I have waded my way through all 118 pages of the Scottish Government’s programme for 2018/19, punchily titled “Delivering for today, Investing for tomorrow”.
The first thing which strikes you is that the cult of the personality is alive and well, 16 pictures of Nicola Sturgeon in various heart-warming poses, Kim Jong-un will be just so jealous.
Once you get past the pictures and the remarkable number of spelling and grammatical mistakes (this booklet was finished in a hurry), the impression you are left with is a Government which believes the 1970s were a model of how to do things right. A ludicrous number of targets, ambitions, objectives, missions - no part of our country, economy and society are untouched by the blizzard.
Desperate to make a difference and above all to dwell on a positive tomorrow rather than the more difficult today, the Scottish Government is making the classic mistake of trying to do too much and in so doing will inevitability achieve little of real importance.
Bad news is ignored, Scotland’s consistently poor economic growth rate, broken promises on healthcare waiting times, rail improvement delays - all airbrushed out of the picture and replaced with announcements of more spending and legislative initiatives. I lost count of the number of times the document bleated about the UK Government and tried to keep reading.
Since the 1970s we have very painfully learnt two important things which the document’s authors don’t want to acknowledge.
First, high levels of Government spending are not a good thing. It is not the new money it pretends to be - it is money taken from the pockets of you and I, supplemented by borrowings and then channelled by a wasteful and inefficient bureaucratic machine at a series of things we do need and quite a few fashion objectives which we don’t. Economies work better when there is a healthy balance between the private and public sector. The public sector and its influence is too strong in Scotland - which is a large part of why our economic growth rate is so poor.
The Scottish Government should refine its agenda down to a smaller number of objectives and focus on them with vigour and consistency. Stop micro-managing everything in sight, leave it to individuals, local authorities, businesses and other groups to set and deliver their own agendas. The Scottish Government talks a great deal about diversity but it doesn’t actually allow the diversity which matters - enabling other people to set their own priorities and get on with achieving them themselves.
The second lesson the Scottish Government has failed to learn is that mixing social and economic policies together is not clever. The document is riddled with requirements for businesses to pay the living wage, achieve gender equality and not use those nasty zero-hours employment contracts. Great soundbites which the lobbying groups will love but, what they actually mean is that a small business employing only a few people in an economically deprived part of Scotland, without any Human Resources policies and needing to have its labour force availability sufficiently flexible to deal with unpredictable variations in demand, is suddenly in the naughty boy category rather than the economic hero it actually is. Worse, it will have a whole lot of extra administration and cost heaped on it and won’t be able to bid for Government contracts because it cannot tick all the socially inclusive boxes on the application form.
The Government should resist such social engineering and leave businesses to provide good services which provide jobs, create the wealth and pay the taxes which can then be used to further social objectives.
Pinstripe is a senior member of Scotland's financial services community.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here