equally rich friends – and yet now claims to speak for the nation’s working class. When, during our interview, I ask him how authentically he can present himself as the voice of ordinary people, it is the only point at which he comes close to losing his cool.

He understands their lives by “going to talk to them and meet them and spend time with them, going on to the streets with them, being out in the pissing rain. Frankly, I’ve never lost who I am and where I come from, ok? My family still live in Greenock [where he grew up]. That’s why I’m standing in Inverclyde, because it’s my hometown. I remember being at Edinburgh University and putting my card in the cash machine and nothing came out. I know exactly what it’s like to have no money – don’t patronise me on that. I hated having no money and I want to help people with no money. I want to help people get back on their feet, I want to help people get into work, I want to help people get good jobs, I want to help people improve their lives. What’s wrong with that?”

Offord is the new kid on the political block, having only been appointed leader by Nigel Farage in January. He is that rare thing: a successful businessman who has taken to and enjoys politics. The polls indicate that Reform could win as many as 24 of Holyrood’s 129 seats in May, beat Labour into third place, and thus form the official opposition. It is an astonishing disruption to a political culture which has for decades been dominated by social democrat parties. The idea that Reform was a purely English nationalist phenomenon, that it couldn’t happen here, is about to be exploded.

One wonders why a 61-year-old financier, who could be relaxing into a life of elite luxury, can be bothered throwing himself into the horrors and stresses of political life, especially at the helm of a party that is still viewed by many Scots as a toxic, far-right, racist brand. It’s a tough, bruising gig. He lost friends by defecting from the Conservatives, he admits. Talking to him, however, leaves no doubt about the passion he has for challenging and, if he can, changing the status quo.

“I’m ambitious for Scotland,” he says. “I’m fed up with mid-table mediocrity. Scotland is massively underperforming and I’m a bit embarrassed about that. The party I was in didn’t have the ambition to do anything about that. By their own admission they said to me ‘we only have one policy, we only want one policy, which is to say no to a referendum’. That’s the only way we get votes, is what I was told by the Scottish Conservative Party. They’re in a co-dependent relationship with the SNP. A doom loop. I was fed up with it.” There have been some awkward conversations with his former colleagues, including Russell Findlay, leader of the Scottish Tories. Offord was the Scottish party’s treasurer until his departure, as well as the UK party’s energy spokesman in the Lords.

“As treasurer, I was organising donor dinners. The donors were saying ‘what’s the plan for government?’ Well, they don’t have one. That was the first reason for leaving. The second reason was being in London, in the Lords, and I was given the energy brief by Kemi. Our energy is now seven times more expensive than China, four times more expensive than the US, we’re completely deindustrialising, losing high-quality jobs. The whole country is covered in wind turbines with not a single blade made in Scotland. I began to say this at the despatch box, and I got the most opposition from my own side. I would come out of there with darts in my back from people like Theresa May, Alok Sharma, John Selwyn Gummer.”

One relationship that he says has survived is that with Alister Jack, the former Scottish Secretary who Offord worked with as a minister and who he describes as his political “mentor”. “Alister and I had a good relationship because we’re both not politicians. Alister’s a businessman and I’m a businessman. I worked with him in the Scotland Office and we were the most effective Scotland Office in 25 years. Local authorities said to me ‘we haven’t seen anyone from London for 25 years’. When devolution happened from Whitehall it was ‘devolve and forget’. We went to them with ideas, money, encouragement, which of course the SNP hated. Alistair and I have a different perspective on this [defection] but he is not a tribal politician, like I’m not a tribal politician. So he and I have been able to maintain our friendship because we knew each other before we went into politics.” What did he say to you? “He wasn’t happy, but that doesn’t mean to say that we can’t have a cordial relationship. There are other relationships which are over.”

I’ve known Offord for a few years, and was surprised by his decision to join Reform. I’d always regarded him as a liberal Conservative, perhaps belonging to the One Nation wing of the party. I’d have thought he would be more comfortable with people like Ruth Davidson, Rishi Sunak and George Osborne than the likes of Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick and Lee Anderson. “Perhaps it was being in the Lords and seeing the grandees of the Blair and Cameron governments around me, and thinking that something has gone wrong over the past 25 years,” he says. “We’re not as prosperous as we should be. We’re not as happy as we should be. Our public services are not as well run as they should be. And being there, seeing them all together – Nigel Farage uses the phrase ‘uniparty’. When I look at the fact that our energy prices are sky high, that we have the highest taxes and borrowing since the war, and that we have the most divided nation since the war, something’s gone wrong. So the One Nation Tory might be this nice, middle-of-the-road concept, which sits very nicely along Blairite New Labour. There’s nothing to choose between them, with the Lib Dems thrown into coalition for five years. It has produced this sort of blancmange. General Patton said ‘if everyone’s thinking the same thing, no one’s thinking’. We’ve had 25 years of consensual thinking which has resulted in the position we’re in. I’m a private equity guy, that’s the business I’m in – I’m a disruptor.”

He admits he is learning on the job, and occasionally slips up. He recently appeared to suggest that Catholic schools should be abolished, a “loose statement” that he quickly rowed back on. As a hard-nosed businessman he is prone to saying exactly what he thinks, which can be refreshing in a climate of soundbites and focus-grouped strategies, but is not without risk. “Reform is not a perfect party, but it’s a disruptor party and it’s here to make change to Britain,” he says. “Sometimes, as we all know, you have to crack some eggs to make an omelette.”

Offord has had to oversee the recruitment of 73 candidates for the Holyrood election, the vast majority of whom have no background in politics. Both the full candidate list and the Reform manifesto will be published on Thursday. I ask him about the kind of people who are standing. “Of our candidates, 80 per cent have not been politicians before. They’re ordinary people – doctors, lawyers, civil servants, farmers, engineers, entrepreneurs, business owners. A wide spread of people, all of whom have got jobs or businesses. They don’t need to do this – are probably taking a pay cut to do it.” Why are they doing it? “Because they’re fed up of professional politicians standing every five years, giving you the word salad, and nothing changes, nothing gets better. They are motivated sufficiently to stop shouting at the telly and put themselves forward. The fact is therefore that they’re not going to be smoothie-chops politicians, they’re not going to be media savvy, it’s going to be a challenge. They’re all smart, they’re all motivated, we’re going to see something different.”

What’s the vetting process been like? “It’s been very intensive, as you can imagine. It’s quite an exercise for a new party to put that together in short order. And then of course next year we’ve got the council elections, another 300 to find. Not an easy process. There’s been a lot of testing, a lot of assessment, a lot of vetting. Intensive days, a lot of media stuff, a lot of personal values stuff. We worked hard on that process.” He says all social media accounts have been checked out. Does he have complete confidence in all 73? “There might be somebody who’s fallen through the net, but we’ve done the vetting and are confident in the vetting process.” The presence for the first time of Reform MSPs in Holyrood promises to significantly alter the environment. In what is likely to be a parliament of minorities, none of the other parties are likely to want to do any deals with them. This raises the question of how Offord intends to approach daily parliamentary life. Would he prefer to be collaborative or oppositional and obstructive?

“At the end of the day Reform has a centre-right agenda which wants to make the country more prosperous, cut taxes, raise productivity, make people healthier and wealthier,” he says. “Anybody that wants to come and talk to us about that agenda, we can work with. But if we’re the only people with that agenda, we might have to be outsiders. In which case we have to be the voice in the wilderness and keep saying what we believe in. There’s been 25 years of devolution and it’s been predominantly government by centre-left parties, by what you might call social democratic principles, whether it’s been Labour or Lib Dem or SNP, and we know that the mindset in the parliament is that any time there’s a problem the only way to fix it is to throw money at it. Money doesn’t solve every problem. We can do better than that, we can be more creative than that. It doesn’t need to be the state every time either. When Scotland started out on the devolution journey, state spending as a percentage of GDP was 43 per cent. Today it’s 55 per cent. The UK is 44 per cent. London and the south east would be 35 per cent. We’re spending the most per capita of any part of the UK. Are our schools better? Are our hospitals better? Are our roads better. Are we happier? Are we more prosperous? If the answer to these questions is no, it might be time to say ‘should we try something different?’”

Reform is still policy-light, although that will presumably change with the release of the manifesto. One commitment Offord has given is that he would cut Scotland’s six tax bands to three, and cut income tax by 1p in each band immediately, and then by a further 2p by the end of the parliament. That would take Scotland’s income tax to below the UK level. This will be funded in part, he says, but cutting the number of quangos. “We want to void cutting frontline services,” he says. “We’ll go for waste, duplication and ideological spending. We’ve got 29,000 civil servants – there were 21,000 before Covid, are we better managed? We have 23,000 working in the quangos, with massive overlap between them.” Offord says he has a “spreadsheet” of quangos and is looking to scrap around 25 per cent of them. Which ones are for the chop? “You might start by saying all of them, and then work backwards to which ones you want to keep. My instinct is to say they’re all abolished until we work out which ones we want to keep.”

Then there’s immigration, an issue which until recently had not been politicised in Scotland in the way it has been south of the border. Indeed, all of the main parties at Holyrood have been in favour of higher immigration, given our aging population and the depopulation of rural Scotland. Offord’s language around the issue, talking about “our people”, has offended some and has opened up a painful debate. “I’m trying to talk about this as honestly as I can, reflecting what local people say to me in their communities,” he says. “Local people, especially working class communities, are very unhappy. They see unfairness. If we ignore that, and they feel they’re being ignored by mostly middle-class politicians who don’t want to talk about it, it’s too uncomfortable, the result is that local communities feel they’re not being properly represented, and they’re feeling sore, angry and resentful. We should not want that in our communities. I’m being honest, and saying we need to fix that to make it fair.”

Controversial or not, Reform cannot be ignored. Until relatively recently, the toxicity around the party’s brand meant that establishment Scotland would avoid meeting its representatives. With the election looming that is no longer the case. Offord says his diary is “packed” and that he has met with the CBI, the Scottish Retail Consortium and small business groups. The party has also had a briefing from the civil service. Scottish politics is changing, and Malcolm Offord is determined to change it for good.

[Beware: Reform UK wants to join you in your bedroom]

True to form, as Scotland’s children prepare to sit their exams, the union has balloted its members on strike action. It said that 85 per cent of those who took part backed a walkout over an “excessive workload” for teachers. The irony is that the SNP government is about the best friend the EIS could have. It recently agreed to a 7.5 per cent pay rise, and has also announced plans for a four-day teaching week, with the possibility of later start times and longer breaks. Not enough. The terms and conditions of the profession must be further softened, or it’s one-out, all-out.

