WHAT has the Scottish Government ever done for us? Well, there’s tuition fees, free prescriptions, personal care, bus passes and so on ... but after 10 years in office, governments invariably fail to live up to expectations. They make mistakes, don’t honour promises, get caught in scandals. It happened to Margaret Thatcher; it happened to Tony Blair; so it’s hardly surprising that the SNP Government under Nicola Sturgeon is being castigated for failing to deliver.

Most of those headline achievements of the Scottish Government were in its first minority government after 2007. Somehow, Ms Sturgeon’s hailing of the “baby box generation” yesterday doesn’t have quite the same resonance. Ex-ministers and former SNP political advisers now supply a Greek chorus of negative commentary from newspaper columns – which is a good thing on the whole. The aversion to criticism within the SNP was always a little creepy.

The Scottish Left has also fallen out of love with Ms Sturgeon. “The SNP has lost its radical edge,” they say, “run out of ideas... lapsed into Blairite managerialism.” Ultra-cautious tax policies and Ms Sturgeon rejecting the 50p band, while cutting air passenger duty to “posh fliers”, has led some Yes supporters into the arms of Jeremy Corbyn.

So there were a lot of people waiting to be underwhelmed by the First Minister’s legislative programme yesterday. And mostly they were. Ms Sturgeon had unwisely promised “the most ambitious legislative plan ever”. In the event, it was a perfectly respectable list of liberal-left measures, though it hardly lived up to that billing.

We already knew about the First Minister’s plans for an education bill, giving head teachers more control of schools. A National Investment Bank is an idea that has been around for a while, as is a deposit return scheme for bottles and cans. Nothing wrong with that, of course, as long as they actually happen this time. Free personal care for the under-65s, pardoning gay men, limiting custodial sentences and a consultation on Citizens Income are all very worthy but uncontroversial. The opposition leaders seemed to spend much of their speeches claiming credit for them.

If there was little excitement in the chamber, or on her own backbenches, during Ms Sturgeon’s address, it was largely because of the gaping hole in the programme left by the independence referendum. It’s not just the SNP MSPs who are grieving over the loss of a second referendum; it’s robbed the opposition parties of their Big Issue. The Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, is having trouble getting back to the day job, and had little to offer of substance yesterday in her reply to the First Minister. Labour, bereft of a leader following Kezia Dugdale’s abrupt departure, had even less to say, though her lugubrious deputy, Alex Rowley, did his best to read his script.

So, forecasts of the Scottish National Party’s demise may be premature. There have been no proper opinion polls since the General Election, but in most of the Scottish subsamples of UK polls from organisations like YouGov the SNP still seems to be doing pretty well, and comfortably ahead of Labour. This may be because the SNP, for all its faults, still seems to be the party most in touch with mainstream Scottish opinion. Looking back over the decade in office, the Scottish Government has probably been as successful in what it has NOT done, as in what it actually did.

The SNP did not extend private provision into the National Health Service in Scotland as many urged it so to do. Almost as soon as it came to office back in 2007, Ms Sturgeon, then Health Secretary, nationalised Strathcathro, the last of the private treatment centres set up by her Labour predecessors. People claim that the NHS is in deep trouble in Scotland, and it is certainly looking a bit threadbare recruitment-wise, but it is nothing compared with the chaos south of the Border. Only last month, the independent health charity, the Nuffield Trust, congratulated the Scottish NHS for its collaborative approach and urged “other parts of the UK to learn from it”.

The Scottish Government also held the line against charging tuition fees, despite the intense lobbying from figures like the former vice chancellor of St Andrews University, Louise Richardson. She is now in charge of Oxford University, and aroused derision this week by inviting comparison with premier league football players when trying to justify her £350,000 a year salary. As the UK Labour Party has discovered, tuition fees is a huge issue for millennials as well as older left-wingers. The SNP’s refusal to introduce £9,250 (and rising) fees north of the Border has done a great deal to bolster its flagging popularity with younger voters.

The Scottish Government is criticised above all for its failure in education. Literacy standards are not good enough, by the Scottish Government’s own admission, and too few young people from less well-off backgrounds go to university. But again, many of the harshest criticisms come from opponents of the comprehensive system. The Scottish Government decided not to follow England down the road of specialist schools, beacon academies and free schools, let alone restoring grammars as urged by Theresa May.

In doing so it has remained very much in tune with mainstream Scottish opinion.

And of course, the Scottish Government has been refusing to go along with hard Brexit. The First Minister’s arguments for remaining in the single market, laid out in the Scottish Government’s December White Paper, have now largely been adopted by Labour as it struggles to escape from the Brexit imbroglio. You can say all you want about the Scottish Government’s failure to promote growth and new business formation in Scotland, but nothing will do more damage to the Scottish economy than leaving the single market.

So, for all the recent criticism, it’s too early to write off the SNP and Ms Sturgeon, who remains one of the most competent leaders in UK politics. The Scottish Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, has made a big impact, but as the Brexit chaos deepens, she’ll find it hard to avoid becoming collateral damage. And Labour’s leadership crisis just goes on and on.