TWO years into her tenure as Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is discovering that Deliverance is not just a feature film about Donald Trump supporters. Like the US president-elect Ms Sturgeon and her party were swept to power on a wave of rhetoric about Labour’s failure to represent its heartlands and guarantees to combat inequality. Unlike Mr Trump, the First Minister probably had every intention of keeping them.

The gameshow host and serial bankrupt who, in eight weeks, will be sworn in as the 45th President of the US was propelled to power by a large swathe of working class America who believed what he told them. Rarely, in modern democratic politics has such a sizeable demographic swallowed whole everything they were being told in the run-up to an election.

Thus, Mexicans would be prevented from pouring over the border to steal their jobs and rob their frail and elderly while the Chinese would be put in their place in the global trading markets: two rungs below the US. Isis would be blitzed and Muslims intent on undermining the American way (all of them, basically) would be stopped at Immigration. Crooked Hillary would be sent down for a spell in the pokey and, as the Washington swamp drained out, her crooked confreres would all soon follow.

His new supporters among America’s white working class will soon discover that the multitude of steel and coal-mining jobs he promised to create will not happen and were never within his gift to deliver. The wall won’t go up; Hillary will remain at large, the US won’t become the world’s torture chamber for terror suspects and trade agreements will largely remain in place. Hell, even Obamacare will remain largely intact. Mr Trump won’t deliver for them; instead he’ll deliver tax cuts and light scrutiny of Wall Street to protect the finances of the elite whom he had promised to scourge.

As the Washington Post put it, “Maybe Trump will find a way to actually improve the lives of working class voters. That’s theoretically possible, but absolutely nothing he has done or said so far suggests that he has any idea how to do it, or even the inclination.”

If you were to re-cast this sentence slightly and substitute any of the leading Brexiters for Mr Trump – people such as Michael Gove and Boris Johnson – exactly the same conclusions could be drawn. Mr Johnson and his cronies have never shown any inclination to improve the lives of working class people; indeed they belong to a political party which is committed to keeping them down. In the five months since June 23 they have shown they had no idea how Brexit could improve anyone’s lives and they probably didn’t much care about the outcome in any case.

Like Mr Trump, they used the sense of alienation and social detachment of much of working class England simply as a means of mounting a bloodless coup within their own party. No matter how it all worked out their personal wealth would always insulate them from the worst effects of Brexit if it all went aglay. Nothing in the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement this week suggests that Brexit will not have a profound, long-lasting and deleterious effect on Britain’s finances and that, as usual, the poorest and the most vulnerable will have to shoulder a disproportionate quantum of the pain.

It would be churlish and wilfully perverse to insist that Nicola Sturgeon’s approach to power and the means by which she attained it falls into the same category as Mr Trump’s and Mr Johnson’s.

In their respective quests for power these two displayed an attitude of outright contempt and disdain for the voters of their countries. Not even Ms Sturgeon’s most implacable enemies can plausibly accuse her of that. Yet, after almost a decade of unbroken government in Scotland by the party she leads, and two years of her own leadership as First Minister, questions are being asked about her ability to deliver. If nothing tangible happens by May 2021, the date of the next Holyrood election, then for all her sincere intentions about addressing inequality and reducing the educational attainment gap, her administration’s promises will be deemed to have been as worthless as Mr Trump’s and those of the leading Brexiters.

By a happy accident of history for the SNP their rise to outright executive power in Scotland has coincided with the Labour Party north of the Border being in a prolonged state of inertia and depression. The Tories in Scotland meanwhile are still thirled to the reactionary and neo-liberal extremism of their bosses at Westminster. Thus, the SNP have been gifted something almost unique in a political democracy: a ready-made four-term government. This gives them more than enough time to experiment and to take risks for those things that are dear to their heart: social justice, equality and fairness in health and education; to deliver on their guarantees which would, in turn, bring about the deliverance of many of those who voted for them.

The slogan which a team of advisers tacked on to John Swinney’s Education Governance Review is impressive: Empowering teachers, parents and communities to achieve Excellence and Equity. It is the third such educational initiative since devolution, following the Curriculum for Excellence and Higher Still. Still, though, it remains very difficult for children from disadvantaged areas to fulfil their educational potential. At some point, a risk needs to be taken; one that involves a radical shift in doctrine and which carries a radical rebuke to the way things have always been done. When Mr Swinney unveils his review, we will know in the first few pages if this SNP administration is finally about to fulfil its own potential.

In health too, something radical needs to happen. You can’t question the commitment of a government which spends more than a third of the nation’s budget trying to make the NHS in Scotland fit for purpose. It’s clear, though, that Scotland’s 32 local authorities act as gold-plated pension pot providers for a travelling circus of health executives from all over the UK of questionable competence. They have made clowns of Holyrood and tell ministers, most with no previous experience of the NHS, exactly what they want to hear.

The Labour Party in Scotland has been removed from power for a generation because, latterly, they weren’t simply failing to deliver on pre-election promises; such was their disdain for their own people and their sense of entitlement that they couldn’t even be bothered to make them.

At First Minister’s Questions on Thursday Ms Sturgeon was reminded sharply and eloquently by Patrick Harvie, of the Scottish Greens, she possesses all the tax powers she needs to make spending decisions in areas she deems high priority. She also has the luxury of five more years to be truly radical: to deliver.