It’s possible to have sympathy with teachers who are struggling with ill-discipline, rising absence levels and a working day that is indeed strenuous, without having much if any respect for an organisation that permanently resists changes that have been shown to improve performance in most high-achieving countries. The EIS has Scotland’s children in its clammy, unyielding grip. It must, somehow, be broken.

With the Holyrood election now just nine weeks away, the union’s bosses have clearly identified their moment to put added pressure on the SNP’s reliably pliable ministers. The Nationalists do not like to pick fights with the public sector, which is to be treasured above all else. Scotland is nicer than England, remember, and anyway, those state-employee votes must be protected in order to be harvested at the next independence referendum.

It jars somewhat that this is about the first time our schools system has been mentioned in an election campaign that is now well underway. Politicians’ speeches are growing feistier and more brutish as the big vote draws near. The NHS, the cost of living, the SNP’s general record, Labour’s divisions, Reform’s harshness on immigration – all have featured prominently, and fair enough. Where, though, is the debate about education, which is surely the closest thing we have to a silver bullet that could make a difference to so many of society’s problems?

It’s true that, according to the polls, education is not among the voters’ top electoral priorities. It was probably 1997 (“education, education, education”) when the issue last occupied a front-rank place in such a contest. But that doesn’t make doing the right thing any less important, or the deep-seated challenges the sector faces any less intractable and urgent. And it’s not just schools – Scotland’s colleges and universities are also at crisis point, cutting courses and jobs in the face of deep, prolonged deficits. Employers, looking to recruit the workforce of the future, are wondering what the hell is going on.

Well, some of us care. This week, the Commission on School Reform (CSR), the education arm of the think tank Enlighten (of which I am director) published a manifesto for Holyrood 2026. If I do say so myself, it is packed with deep thought and smart ideas produced by its expert membership. This is not a matter of flashy headlines and cheap pledges. Behind the scenes, and across the parties, Scotland’s more serious politicians acknowledge the Commission is on the right track and that the progressive route of the past few decades has been a dead end. But few (aside from the Lib Dems, whose education spokesperson Willie Rennie is unusually brave and determined) have so far shown themselves willing to grasp the thistle.

What does the Commission propose? It makes a direct challenge to the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), the failed underpinning of modern Scottish primary and secondary education. This structure, which somehow manages to be both impossibly vague and overly bureaucratic, should be replaced with the kind of knowledge-based curriculum used by the world’s most successful education systems, including England’s.

As Keir Bloomer, the CSR’s chair, said, CfE “is now harming the long-term prospects of a generation of children.” He warned that “the place of knowledge in the curriculum has been devalued. Increasing research evidence about how learning takes place and the importance of knowledge and long-term memory has been neglected. We must be big enough and bold enough to admit when we have made a strategic mistake, and reverse it before any more damage is done.”

School and headteacher autonomy should be radically increased, particularly in relation to curriculum delivery, the management of bad behaviour, and the deployment of resources. Exams, rather than coursework which can be exploited by middle-class families and which allows teachers to in effect mark their own homework, should remain the major form of objective assessment. The unplanned and unaffordable explosion in Additional Support Needs should be subject to a review. And, given the rising level of indiscipline in classrooms that has followed the Covid pandemic, “we must assert the right of every young person to an education which is not disrupted by others, that dealing effectively and quickly with poor behaviour requires sanctions, and that parents are obliged to support schools in seeking to ensure acceptable behaviour by their children.”

Oh, and there should be a new Office for Scottish Education Data, given that the existing data tells us far too little about what works and what doesn’t in Scotland’s schools. We really don’t know much about what is going on, which of course suits the government.

At the heart of this manifesto lies the route to restoring a once proud and globally renowned education tradition to a world-class standard. If this isn’t worthy of debate in the heat of an election campaign, then what, really, is the point of the Scottish Parliament. And if the EIS hates it, which it will, so much the better.

[Further reading: Scottish independence is sneaking up on Westminster]

What’s more, the Greens, Scotland’s other main pro-independence party, have decided to stand in just a dozen constituency seats, instead concentrating on the list vote. This leaves the path clear for the Nats to scoop up the first-past-the-post votes of most of those who want to leave the UK. A poll for More in Common this week found the party on course for 64 seats in May, just one shy of an overall majority. Not an unbridgeable gap.

Meanwhile, the unionist vote remains hopelessly divided. Anas Sarwar’s failed coup attempt against Keir Starmer impressed Scots, but has as yet had no impact on their voting intentions. Labour remains in third place, behind Reform. There are suggestions Malcolm Offord, Reform’s Scottish leader, could stand against Jackie Baillie, Sarwar’s deputy. Baillie is a formidable campaigner but her majority is only 1,483, with the SNP in second place – it is not unthinkable Offord could attract enough former Labour voters to allow the Nats to unseat her.

The consequences of John Swinney securing that overall majority could be seismic. It is the benchmark the First Minister has set for demanding a second independence referendum – and he has a point. It was after securing such a majority with 69 seats in 2011 that Alex Salmond sought and won the right to hold the first referendum, which resulted in a too-close-for-comfort 55-45 win for the union. Today, support for independence sits around 50 per cent. Again, it wouldn’t take much for that figure to tick higher. And you only have to win by one.

This was supposed to be the first election in two decades where independence was not the main subject of debate. Voters are more concerned with the ailing NHS, the cost-of-living crisis and immigration. But the prospect of a Nationalist majority could change all of that. The whiff of outright victory will encourage Swinney to major on the prospect of another referendum. The opposition parties will go to war with him on that territory. Independence is back.

What will a Labour government at Westminster do in the event of such an outcome? There will be resistance to a second plebiscite. It will be pointed out that the SNP has secured its Holyrood victory with a much smaller share of the vote. Polls suggest it will get around 35 per cent, compared to Salmond’s 45 per cent. But Swinney will have delivered what no one thought he could, and will have a mandate through a democratic election. He will have a right to deliver his manifesto promises, which will certainly include among them the right to hold a referendum.

The SNP will be confident of winning it this time, too. Conditions at Westminster are abysmal. It seems all but certain that defeat in Scotland, Wales, and in the English council elections will finally do for Starmer, giving the UK yet another new prime minister. Instability has become the norm, and Britain feels like a strange, ungovernable, un-unifiable country these days. Scotland’s voters might be weary of the long constitutional debate, but they are equally weary of successive London administrations that have spectacularly failed to live up to expectations. There will be the question of fairness. A third consecutive decade of SNP rule, a second overall majority: at some point the Nats will have earned the right to pose the indy question again. If not in these circumstances, then when? At what point do a broad swathe of Scots start to feel like there is no democratic outcome that allows them to at least make the choice?

There is much that still stands in Swinney’s way. Sarwar continues to believe Labour will rein in the SNP’s lead in the coming weeks, and he may well be right. Perhaps his anti-Starmer gambit will pay dividends over the period, successfully establishing his party as solely focused on Scotland and not tied to southern apron strings. The SNP government, despite its lead, is far from popular among voters after its long spell in office. There is a sense that the nation has not been well governed, that high taxes have not led to improved public services, that across a whole range of policy areas – health, education, ferries, drugs – the Nats have barely tried, or simply failed.

Admittedly, there are no shortage of scandals around the SNP. The Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain, who runs the Crown Office in Scotland as well as sitting in the Cabinet, was hauled before the Scottish Parliament this week after it emerged she had passed specific details of the Murrell case to Swinney a month before they became public. The opposition parties have accused Bain of handing a “clear political advantage” to the First Minister, and it must be said that she was unconvincing in her attempts to counter those accusations. There remain unanswered questions around the safety of Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital and whether ministerial pressure forced it to open too early, putting patients at risk. The gender debate remains live and contentious.

And yet, the stickiness of the SNP’s core vote is a remarkable thing. No failure, it seems, is too great to change minds. No length of time in office is seen as long enough. No scandal cannot be explained away. The goal of independence excuses everything else, and always comes first.

Can Swinney win his majority? Can he then secure a second referendum? Does the man who was once seen as a caretaker leader have it in him to leave his mark on history? Can the UK government and the unionist parties get their act together in time to stop him? The coming months will provide the answers.

[Further reading: Anas Sarwar’s epic misfire]

Peter Cook: The war is not going very well, you know. I want you to lay down your life, Perkins. We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war. Get up in a crate, Perkins, pop over to Bremen, take a shufti, don’t come back. Goodbye, Perkins. God, I wish I was going too.

Jonathan Miller: Goodbye, sir – or is it – au revoir?

Peter Cook: No, Perkins.

In calling for him to step down, Sarwar said goodbye to Starmer on Monday. In return, Starmer and his Cabinet said goodbye to Sarwar. It’s hard to avoid any other conclusion, with the Holyrood election imminent. UK Labour has effectively written off its chances in Scotland – and those of the leader of its Scottish party.

It was a curious press conference. Sarwar obviously found it hard to say what he felt he had to. Until that morning, he and the PM had been more than allies: they had been friends. That relationship ended when Sarwar called Number 10 around 1.30pm to declare his intentions, after a weekend of deliberation with his closest allies. “I spoke to the Prime Minister earlier today and I think it’s safe to say he and I disagreed,” he said. Just after 2.30pm, he went on live TV and said Starmer had to go.

If you’re going over the top, it’s safest to check who’s coming with you. Very few, it turned out. Starmer may be in a weak position, having just lost Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff, and Tim Allan, his director of communications, and still facing the fallout from the Mandelson scandal, but within a few hours the entire Cabinet had declared its loyalty. No one believes them, of course – they are merely coiled in watchful readiness. If there was a flaw in Sarwar’s plan, it was in the timing. Wes Streeting is busy de-Mandelsoning himself. Angela Rayner is still cleaning up her tax affairs. Andy Burnham is stuck in Manchester. They have careers and personal ambitions to consider. The fate of Scotland and Scottish Labour trails some way behind.

What a mess. What grim consequences. Jackie Baillie, Sarwar’s deputy leader and the co-chair of Scottish Labour’s election campaign, loyally sat in the front row of Sarwar’s press conference. Douglas Alexander, the Scottish Secretary and the other co-chair, released a statement: “The Prime Minister has recognized not just that lessons have to be learned but also that we change how we do government. He is right about that and has my support.” Hardly a ringing endorsement of his boss, but he is, for the moment at least, sticking with his man.

So there is now a seismic, unhealable split between Labour at Westminster and at Holyrood, just as the party asks Scots to vote for them and eject the SNP from power. How can Starmer come to Scotland during the campaign? How could he possibly he stand alongside Sarwar? How weird will it be if the Prime Minister has to stay hidden away in London throughout? How can a campaign run by Alexander and Baillie speak with a single, unified voice? What the hell is the average voter supposed to make of it all?

The fact that Sarwar did what he did confirms the desperation in Scottish Labour ranks at what appears to be the almost inevitable outcome of the election: another SNP win. Labour has been trailing the Nats in the polls for over a year. Far from looking likely to rein in the SNP lead, Sarwar finds himself in a battle with Reform for second place. The mis-steps and deep unpopularity of the Starmer regime have been a millstone around Sarwar’s neck, and he hs grown increasingly frustrated. He repeatedly spoke about his primary loyalty being to “my country, Scotland” – to the point of parody, arguably – in an attempt to draw a clear line between the party in Holyrood and at Westminster. “We are no branch office” was the message. But that assertion will be lost in the chaotic aftermath. The call to quit was a hail mary pass that spectacularly failed to find its target. What are we supposed to think today, other than “it’s over”?

The SNP has spent the past few months telling us that the Scottish election is a chance to kick the PM out of Downing Street. Scottish Labour has pointed out, reasonably, that this is simply an attempt to avoid being held responsible for nearly 20 years of tepid, uninspired government in Edinburgh. Yet Sarwar has now effectively proved their point: he agrees that Starmer must go, and that Scots are likely to use this election to say so.

It’s clear that the PM’s days are numbered. It’s just that the timetable that suits Streeting, Rayner et al is very different to the one that works for Sarwar. Labour will stumble on at Westminster, watching the Scottish party stagger into the jaws of a devolved election it clearly no longer believes it can win. The SNP, meanwhile, can hardly believe its luck. The only leader who benefited from Monday’s events was John Swinney. Futile.

[Further reading: How Keir Starmer survives]

If those at the top misbehave then it sends a message down the chain – if the elites are corrupt and filling their boots, then why shouldn’t you try to do the same? Why should you treat the next guy fairly if you can’t be sure he’ll do the same to you.

I’d still hold that the UK remains a relatively uncorrupt country, but this has undoubtedly been a challenging week. As an unrepentant Blairite, the downfall of Peter Mandelson, and the actions that brought it about, have been tough to take. I liked and admired Mandelson as a political strategist and a policy thinker. He was central to the government that helped shape my political identity. The revelations about what he was up to behind the scenes have been not just disappointing, but upsetting.

We waited a long time for this current Labour government, too. Keir Starmer’s first speech on the steps of Downing Street was a moment of hope and promised renewal: “When the gap between the sacrifices made by people and the service they receive from politicians grows this big, it leads to a weariness in the heart of a nation, a draining away of the hope, the spirit, the belief in a better future, that we need to move forward together. You have given us a clear mandate and we will use it to deliver change, to restore service and respect to politics, end the era of noisy performance, tread more lightly on your lives and unite our country.”

Well. Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth, and today Starmer is a heavyweight lolling on the canvas. The towel may be about to be thrown in. Service and respect have not been as prominent as one might have hoped. Almost every significant British institution has faced or is facing its own form of scandal, from the Royal family to the BBC to the Lords and beyond. There is still a weariness in the heart of the nation – in fact, it is growing.

You can see the calculation a growing number of voters are making: if you’re going to have a government led by chancers who don’t really know what they’re doing, then why not opt for the biggest chancers of them all? At least Nigel Farage and his crew are more transparent bullshitters. There is plenty to dislike, but then Reform UK don’t pretend to be pious or all things to all people. There might be an opacity to Farage’s personal finances and legitimate questions about who is funding his party, but that’s priced into the brand.

What of Scotland? There has been plenty of preening from the SNP about Mandelson’s downfall. The timing couldn’t be better for them, with the elections due in May. Scottish Labour have already been hamstrung by Starmer’s failures, and this latest outrage will not help. This week, a poll by More in Common found the SNP still on course to emerge as the largest party. It also found Reform only five points behind in the regional part of the Holyrood vote. Reform is the most popular party among unionists, supported by 31 per cent of those opposed to independence, ahead of Labour on 23 per cent.

So is Reform about to become the official opposition in Scotland? Perhaps. It’s worth making the case that this is not just down to Labour’s failures but to those of the SNP too. The past few years have seen the Nats avoid transparency and accountability whenever they felt it in their interests. They have developed bad habits of obfuscation and intransigence, the kind often seen in long-serving governments which develop an arrogant, born-to-rule tendency.

The government is currently, and unprecedentedly, being taken taken to court by the Information Commissioner after it missed deadlines to produce documents from an ethics investigation into Nicola Sturgeon, relating to the investigation into Alex Salmond. It is also being challenged for dragging its heels over implementing the Supreme Court’s decision last year which made it clear that single-sex spaces were for biological women only. The government is still arguing that trans women can be placed in women-only prisons.

There have been various scandals involving SNP ministers in recent times, from Michael Matheson’s iPad expenses to Angela Constance’s misrepresenting an expert on child abuse and grooming. Every time an SNP politician in the inner circle threatens to come a cropper, the wagons are circled, regardless of the strength of the evidence against them. Most of this might amount to political sharp practice rather than apparent corruption on the Mandelsonian scale. But remember that the Nats have still to go through the trial of Peter Murrell, its former chief executive and estranged husband of Sturgeon, who faces charges of embezzlement of SNP funds.

It goes without saying that we should try to be honest and decent in our daily dealings with one another. There are plenty of bad apples out there, but most of us are trying our best to live honourably. But if the fish rots from the head down, if we look to our leaders for an example of competence and integrity, then the UK and Scotland might be closer to low, dishonest nations than any of us should be comfortable with.

[Further reading: Peter Mandelson is gone, and so is New Labour]

The SNP has been wrestling with this in recent months. The party, with its roots in the pacifist movement and its long-standing opposition to nuclear weapons, has always had an uneasy relationship with matters of war and defence. It has opposed almost every modern conflict in which Britain has become involved. It wasn’t until 2012 that the party voted for an independent Scotland to be part of Nato – prior to that the plan was to sit outside the Western Alliance.

Nato may no longer be what it was – we may not even know what it currently is or will come to be – but in these nervy times the SNP needs some kind of answer to the existential and diplomatic challenges the world, including Scotland, faces. And it needs to make a case for why, in such circumstances, independence might still be a reasonable and rational choice.

This week, on Wednesday (28 January), John Swinney attempted to square the circle. In a speech at Edinburgh University, the First Minister made a rare foray into international affairs. Inspired by Mark Carney’s acclaimed recent speech at Davos, Swinney gave us his own version. Scotland’s devolved politicians have not been known for their oratorical prowess since the days of Alex Salmond, but agree or disagree with the points Swinney made, this was a weighty and thoughtful intervention.

He began by drawing a distinction between politics, which he said was about power, and law, which was about “normative order”. “Law, the set of communal rules upon which we have agreed, places limits on power. That is, of course, the basis for the constitutional order we enjoy here at home. For eight decades, it has been, also, the basis of the international order, the rules-based international order that, although imperfectly, has brought us peace and prosperity. The reality of power is not denied, but the exercise of power by politicians, even if imperfectly, is controlled.”

After 80 years, that settlement has begun to break down, argued the FM. In the context of US aggression and self-interest, and the rise of a multipolar world, Scotland should embrace independence in order to rejoin the EU and seek security in its embrace. Swinney said he was a leader who “believes in independence in Europe for my nation, and also independence – that is, meaningful strategic autonomy, including in defence, technology and energy – for Europe. Not so the European Union becomes merely an alternative power bloc in a world where only might is right, but rather as part of an alternative vision of a world sustained and built through partnership – and a partnership of equals, where the smallest sit at the same table as the strongest, and where their voice is heard.” The power of a united Europe could be seen in its steadfast response to President Trump’s demand for Greenland, which saw Trump back down on his threats of military action and tariffs.

Brexit, he said, has been a calamity for Scotland and the wider UK, and has left Britain sitting on the sidelines at a time of global transformation. “An insular attitude has separated us from our nearest neighbours, leaving us unnecessarily and dangerously exposed. This year marks ten years since the Brexit referendum – and year on year the scale of the Brexit disaster becomes more apparent. Bit by bit, Britain is being broken by a Brexit that has left families worse off, that has meant less money available to invest in public services like the NHS.”

Those of us who were opposed to leaving the EU – 68 per cent of Scots at the time of the Brexit referendum – could nod along in agreement to this section. The English-led decision to quit the EU damaged fraternal relations with Scotland – something shifted in the soul that day, a wound was opened that still hasn’t quite healed. The prospect of a UK government led by Nigel Farage is an uneasy prospect for many Scots and could, theoretically, reopen the independence debate, which has quietened in recent times.

And so Swinney sees both the challenge and the opportunity in the current crisis. The challenge, I would argue, is that a majority of Scots are unlikely to be persuaded that this looks like a good time to throw the dice on independence. And, bear in mind, the SNP is still unable to convincingly answer questions about currency, trade with England, a projected multi-billion pound deficit, and the other complications that independence would inevitably bring. On top of this, Scotland would, in the short term at the very least, still be outside the EU, and would have to negotiate entry. If it wanted to join the single currency, which is the SNP’s preference, that would require crushing fiscal austerity in order to qualify.

And there is the small matter of the failure of devolution to improve the economy, or to reform public services, or to provide the transparent and accountable politics that was promised at the outset. The SNP has been in power since 2007, and so most of this failure is on it. This hardly inspires confidence that full independence would lead to better things. Meanwhile, Swinney’s view of Europe as a single, unifying, collaborative force might also be challenged – that has hardly been the experience of recent years. Perhaps this will change in the threatening new global climate, but the distinct instincts of and cultural and political differences between nation states remain a powerful brake on integration.

“Scotland is a European nation, and I hope, soon, that Scotland will become the EU’s newest member state,” was Swinney’s closing line. This was probably the best speech he has made since becoming First Minister. But it’s still just a speech. He can hope as much as he likes, but it’s hard to see the vision it sets out becoming a reality any time soon.

[Further reading: The Carney doctrine]

Polls indicate – and have for some time now – that the SNP is likely to emerge as the largest party, though without an overall majority. That would leave John Swinney with two options. The first would be to take leaf out of Alex Salmond’s book and seek to govern as a minority administration. Salmond’s go-it-alone government between 2007 and 2011 is regarded as one of the more successful of the devolution era: he struck legislative deals with other parties (including the Tories) and went on to win Holyrood’s only overall majority (so far) in the subsequent election.

The second option would be to seek the stability of a coalition with another party. Nicola Sturgeon tried this with the pro-independence Greens, which worked until it didn’t. The smaller, more radical party was viewed – including by some in the SNP – as having pulled Sturgeon’s government significantly to the left, with the tail too often wagging the dog. This may have been to misjudge the then first minister’s policy preferences, however overall the arrangement was not a popular one and helped dampen the Nats’ popularity in the country. There have been tensions between the two parties since Sturgeon’s successor Humza Yousaf ended the agreement, which the Greens did not take graciously and which brought about his downfall. Would Swinney, who has sought to govern in a more centrist style, really want a return to those days?

A more coherent partnership might have been with the Lib Dems, who in the past have been a coalition-friendly party, working with Labour in Edinburgh and the Conservatives in London. A deal could surely be done to exclude policy on independence from any agreement, and a programme of sensible social democracy agreed. The problem here is that the Lib Dems have ruled out a coalition with the SNP and, for now at least, insist they will not budge.

Life could be made hard for the SNP by virtue of their longevity in office. The opposition are sick of what they see as government underperformance and the obsession with independence. Agreeing to prop up a third decade of Nat power is a hard thing to swallow.

Then there is the possibility that, as Labour hopes and still claims to believe could happen, the polls change. Anas Sarwar is pinning his campaign strategy on just that outcome – the theory being that when Scots properly focus on their options for Holyrood they will decide the SNP has been indulged for long enough. If this somehow came about and Labour pipped the Nats, they would likely form a coalition with the Lib Dems, and work where possible with the other unionist parties where the numbers required it.

Which brings us to Reform. The insurgent party could win as many as 20 of the 129 seats, which would put it in a powerful position. But could Labour really do deals with Faragists? What would be the broad public reaction? What would Reform want in return? Its new Scottish leader Malcolm Offord may be a more moderate and reasonable sort than Farage, but the toxicity of his party – and likely some of those on the benches behind him – will make any kind of accord difficult.

Then there is the big question: could the SNP and Labour bury their differences and form a large, mainstream coalition? In Wales there is talk of a potential deal between independence-supporting Plaid Cymru and Labour, with the former looking certain to oust the latter from office. But there is much more bad blood between the two in Scotland after decades of the independence wars and SNP dominance election after election. They really don’t like each other, despite offering similar policy programmes. And it’s hard to imagine either agreeing to be subordinate to a first minister from the other side. I just can’t see it happening.

This may be a question of putting party before country, but such is the highly partisan nature of politics in Scotland. The next parliament is likely to be a noisy and messy one too. Almost half of the SNP’s sitting MSPs are standing down, including many of their most experienced ministers. Along with the influx from Reform and the lesser turnover in the other parties, this would mean around half of the intake would be first-timers, with no experience of how Holyrood and government works. Not all may be willing to play nice and do exactly as they’re told.

The problem with all of this is that a stable government is precisely what Scotland will need. The challenges are piling up, on the economy, education, healthcare, transport and more. The sustainability of the high current levels of public spending has been challenged by practically every economic expert going, from the Fiscal Commission to Audit Scotland to the IFS to the Fraser of Allander Institute. The next parliament will be one of hard choices, something Holyrood in the past has not shown itself capable of taking. But without them a fiscal cliff-edge is approaching.

Tackling all of this will require a level of maturity and collaboration that has been almost entirely absent during recent years. That is what worries me most about what will confront us after May. More of the same just won’t cut it, but in one form or another it may be what we are about to get.

[Further reading: Westminster’s authority over Scotland is dissolving]

There was a time when a visit from a prime minister or opposition leader was an occasion of some note north of the border. These days, not so much. They may still be the tallest of poppies in London, but modern Scotland is more likely to look inward, to Edinburgh, when it talks and thinks about its domestic politics.

These three have specific problems with a Scottish audience, of course. Starmer is fatally unpopular in the north, as in the south, east and west, and is dragging the Scottish Labour party down with him as May approaches. Badenoch, despite her improved performance at the despatch box and rising poll ratings, has made little impact on the Caledonian psyche. Her Scottish party is heading for a sorry single-digit number of MSPs in the next parliament. Nigel Farage is… well, Nigel Farage. How do you think Scots react to him?

But it’s not just the obvious weaknesses of this current crop of Westminster leaders. When it comes to the various types of election that confront them – UK, devolved, local – Scottish voters have shown themselves to be a sophisticated bunch. They are perfectly capable of sending a majority of new Labour MPs to London 18 months ago, humiliating the SNP in the process, and then electing that same SNP to run the Scottish parliament in May. It’s not just Starmer’s crisis or the rise of Reform that is driving down Labour support. The SNP is still seen by many as the party that will stand up exclusively for Scotland against the “distant” mother parliament, government and Whitehall.

We Scots are a thrawn bunch: “don’t tell us what to do” might be the nation’s motto. Increasingly, the electorate is looking for its leaders at Holyrood to show genuine independence of mind and action, to be willing to stand up to their own bosses in London, and to pursue their own paths. This explains Sarwar’s recent disowning of his friend Starmer. “I’m going to lead the election campaign, I’m our candidate for first minister, this election is about Scotland,” he said. “And the best thing the Prime Minister can do, the Cabinet can do, and Government ministers across the UK can do is be behind their doors, at their desks and changing outcomes for people across the country.”

Ouch. But it needed said. The SNP jibe that Scottish Labour is merely a “branch office” of the UK party is an old one, but has not lost its power. If Sarwar is to have any chance of reining in the Nats’ poll lead he must show Scots he is his own man, and is not tied to the apron strings of a weak and disliked PM. Even then, with the latest poll this week putting the SNP on course to win 61 of Holyrood’s 129 seats, and Labour and Reform heading for joint second place with 18 each, that looks an increasingly forlorn hope. In these circumstances, did it help for Starmer to ignored Sarwar’s advice and fly north?

Farage at least had something real to do, unveiling his new Scottish leader, Malcolm Offord, a private equity millionaire who has defected from the Tories. That will make headlines, and Offord is a strong-minded figure who will focus Reform’s campaign on improving economic growth and the public services, and much less on issues such as immigration. He is also a supporter of devolution, which removes one criticism the opposition might have had of Reform. But even Farage was upstaged, as during the press conference it emerged that Badenoch had sacked Robert Jenrick over his own apparent intention to defect to Reform, a defection that Farage has now supervised and finalised. Once again, the psychodrama of Westminster politics affected the ability of a London politician to tell Scots how it is. Och, you lot and your silly wee games…

All this in a week in which the SNP was able to deliver the final budget of this Scottish parliament. If all budgets are political, none is quite so political as the pre-election budget: it is a powerful weapon for any ruling party to wield. The Nats, ostensibly at least, did not miss their mark. A tax cut for lower earners caught the headlines, and this bit of jiggery pokery allows them still to claim that a narrow majority of Scots are paying less tax than their equivalents elsewhere in the UK, even if the rest pay more. There was enough pork barrel in it to give SNP activists across the nation something to take to the doorsteps – investment in the islands here, rail improvements for the Borders there, free breakfast clubs and summer holiday swimming lessons for all primary school children, a rise in the Scottish Child Payment for babies in the first year of their lives, more cash for colleges and the NHS.

There was plenty to criticise in the budget. That tax cut amounts to a not-exactly-whopping £3 per month, for example. Middle earners such as teachers and nurses are being dragged into higher income tax bands due to fiscal drag. Local government has been left high and dry once again. And all the experts are still warning what they have been warning for years now: that the level of government spending in Scotland is unsustainable, indeed, unaffordable – a cliff edge is approaching towards the end of the decade.

Still, the SNP has an election to win, and it has placed its bets on what will give it the best chance of doing so. It can argue that, for better or worse, these are Scottish decisions taken by Scottish politicians. You can back them or sack them in just a few months, unlike the one-day drop-ins from London. It can point to the daily messiness of Westminster and ask, over and over again, if this is really how we want to do our business, or to have it done for us. I should say that I don’t see it that way myself, but plenty do, and it looks, right now, as if it will be a winning formula in May for John Swinney.

[Further reading: Robert Jenrick defects to Reform]

On Monday, in his first speech of the year, Sarwar had distanced himself from Starmer, appearing to suggest the Prime Minister should stay in London rather than campaign in Scotland. The pair are friends and allies, but Starmer’s unpopularity and the many missteps of his government have had a devastating effect on Scottish Labour’s support. The most recent poll put them in fourth place, behind the SNP, Reform and the Greens. Happy new year, comrades.

This was not how things were supposed to play out. At the time of the 2024 general election, Sarwar looked to be a sure thing for Bute House, the first minister’s official residence. The SNP was scandal-ridden, exhausted after nearly two decades in office, and had lost its way on the issue of independence. A popular new Labour government at Westminster, with a tranche of freshly elected Scottish MPs, would surely pave the way for Labour to finally oust the Nats from office. Not so much, it turns out.

I’d expect Labour to do better in May than the numbers currently suggest – the party’s performance in local and devolved by-elections has generally been better than the pollsters have predicted. But still, with four months to go until the devolved vote, it is a fact that Labour is currently wrestling not with the SNP for first place, but with Reform for second. There is no clear or obvious route to outright victory, and smart ideas on public service reform are unlikely to shift the dial to the extent necessary. Some big policy bombs are needed.

To Labour’s benefit, the party has the best ground game of any of the parties. Its social media performance is sharper than the rest’s too, for what that is worth. And in Sarwar, it has a talented and energetic frontman. There is also the advantage of having the campaign run by Scottish Secretary Douglas Alexander, a canny and experienced electoral strategist. But still, there is a mountain to climb in a very short period of time.

The SNP cannot believe its luck. It is framing the contest as a straight shoot-out with Reform, which is probably not true, but is none the less a powerful slogan. The party has a solid electoral base of between 30 and 35 per cent, which given the divided unionist vote, will be enough to return John Swinney to office. That will give the Nats a fifth straight term, a staggering achievement.

Ostensibly, the SNP is not without its problems to seek. The alleged misuse of party funds by former chief executive Peter Murrell still hangs in the air, with Murrell expected in court before May. I’m told, though, that internal polling suggests voters don’t hold Swinney accountable for that scandal – they associate it with the previous regime under Nicola Sturgeon, who was married to Murrell at the time. Swinney is seen as a steadying force and a decent man, both of which are true enough.

The SNP has also struggled to raise funds since the Murrell crisis emerged, with donors unwilling to be associated with a party facing criminal investigation. Swinney said this week, though, that he expects the party to reach the £1.5 million spending limit for the Holyrood election. Insiders are bemused about that. “Realistically, where’s the cash going to come from?” one said to me.

The SNP has a new chief executive in 41-year-old Callum McCaig, a former MP and Spad who was leader of Aberdeen City Council at the tender age of 26. McCaig is well-rated in the party. He is a laid-back figure who has stayed out of the media since taking on the role, which is probably what is needed given the controversy surrounding his predecessor. I’m told McCaig and his team have a strategy of using what they call “Nats in the wild” to boost their election campaign. These are the former SNP MPs, MSPs, staffers and councillors who lost their jobs as support for the party declined over the past few years – in the last general election alone, 39 MPs were ejected from parliament. They are now being tasked with helping with fundraising and campaigning on the doorsteps. “We haven’t really had well-known and experienced ambassadors on this level before,” one source told me.

The SNP’s track record in office is not particularly something to boast about. The data surrounding school and NHS performance is poor. Many universities and colleges are in financial crisis. There is the unending ferry scandal. Scotland has the highest number of drugs deaths in Europe. Targets on housing and net zero have been routinely missed. And yet, the Nats have the undeniable advantage of being in office, with the spending and rhetorical power that provides. For example, Swinney was able to announce this week that Scots will get an extra bank holiday during the World Cup, enabling them to watch the national team – a bribe by any other name.

This advantage will be further evident next week, when Finance Secretary Shona Robison delivers the last Scottish Budget before the election. It seems unlikely, despite warnings from public sector watchdogs such as Audit Scotland and the Scottish Fiscal Commission, that this will be a moment of retrenchment or fiscal caution. The devolved Government’s spending power has been boosted by extra cash from Westminster, thanks to Rachel Reeves’s Budget decisions. There will be little gratitude shown towards Reeves, but the SNP will use the money to enhance its backing among specific groups. The First Minister said this week that tackling child poverty will be at the heart of the decisions taken, which plays well with the left, from where the Nats draw much of their support.

And what of Reform? Nigel Farage will announce Malcolm Offord as the party’s Scottish leader next week, giving it an authentically Scottish face and voice. Offord, who made a fortune in private equity before entering the Lords as a Tory peer and Scotland Office minister, defected recently and provides a credibility which few expected Reform to muster north of the border. He is determined to focus on economic growth and reform of public services – it remains to be seen how he will square that with Farage’s often antagonistic comments on immigrants. Scotland as a whole is relatively pro-immigration, and with its fast-aging population and rural and island communities, needs more rather than fewer incomers.

The energy and freshness of Reform is causing problems for Labour and the Conservatives, attracting unionist voters who have become disillusioned with what they see as an ineffective mainstream. On the left, the Scottish Greens are similarly benefitting from this disaffection and should do well in May. The situation is most acute for the Scottish Tories – insiders expect to see their MSP numbers drop to single figures in May. Leader Russell Findlay has fought hard to challenge Holyrood’s left-wing orthodoxy, but has struggled to secure a hearing – the voters simply find Reform more interesting, and there is not much he can do to change that.

All taken together, Scotland is every bit as divided and confused as any other nation across the West, and voters are proving to be just as attracted by the siren songs of populists and radicals, and untrusting of the same old faces. There are policy crises across the board that have no easy or obvious solutions. If Reform wins the 20-or-so seats it is predicted to, there will need to be a self-reckoning by the traditional establishment as to why.

Swinney has ruled out any second independence referendum unless the SNP wins a majority of seats in May. That outcome seems unthinkable, but he is playing a longer game. If Farage wins the next general election, that could push more Scots into the pro-independence corner. Support for leaving the UK still sits at around 50 per cent, and so it wouldn’t take much to create a solid majority for separation. Anas Sarwar and his colleagues may well, and justifiably, blame Keir Starmer for the predicament they find themselves in. But ultimately, this failing Prime Minister may be putting the very future of the country at risk.

[Further reading: Can a progressive alliance defeat Reform?]

The step is long overdue – university leaders have been warning for years that the current funding model is unfit for purpose. Earlier this year, ministers were forced to bail out Dundee University to the tune of £40 million after it suffered a cash crisis. Edinburgh University and the University of the West of Scotland have announced plans to cut jobs. Others stand on a similar precipice.

The “free” tuition policy pursued by the SNP – and supported by all the main parties – has been a drag on university income. As teaching costs are funded by the Scottish Government, and have been declining in real terms, institutions have been forced to take in more and more foreign students, whose fees help to make up the shortfall. But last year saw a decline in the number of overseas students coming to Scotland, intensifying the crisis. With the geopolitical situation increasingly tense, that decline is surely only likely to continue. As Sir Anton Muscatelli, the former principal of Glasgow University, put it in a recent report, the sector’s “financial strains and chronic under-funding” are such that “it is far from dramatic to state that this could lead to existential challenges for some organisations”.

Praise, then, to Ben Macpherson, the relatively new minister for higher and further education, who has seized the funding thistle and announced a review. Macpherson is that rare thing in SNP circles – a relatively open-minded and deep-thinking minister who wants to get stuff done. He has a track record of being effective, too, having overseen the creation and setting up of Social Security Scotland. If only there were more like him.

Unfortunately, it seems that open-mindedness only stretches so far, as the review will not examine whether free tuition is the right model for the future. Macpherson insists that graduates should not be asked to make a contribution to the cost of their education. Most principals disagree with this position, but given the political unanimity against the imposition of any kind of fee – even a graduate tax – the SNP is under no real pressure from its opponents to rethink. That feels like an opportunity missed.

It’s not yet clear how wide the scope of the inquiry will be. Will it consider the case for a smaller sector, through mergers or closures, for example? What about the relationship between universities and colleges, which should be working more closely and complementarily together? Should more students be pursuing apprenticeships and college courses rather than degrees, in order to close the skills gap identified by Scottish employers – and, if so, how will those seriously underfunded colleges be supported?  Should different institutions focus more on different specialisms to increase the sector’s diversity? Should the four-year degree, a Scottish peculiarity that significantly adds to the overall expense, be reconsidered? Which is the best route to boosting the number of spin-outs coming from academia?

Macpherson is at least trying to build consensus behind whatever changes emerge from the review. He said that “this is an issue that goes beyond party political boundaries, which is why the work of MSPs from across the chamber in seeking to find common ground on these complex issues is desirable and important”. Given the failure of Scotland’s parties to work together to solve most major systemic issues, the possibility of collaboration on university funding is to be welcomed. After all, Holyrood was designed to encourage more cross-party working, even if in reality it has become home to the same antagonistic, needlessly oppositional politics as Westminster.

One hopes that the review produces some serious and radical proposals that will offer a brighter future for the nation’s universities, which are one of the jewels in Scotland’s crown and which bolster its international reputation and soft power. And is it too much to hope that this could be just the first effort by government to face up to the many challenges facing Scotland across the board? Will it be equally brave when it comes to tackling the decline in school education and the problems confronting the NHS, or in introducing measures that could lead to increased private-sector growth?

Public confidence in devolution is low and falling, due to that sense of inertia. Voters are heading to the extremes of politics, such is their disillusionment and belief that nothing will continue to happen. The answer to this cannot be more empty rhetoric and government by press release, but a Holyrood and an administration that is brave, effective, and open to genuine change and delivery. At least, on universities, they’re making a start.

[Further reading: Malcolm Offord may be too reasonable for Scottish Reform]

The best belonged to Malcolm Offord, though: a vintage, open-top Jaguar sports car, Bond-esque in its sleek lines and growling power. Offord, with his sunglasses and slicked-back, wealthy man’s hair, looked entirely fit for purpose in the driver’s seat as he roared off into the countryside.

In life as in politics, though, not everything goes to plan. A few minutes later the heavens opened. I’ve been worried since about what happened to the peer’s glistening barnet as well as the inside of his car.

I’d heard rumours in the past few weeks that Offord might defect from the Conservatives to Reform. Mutual friends thought he fancied a shot at leading the insurgent party in Scotland. I had my doubts, however. In our conversations, he has always come across as a liberal Conservative, and hardly a clean fit for whatever it is that Nigel Farage is turning Reform into. Shows what I know.

Regardless of that, I think he’s a terrific get for his new party, for a variety of reasons. He’s smart and successful, having amassed a fortune in private equity, with a grasp of economics and business that will dwarf that of anyone else at Holyrood, presuming he makes it there in next May’s election. He’s passionately and authentically Scottish, born to an ordinary background in Greenock with a useful habit of throwing in the odd bit of Scottish slang when he speaks. The condition of Scotland has been his main political focus, as he proved with the publication of an excellent paper, Wealthy Nation, Healthy Nation, earlier this year. This looked at how the legacy of Adam Smith might be used to boost growth and productivity north of the border, and examined the failings of the nation’s education and health systems. All this helps tackle the perceived “Englishness” of Reform.

Offord brings much needed governing experience, too. Although relatively new to politics, having been made a peer in 2021 after failing to be elected to the Scottish Parliament, he quickly became a minister in the Scotland Office and then worked for Kemi Badenoch as minister for exports in the Department for Business. He enjoyed it, and was a perhaps rare example of someone from a high-level business background adapting smoothly to the political life.

It hasn’t been officially confirmed, but Offord is all but certain to lead Reform in Scotland. I suspect this was the deal done with Farage as the price of his defection. He is certainly serious enough about what he’s doing to have handed back his peerage in order to run again for Scottish Parliament, which isn’t a choice undertaken lightly. His willingness to make the leap, as well as his establishment credentials, adds legitimacy to the party. He is straightforward, plain-speaking, good on TV and not, I would say, especially extreme on anything – or he certainly hasn’t been up till now.

This, I suppose, is where the doubts creep in. The Offord I know will want to focus on growing the economy and reforming public services. How will that sit with the sometimes incendiary rhetoric of Farage on immigration? Reform’s race-based attacks on Anas Sarwar during the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election in June were disgraceful, but the creation of this kind of division has been central to its campaigning style and its appeal to a segment of the electorate. While concern about immigration is rising in Scotland, there are no small boats arriving on the nation’s shores, and its population is ageing at a faster rate than elsewhere in the UK. If anything, Scotland needs more, rather than fewer, immigrants. How does that sit with Reform’s messaging during the Holyrood campaign? How comfortable will Offord be having to defend Farage when his UK leader cuts loose on a topic that is both endlessly controversial and apparently a key vote winner?

Reform’s success so far has largely been based on its willingness to say things that the mainstream parties won’t. It has been inflammatory, populist, and its policies have lacked enough detail, or been broad enough, to escape real interrogation. How different can Offord’s approach be? He is at heart a fairly traditional Conservative, but there is already a Conservative Party in Scotland, even if its electoral prospects currently look grim. How will his pitch differ from that of Russell Findlay, the Scots Tory leader? Findlay has pursued a robust “common-sense conservatism” that has led some of his MSPs to quit the Conservative benches, claiming he is shifting the party too close to the Reform agenda. Where is the gap waiting to be filled?

Offord has the advantage of the new, of course. Voters, even those who won’t vote for Reform, are intrigued and/or horrified by its rise and curious about the reasons behind it. The party is taking support from the Tories and Labour, and even some from the SNP. Disenchantment with the mainstream is real, and growing, and there is a willingness to listen to fresh voices, even if Farage remains a figure of significant contention. A poll this week put Reform in second place in Holyrood voting intentions, behind the SNP but ahead of Labour.

These, then, are the challenges and opportunities facing the new man and the new party. How does Reform Scotland shape itself? Where does it profitably differ from Reform UK? How does it adapt to Scotland’s specific sensibilities? In doing so, how does it avoid losing that which has made it distinctive and attractive to certain parts of the electorate? Questions plain old Malcolm Offord now has to answer.

[Further reading: I was at school with Nigel Farage, this is what I heard]

Except… the conversation kept returning to the looming Holyrood election, and at that point the mood would drop. I’m probably approaching the age where the grisly epithet “veteran” starts being applied to me, and I can’t ever remember such dismally low expectations ahead of what should be an exciting moment of democratic renewal.

This is, in part, due to the fact that almost everyone outside of Scottish Labour HQ now expects the SNP to emerge as the largest party, ushering in a third consecutive decade of nationalist rule. I’m not sure even the Nats’ own supporters will back them with much enthusiasm, but back them they will. The party has dropped in the polls, but as things stand its electoral floor should still be high enough to see it over the line. The view of Labour’s prospects is that they have already dissipated, long before the campaign proper begins. There is a dangerous determinism setting in.

And what then? The past decade or so of devolved government has been a wretched period of challenges avoided, of missed opportunities, of weird fixations, of spiralling problems being kicked down the road. I didn’t speak to a single person at the party who thought this would change over the next five years. Optimism is near zero. What a state we’ve got ourselves into.

This mood stretches beyond one evening of pissed, grumbling Scots. A report this week by Our Scottish Future, Gordon Brown’s think tank, captured the spirit of the times. Based on interviews with senior civil servants working for the Scottish Government, local authorities and other public bodies, it argued that the government is failing because it is obsessed with short-termism over outcomes and spin over substance.

One civil servant was quoted as saying that “the requirement to avoid alienating any public support for the SNP and independence stymied politicians’ willingness to think about any idea that might require substantial short-term unpopularity. That grew and grew from 2010 to 2014 [the period leading to the independence referendum] and it’s never diminished since then, it’s become an established way of thinking.” It’s not a particularly new claim, but it’s interesting that even those working at the heart of government share the view of those looking in from the outside.

Audit Scotland, one of the few public bodies willing to challenge the SNP administration, has added its voice to the chorus. Its latest report warned that the NHS remains “financially unsustainable”. “Despite more money (+£3 bn since 2019) and more staff (+20,000 since 2019), NHS Scotland’s performance has not improved in line with commitments made by the Scottish Government,” it stated, adding that “improvements in productivity and reform of the health and care system are essential if health outcomes are to get better, health inequalities are to be reduced, and service delivery is to improve”.

My own think tank, Enlighten, released a paper on the astonishing rise in the number of children receiving additional support in schools. The total has risen from 33,000 to 284,000 – a ninefold increase – in recent years, as the concept of what constitutes “special” education needs has broadened. This is having a significant impact on teachers, who must provide the extra care in the classroom, and on school budgets. And it has in effect happened by accident – ministers admit they don’t know what to do about the situation.

One of the paper’s authors, former headteacher Frank Lennon, said that “the current unsustainable position has arisen from allowing an approach which is well-intentioned but has never been exposed to serious scrutiny. The vastly increased demand for ASN is creating the single biggest post-pandemic pressure in Scottish schools, and the Government must now address it as a matter of great urgency”. We have called for an independent national enquiry so that the problem can be better understood and addressed.

Barely a week goes by without some new version of the various critiques mentioned above, across the whole range of government activity. Scotland is facing a toxic mix: a crisis of performance and funding in its public services, and a political class that simply refuses to acknowledge the scale of the challenge and the nature of the measures required to tackle it, for fear of offending one constituency or another. The complacency displayed is staggering, and deeply disillusioning.

So on we go towards May, when off to the polls we will faithfully trot, without a song in our hearts or hope in our souls. Devolution remains an excellent idea in principle, but in practice it has been a sorry tale of timidity and party-political convenience. Such has been the prolonged duration of the disappointment that more and more of those who engage with Scottish politics for reasons either of professional obligation or basic human interest are losing any belief that matters will or can change.

I don’t know where all that ultimately leads, but I’m sure it’s nowhere good. From Christmas parties to research papers to open criticism from the public watchdogs, the same message is being dispatched towards Holyrood. What a grim legacy for today’s leaders to leave behind them. And what does it say about them that they are willing to do so?

[Further reading: Has Rachel Reeves’ Budget doomed Scottish Labour?]

Well, according to Rachel Reeves, they’re doing just that. The Chancellor announced in her Budget that households will receive an average £150 off their energy bills through the scrapping of green levies. Unfortunately for Sarwar, the political situation has deteriorated to such an extent that the measure no longer seems likely to have much of an impact on his apparently dwindling prospects of becoming first minister.

Such has been the car crash of Keir Starmer’s government that its toxicity is infecting everything: Labour in Scotland, Labour in Wales, Labour in England. Taxes of one sort or another have shot up over the course of two Budgets, and the government is simply not trusted by the electorate. Both Starmer and Reeves are calamitously unpopular. Sarwar, who has aligned himself closely with the PM, is feeling the backdraft.

It’s not that Labour hasn’t been good to Scotland. Reeves’s first Budget provided an extra £3.4bn to the Scottish government. This week brought a further £820m, which the Chancellor said was thanks to Sarwar asking for it. The scrapping of the two-child benefit cap is something that both John Swinney and Sarwar have been demanding for some time.

However, the energy levy that is having such a horrendous effect on North Sea oil and gas, a vital part of the Scottish economy, has been kept in place. As Sandy Begbie, chief executive of Scottish Financial Enterprise, points out, capping salary sacrifice could hit the long-term savings industry, a particular strength of Scotland’s large financial services sector. The uncertainty surrounding the Budget process, the decisions taken last year on employers’ national insurance, and the smorgasbord of tax rises announced this week, will all damage Scottish Labour as the Holyrood election approaches. Businesses are withholding investment and putting off hiring decisions, growth projections are miserable, and consumers seem likely to spend less.

There is still no sense of what this government is for – it is not reforming public services, or cutting the ruinous welfare budget, or introducing measures that will get the economy firing again. Instead, Reeves bought off her own backbenchers with her spending increases. An administration that promised to be about service instead looks self-interested, party before country, a player of games.

Sarwar has to sell all this to a sceptical nation. He wanted to go into the election campaign with a message of hope and evidence from London that Labour is turning things around. I’m sure he will still try to do this, but there is a real danger that his words will sound hollow and that he will simply appear disconnected from reality. Voters are not stupid – their mood is one of nervousness and pessimism. The present is grim, and the future does not look bright. And the finger of blame for this is being pointed firmly at Sarwar’s pal in Downing Street.

It all works in Swinney’s favour. He now has extra cash to splash at a vital electoral moment. His government may be no great shakes either, but it is far less unpopular than the UK administration. Dull and ineffective, maybe, but in comparison to the weekly clown show at Westminster it at least appears steady.

The tragedy of all this is the impact the situation is likely to have on reform in Scotland. A nation that badly needs radical change to its public services and brave decisions from its political leaders will probably not get it. There is no real pressure on the SNP to take risks by challenging the vested interests that are holding us back – the polls suggest the party is cruising to victory as it is. When Scottish Labour was competing for first place a year or so ago, there was a refreshing energy to Scottish politics. That competitiveness forced Swinney to explicitly refocus his government on the big mainstream issues that affect everyone, such as education, health and the economy. Sarwar was snapping at his heels and the status quo would no longer do. Without that sense of jeopardy, the incentives have changed.

As for Sarwar, how radical can his own manifesto now be? With public confidence low and faith in Labour even lower, any programme of serious reform will be a major gamble. My instinct is that what we will see from the two main parties in the coming months will amount to little more than promises of tinkering – a tweak here, a nip and tuck there, electoral bribes and continued high spending, all amounting to not very much. Scotland will be doomed to continue on its current path of mediocrity and decline.

I dearly hope I’m wrong. The times and the challenges are too serious for low ambitions and playing safe. But it simply doesn’t feel like we are approaching the moment where our politicians will surprise us. And so Scotland continues to sink.

[Further reading: Scotland must learn from English schools]

It was a breath of fresh air, therefore, to talk this week with Maree Todd, the Scottish sports minister. We were discussing the rise of women’s football in Scotland, and she was full of praise for the Lionesses and the impact their global success has had not just on England, but on the women’s game in Scotland too. It’s certainly hard to imagine many Scots reacting as positively to an England men’s World Cup win next year.

The women’s game is culturally different to the men’s: matches are often unsegregated between rival fans, the crowds are more family-based and the atmosphere generally friendlier and less tribal. There is support between teams and countries, all of whom have a shared interest in growing the sport. Todd had a wonderful line: “sisterhood is stronger than nationhood”.

Solidarity between the UK’s nations is not what it was. Support for Scottish independence sits just shy of 50 per cent, while polling suggests we may, before too long, have an English nationalist prime minister, Plaid in power in Wales, Sinn Fein ruling Northern Ireland and an SNP first minister. This does not necessarily seem like a recipe for harmonious and constructive co-existence, or to promise a bright future for the Union. It is a consequence of Keir Starmer’s failure.

One sad result of the constitutional pitched battle that has dominated Scotland politics for more than a decade has been the refusal to consider that English policymakers may occasionally have a good idea. The SNP position has usually been that if England is doing something then Scotland damn well won’t. This has been self-defeating in a number of areas.

The one that rankles with me most is education. No one claims the English schools system is perfect, but its recent story is one of success. It has soared up the international charts due to a programme of reform pursued by consecutive governments, both Labour and Conservative. Scotland, meanwhile, has been traveling in the other direction under the control of a “progressive” education establishment and a government afraid of challenging those vested interests.

This week, Enlighten, the think tank I run, played host to Sir Nick Gibb, arguably the most successful and consequential schools minister England has ever had. Gibb was in post for most of the 2010s and into the early 2020s, and his innovations lie at the heart of the success story. He is softly spoken and cerebral, with a genuinely expert grasp of his subject matter (a rarity in politics). He has recently published a book explaining how he did it: Reforming Lessons: Why English Schools Have Improved Since 2010 and How This Was Achieved.

In short, Gibb oversaw the expansion of the academy programme – he is generous about the role played by his Labour predecessors – that brought new leadership to failing schools and freed up successful heads to run their schools as they saw fit. There were changes to accountability and teaching methods, a curriculum based on knowledge, and improvements to pupil behaviour. There was an intense focus on phonics and East Asian methods for teaching maths, both of which had a dramatic and quick impact.

Gibb and his immediate boss, Michael Gove, faced opposition from the English education establishment, but sought to work with and persuade their critics. Gibb kept good personal relations with his opponents in the unions. He says he compromised where necessary, introducing reforms until his plan had largely been achieved in full. It’s a smart political strategy – after all, how do you eat an elephant? One bit at a time.

Too many of Scotland’s schools are in poor fettle. And yet, so far, our political leaders – I’m not just talking about the SNP here – show little intention of properly grasping the issue. Surely, if a strong education system is the closest thing society and politics have to a silver bullet, this should be their number one priority. As May approaches, can we expect manifestos to display some genuinely radical thinking, or will the parties continue to kow-tow to the received wisdom of the conservative establishment, despite the track record of failure and decline? If anything is worth spending your precious political capital on, surely our children and their future prospects are it. Most successful systems across the world have similar measures at their core, so why resist what is obviously best practice?

Gibbs says he is not a particularly ideological politician, and is more interested in “what works”. What a good and all-too-rare way to approach politics. And what a legacy this now former MP and minister has left behind.

Sisterhood may well be stronger than nationhood. To the rational mind, lots of other things should be too, including smart, proven public policy success. I’m told Scotland’s education secretary Jenny Gilruth has asked to meet Nick Gibb. I hope she’s in listening mode, and that she finds his lessons as inspiring as I did, and that she then acts upon them.

[Further reading: Tinkering with ECHR definitions will not help the government]

North of the border, Labour has sunk to third place in the polls, behind the SNP and Reform. With six months to go until the Holyrood election, the party is nowhere near where it needs to be if it is to oust the Nats from Bute House. Concerns are growing among senior figures that Labour’s ambitions might be done for, even before the campaign has a chance to get properly underway.

It’s impossible not to feel for Sarwar. Most of his problems are not of his own making. Labour sources say that on the doorsteps in recent Scottish by-elections, the biggest obstacle they faced was the chronic unpopularity of the Prime Minister. He is a major drag factor on Labour’s vote, as is the perception that his government has so far been a failure. With a brutal Budget on the way, no one is expecting this to change any time soon.

Scottish MPs have been involved in the conversations about replacing Starmer before the May electoral test in Scotland, Wales and in English local government. “The timetable has changed. They’ve started asking why Scotland, Wales and England should be sacrificed before making the change that people can see is needed,” said one source.

So Sarwar is arguably going into the election campaign with one hand tied behind his back. Eighteen months ago, the belief was that a new Labour government at Westminster would help him over the line in Scotland. That mood has long since evaporated. “It’s a shitshow and a problem for us,” said one party insider. Sources in Labour warn that the Scottish leadership is responsible for at least some of its own troubles, though. They argue that the party appears “policy-light” and could be leaving it too late to define its offer and its message to voters.

Sarwar is liked and respected by his colleagues. He has brought Scottish Labour back from the doldrums and is a dervish of energy and confidence. His social media videos have been excellent – professional, smart and funny – in the past few months, as his team have learned from the online tactics of Zohran Mamdani, the innovative New York mayor.

It’s not that Labour lacks funding or expertise, either. With Douglas Alexander back in the Scotland Office, they have a seasoned election-winning veteran at the helm of their campaign. The team around Sarwar has experience of the successful 2024 general election and has pulled off some excellent by-election results since then. The donors who have supported the party in recent years are still around.

And yet, despite these advantages, they are battling with Reform for a claim on second place, rather than scrapping with the SNP for outright victory. I’m told that there are plans for a significant January launch of policy, but, says one source, more needs to be done before then. “By the end of this year we need to be clearly in second place. Many voters are fed up of the SNP but they need to look at Labour and see us as the obvious alternative, and they need to start doing that soon. We’re leaving it all a bit late to set out that we are offering change and difference.”

Easier said than done, of course, but that’s the challenge. Sarwar would defend himself against criticism that he is policy-light, and could point to a thoughtful and detailed report on economic growth published this week by Anton Muscatelli, the economist and former principal of the University of Glasgow, which the Labour leader commissioned. He has also taken a deliberate decision to hold back on announcing some of his key policy ideas until the Holyrood campaign is fully underway, to ensure they are fresh and that the SNP doesn’t steal them. He believes that voters haven’t yet begun focusing on the Holyrood election, and are still viewing politics through a Westminster prism. When that changes in the new year, he expects Labour’s data to improve.

But still, the polls show the fight is currently with Reform for second place, rather than with the SNP for first. A third-place finish would be a humiliation – as it was in 2016 when Ruth Davidson achieved the unthinkable by bringing her Tories home in second, ahead of Labour. Sarwar had seemed to have put those dark days behind his party. And yet…

It seems extremely unlikely that he will stay on as Labour leader if he fails to become first minister in May. Sarwar’s whole game since taking the job in 2021 has been targeted at winning Bute House in 2026. That was the goal het set himself, and he did so in public. Even a second-place finish for Labour would hand the Nats a third consecutive decade in government. That could only be judged a catastrophic failure, whatever the reasons for it and whoever is most to blame. The only question then is likely to be whether Keir Starmer or his pal Anas Sarwar is first out the door.

[Further reading: Keir Starmer has entered the danger zone]

They are certainly talking the talk. Last month, finance secretary Shona Robison published a consultation on reforming council tax. On the back of a paper by the IFS, the Scottish government said it would work with Scotland’s councils to devise a new system. Properties are currently taxed on their 1991 value, which just shows how long it has been since this particular thistle has been grasped.

Robison says the government “is not advocating for a specific reform”. However, it seems likely that those in the priciest homes will pay significantly more. The new system won’t arrive any time soon, though, with Robison stating it “would require a long delivery period and would likely not be complete in this decade”. Doing something slowly is better than doing nothing, I suppose, and the time frame might allow the SNP to prepare voters and build some political consensus behind the plan.

But they should be doing more. Scotland – ironically, given its devolved status – is one of the most centralised nations in Europe. The Scottish parliament, especially under SNP rule, has consistently gathered power to itself, stripping councils of autonomy over policy, services and finances, and creating national agencies everywhere you look.

This goes against the healthy principle that decision-making is better exercised as close to communities as possible. The challenges facing the Borders are very different from those facing Glasgow, which are different from those faced in Aberdeen. Yet, too often, it has seemed like the man or woman in Bute House has felt that they know best. As a result, starved of resources and unable to do much about it, local democracy in Scotland has withered. Polls show public trust in councils has plummeted since the advent of Holyrood.

Contrast this with the vibrancy that has been unleashed in those English areas with directly elected mayors. When I attended Labour conference in Liverpool, the city seemed to be buzzing with renewed purpose. The same is true of Manchester under Andy Burnham, and Tees Valley and the West Midlands have found new life under their mayors.

Scottish Labour has made noises about introducing directly elected mayors, though we may not know the detail of its plans until the party produces its manifesto for May’s Holyrood election. But the polls consistently indicate that the SNP is likely to emerge as the largest party, and the national leadership has shown little interest in pursuing the innovation.

This would be a shame. It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the SNP’s reluctance to go down the mayoral route – which is standard in many countries – is in part based on a desire to avoid creating peripheral power centres, which, as we’ve seen in England, can create problems for the centre. It is also a nationalist instinct to put a national identity above local ones – if you want Scots to vote for independence, they should feel Scottish first and foremost, rather than Glaswegian or Dundonian. Hence all those national agencies and powers dragged to the centre – these are the trappings of potential statehood.

If we want Scotland to flourish, then this is most likely to begin at a local rather than national level. Local businesses drive economic growth, so allow local politicians to devise and implement strategies that will help them. Local communities care most about their city and town centres, so give them the ability to revitalise these places. A directly elected mayor is a figurehead, but also an advocate, a scrapper for local priorities and a lightning rod for a community to think and talk about itself: what it is, what makes it distinctive, what it might yet be.

In a forthcoming paper on local government reform that will be published by Enlighten, my think tank, the Mercat Group of former council chief executives argues that “the aim should be for decision-making at the most local level, consistent with sound democratic and financial accountability. The devolution settlement always saw devolution extending to the most appropriate level. The Scottish Parliament has, so far, assumed a top-down approach, and local democracy has perished in its wake.

“The key objective should be to increase the participation of both people and businesses in the governance of Scotland. Both councils and communities have become less involved in shaping their futures as more decisions are taken centrally. The consequence has been the loss of trust in both councils and the Scottish government.”

This is clearly and demonstrably true. One solution to the rise of political extremes is to empower people to make decisions and take responsibility for the environments in which they live every day. A sense of ownership is a powerful and inspiring thing. That’s why change should be embraced by whoever wins in May.

[Further reading: Distrust between Scotland’s leaders is a barrier to reform]

That final session, the politicians, was the tricky one, though. We had Neil Gray, the Health Secretary, and the opposition parties’ health spokespeople: Labour’s Jackie Baillie, the Lib Dems’ Alex Cole-Hamilton, the Tories’ Brian Whittle and the Greens’ Patrick Harvie. The mood of concord quickly soured.

I asked the audience whether they wanted to see health taken out of the political cycle, out of the overly tribal politics that scars today’s Holyrood, and for a ten-year national strategy to be developed and agreed between the parties, much as the Smith Commission of 2014 saw them strike a deal on new powers for Holyrood. All but a few raised their hands in agreement. I then asked the politicians whether they were up for it. The answer was a flat no: they would instead continue to take lumps out of one another. The grim outlook was captured by Cole-Hamilton, who turned to Gray and said “I like you, Neil, but…” If you have to say it…

Holyrood was not supposed to be like this. The chamber is designed in a horseshoe shape, rather than Westminster’s two swords’-length distance, to encourage collaboration. The voting system is designed to avoid any one party winning an overall majority, forcing parties to work together in the European way. But decades of hostility, mainly over the constitution, have taken their toll. Our politicians may like each other well enough, they may even agree on a fair amount, but there’s no real trust between them.

This is a barrier to reform. If everything is a political football, then common sense goes out the window. One might think that health, and Scotland’s world-beatingly poor record in the area, provides the perfect platform for cross-party working, for country before party. But no.

This is, arguably, a national tragedy. Earlier in the day, we heard from Stephen Boyle, the Auditor General, who pointed out that health spending constitutes 40 per cent of Holyrood’s budget. This is projected to rise to 55 per cent by 2075, an astronomical sum which would have major implications for spending in pother key areas, and for tax levels. Collaboration was essential, said Boyle, if this crisis was to be addressed effectively.

Everyone knows the reality of the situation. The health system is often stretched beyond capacity, it is overly complex, and it too often fails to meet people’s needs. At the same time, data shows our health is deteriorating, inequalities are widening, and we have an ageing population which places a growing demand on NHS and social care services. Fundamentally, the status quo is not an option. A social care system worthy of the name must be created. Resource must be shifted from treating sickness to preventing it. Technology must be embraced. Efficiencies must be found.

The public gets it – the NHS is the electorate’s main priority going into next May’s Holyrood election. My think tank, Enlighten, which hosted the conference along with Chest Heart & Stroke Scotland and the Royal College of Physicians, published polling which showed that 93 per cent think the NHS needs either “significant” or “moderate” change and reform, with 88 per cent thinking the same of social care. A whopping 71 per cent of Scots think the NHS is worse now than ten years ago, and 77 per cent think it will be worse still 10 years from now. Eighty-eight per cent believe healthcare should remain free at the point of use, but 50 per cent would use the private sector. That latter figure – it would have been nowhere near that a decade ago – shows just what a loss of confidence there has been in the state system.

Now, six months or so out from an election, it may have been asking a bit much for those competing against one another in it to declare peace and agree to work together. But the likely outcome of that election suggests that is exactly what they need to do. Polls repeatedly show Reform UK is on course to win as many as 20 of Holyrood’s 129 MSPs. No one party is likely to have overall control, so it will be a combative parliament of minorities stretching from far left to far right. Scotland’s voters are as sick of mainstream politics, and its apparent inability to address the deep challenges facing our public services and our economy, as they are across the rest of the West.

How do you tackle this? Howe do you stop the drift, and the rot? In part, by showing the mainstream can deliver, that the centre can hold. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the only way to do this is for the two big beasts, the SNP and Labour, to find ways to set aside their differences and show that they can work together when required in the national interest. I don’t for a second believe there will be some Nat-Labour formal coalition after May, but there doesn’t need to be if they can combine to agree and deliver a course of action across several parliaments on issues such as health. Otherwise, short-termism and cheap point scoring will continue to rule the day.

Polls show that most Scots believe the Scottish Parliament has been a disappointment over the 26 years of its existence. It’s hard to disagree with that view, and it is a dangerous one. This loss of faith can only be the fault of those politicians who have consistently lacked ambition, courage and a vision for a better nation. From my experience on Monday, I’m sorry to say that nothing is about to change.

[Further reading: The SNP has run out of ideas]

It will be interesting to see what kind of crowd this weekend’s SNP conference in Aberdeen attracts. Does Scotland’s long-governing party have much pizzazz left? Can it still pull in businesses? Are activists still as fired up about independence as they were during the party’s glory years? Or have fatigue, failure and familiarity taken their toll?

Seven months out from the next Holyrood election, John Swinney will be hoping to show strength and vitality. After a troubled few years, he has certainly been balm to the SNP’s soul, restoring order to the government and putting it back on course to win in May.

But while things appear better in Natland, there are still plenty of problems. Voters are generally disillusioned with devolution and an administration that has been in control for two decades without much in the way of big achievements. If the SNP wins next May it will largely be because of a split in the unionist vote, driven by Reform.

This week, the Scottish Social Attitudes survey, charting public opinion over 25 years of devolution, found that only 47 per cent of Scots say they trust Holyrood to act in the country’s best interests. In 2019 the figure was 61 per cent. In 1999, at devolution’s advent, it was 81 per cent. Meanwhile, satisfaction levels with the NHS have dropped to just 22 per cent – an alarming stat given health is the main public concern going into the election.

A lot of this must be on the SNP, given its prolonged grip on the state. So what is Swinney’s response to rising disaffection? Well, he launched yet another paper on independence this week, promising that households would be £10,000 better off after leaving the UK. This is the kind of pie-in-the-sky figure that was thrown around during the independence referendum in 2014. It wasn’t believable then, and given the growing Scottish deficit, it’s even less believable now.

Something has gone wrong at an intellectual level in the SNP. Its arguments on key indy issues such as pensions, currency and fiscal matters have barely developed a jot in the past decade. Using the civil service, it has continued to produce swathes of documents on independence and all the glories it would hold, but less and less attention has been paid by a media and public who have heard it all before. If Scotland said no to these arguments in 2014, why would it say yes today? “Britain is a shitshow” is not a winning argument. What is the new, developing offer?

Launching this latest paper (the last for now, he says), Swinney declared that devolution had “reached its limits” and that for Scotland to improve it would need to take the next constitutional step.

This strikes me as a foolish statement. Has the SNP used the powers of the Scottish Parliament to their maximum over nearly 20 years? I don’t believe the First Minister believes that to be the case for a second. In fact, the debate around Holyrood’s first quarter century has focused on how poorly and unambitiously those powers have been deployed.

Scotland has the highest drugs deaths in Europe, ferries for its islands are heavily delayed and vastly over budget, its schools continue to slide down the global rankings and the NHS is in a mess. Most fair-minded people would agree that the SNP, through years of constitutional obsession, has failed to deploy the might of the state to tackle these issues.

There are other routes and methods available. Lord Offord suffers from a triple reputational risk: he is a Tory, a peer, and previously worked in private equity. This is not the kind of CV that has often proved popular in Scotland’s social democratic political climate. Yet since entering politics (becoming a Scotland Office then trade minister in the last Conservative government) he has emerged as a thoughtful and persuasive voice on Scotland’s problems and how they might be addressed.

In a recent pamphlet, “Healthy Nation, Wealthy Nation”, he called on Scotland to reclaim the legacy of Adam Smith, “to create a virtuous circle of entrepreneurship and economic growth, a high level of educational and employment opportunities, and healthy lives with a quality provision of healthcare.”

We should, he argues, set aside the constitutional debate for a generation and instead concentrate on making Scotland “the most prosperous and best-governed part of the UK.” Only once that milestone is achieved should we think about returning to the constitutional debate. “The Scottish people can then decide their future direction, but from a position of strength, not weakness,” says Offord.

He is not impartial, of course. However, he criticises his own party as well as the SNP for its fixation on the constitution, saying the Scottish Tories have focused on short-term political gain rather than developing considered policy on the major issues. And he argues that while nationalists have sought to use devolution as a stepping stone to independence, unionists have merely “tolerated” it as a mechanism to stop nationalism from spreading. There is blame all around. It is time to do things differently, to try something new.

Unless you are a blinkered diehard on one side or the other, it’s hard to disagree with this analysis. The prospect of a politics focused on raising economic growth and reforming public services, with its practitioners working across the aisle in pursuit of the national good, will likely remain a dream, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a noble and necessary one. How many groundhog days must Scots live through?

Of course, with SNP conference upon him, Swinney must play to the party gallery. Independence will be the main focus of debate and conversation, as it always is. Some delegates are angry at Swinney’s caution around pursuing a second referendum, even though his prescription – a majority of SNP seats at Holyrood – is a sensible and fair one and is based on the 2014 precedent. We will see whether tempers fray in Aberdeen.

The bigger problem is that until we change the conversation at a national level, the work of change – so very badly needed – cannot begin.

[Further reading: Bridget Phillipson: “I’ve had to fight tooth and nail”]

In truth, though, I thought Wes Streeting’s address to the same hall a few hours before was even better. What Starmer strives for, the Health Secretary has in spades. He is probably the closest this government has to a Blair-quality orator.

Streeting is, in my view, the most impressive politician in the Cabinet. For all the justifiable claims about Labour’s agenda lacking shape and coherence, you can’t say the same for its approach to the NHS. Streeting has been a ball of energy and reform since taking office.

Waiting lists and times are being cut, and the unions faced down. A deal has been struck with GPs that will help to end the “8am scramble” for on-the-day appointments. Local diagnostic centres are being expanded. But what is most impressive is how the English health system is embracing the digital revolution.

The NHS app has been available in England since 2018, but Streeting has put rocket boosters under it. It will now allow patients to book appointments with their GP, order repeat prescriptions and access their health record. Users can manage healthcare services for parents or spouses. In short, it makes life easier.

More is to come. There is a plan for a digital hospital service by 2027, aimed at cutting waiting times further. NHS Online will be available through the app, and have its own dedicated doctors so that assessments, check-ups and follow-up appointments can be done online. Ministers say it can deliver 8.5 million appointments and assessments in its first three years, four times more than an average NHS trust. “A new world is coming,” Starmer said, as he announced the policy.

It’s an irony that some Scottish digital companies are involved in designing the app, and that others are working with English trusts on local digital offers, because the Scottish NHS still lives in the old world. Where Streeting has brought vision, ambition and a degree of necessary risk-taking to health policy, the system north of the border languishes years behind.

There is, for example, still no NHS app in Scotland. There is a plan to launch one later this year, but only in Lanarkshire and with very limited functionality. And although the app will be made available to the population as a whole in April next year (a month before the Holyrood election, conveniently for the SNP), a full rollout won’t happen until the end of the decade.

A 12-year gap between the English NHS’s digital revolution and a Scottish equivalent is astonishing and unforgivable. The advantages of the use of technology in improving healthcare have been obvious for so long, and yet the SNP has dragged its feet. Scottish digital companies that have repeatedly offered to help speed things along say they have been given the cold shoulder.

Surely, this should have been a priority. Scotland’s population is aging faster than the rest of the UK’s, increasing the pressure on waiting lists and systemic costs. The future projections are horrifying. The nation’s health challenges are already deeper and more engrained than elsewhere – as Paul Johnston, chief executive of Public Health Scotland, puts it, “people in Scotland now die younger than in any other Western European country. People spend more of their lives in ill health. The gap in life expectancy between the poorest and the wealthiest is growing… at the moment, Scotland’s health is getting worse.”

The persistence with an analogue version of healthcare beyond any reasonable timescale is one of the SNP’s greatest failings. The NHS may be treated as a political football by all of the political parties, but the Nats have controlled the system for the past 18 years. In that time, our lives have been transformed by the digital revolution, and yet our leaders have failed to grasp the opportunities it offers – and not just when it comes to health.

Why has this been so? Is it to do with the SNP’s relentless obsession with independence leaving little space for a focus on reforming public services? Is it that change always comes with an element of risk, and the Scottish government has repeatedly shown itself to be risk-averse? Is it that anything done by the UK government must not be aped, because Scotland must always be shown to be different? It’s certainly the case that when NHS England offered to use its spare capacity to treat Scottish patients languishing on waiting lists, it was rebuffed.

The devolved administration has complete control over the NHS and education. These are the two main policy areas where it can make a difference, and yet in both the nation has been going backwards. John Swinney has now taken control of a programme of health reform, insisting it will be a key priority of his time as first minister. But Swinney is no Wes Streeting – he is still driving with the brakes on. A new world may be coming, but, sadly, it’s coming to some much quicker than others.

[Further reading: Starmer has not yet proved he can solve our quicksand politics]