THE Scottish Government is an OK government. Not bad, not brilliant, but OK.

It has cut climate emissions, boosted renewables, increased welfare payments to the worst-off, rolled out free childcare and free school meals for P1-P5, brought in more NHS staff, and introduced minimum unit pricing for alcohol.

At the same time, on the SNP’s watch, children from poor backgrounds have remained well behind their wealthy peers in exam attainment, Scottish pupils have fallen in the world rankings in maths and science, the number of staffed NHS beds has reduced significantly, we’re still chronically short of doctors and nurses (the Scottish Government even cut student nurse places when Nicola Sturgeon was Health Secretary) and the fiasco surrounding the procurement of two ferries drags embarrassingly onwards (they’re currently five years late and two and a half times over budget).

Like I say, not bad but not brilliant.

But even those who regard Scottish ministers as numpties seem to take the forgiving view that at least they’re our numpties.

The latest annual survey of what Scottish people think of their two governments has found that despite well-documented problems in hospitals, schools and other services, two-thirds of people trust Scottish ministers to work in Scotland’s best interests.

Just 22 per cent of those questioned in the Scottish Social Attitudes survey say the same of the UK Government.

Sixty three per cent think Holyrood gives ordinary people more of a say in how Scotland is run and a similar number think Holyrood gives Scotland a stronger voice. Forty per cent, meanwhile, think the UK Government is not at all good at listening and 57 per cent don’t trust the UK Government to make fair decisions very much or at all.

These are stark findings, so what conclusions should we draw?

Perhaps above all, if Westminster wants to rebuild trust, then it must learn from Holyrood. It could start with a better voting system.

It might be tempting to conclude from these survey results that Scottish voters are full of enthusiasm for the SNP, and even independence, but is that true?

Well, disdain for the Tories under Boris Johnson shows through strongly (the survey was conducted from October 2021 to March 2022). We can detect resentment of Brexit and the residual impression, established during the pandemic, that Nicola Sturgeon is more competent than her UK counterpart.

The SNP is also highly adept and completely shameless about deflecting blame on to Westminster for the shortcomings of Scotland’s public services, which is only partly justified.

But none of this means that Scots are essentially fed up with being part of the UK – not even Constitution Secretary Angus Robertson, in welcoming the survey, claimed that.

Actually what this survey shows most clearly is that devolution is working. The whole point of devolution, supported by three-quarters of the Scottish public and all parties except the Tories, was to create a parliament that was closer to the people it served, focused entirely on Scotland and that could be trusted to champion Scotland within the UK. The Social Attitudes survey has shown again and again that Holyrood has succeeded on all counts.

But this survey also shows that people do not feel their priorities are reflected by Westminster in the same way they are at Holyrood. It shows they want a stake in both their governments, or at least a sense that the London Cabinet reflects their priorities, after years of Tory governments they didn’t vote for.

Some argue that that is a vain hope, not worth holding out for, and that the UK should just break up; but others would argue a Labour government – and better still, a new proportional UK-wide voting system at Westminster – would change the terms of the whole debate.

Switch on First Minister’s Questions on a Thursday and it’s unlikely the first word to spring to mind would be “consensus”. “Scrap”, perhaps, or “stushie” or “trench warfare”, but not like-mindedness.

The truth is, though, that if the independence question is removed from the equation, there is a high degree of consensus across the benches in Holyrood. Four out of the five parties represented can be described as progressive, and left or centre-left, and the spread of MSPs reflects public opinion in Scotland pretty accurately. This in turn is down to Holyrood using a voting system that is more proportional than the one used in Westminster elections.

It helps explain why Holyrood comes out with such high approval ratings versus Westminster in spite of the Scottish Government having clocked up its share of disappointments and blunders over the last 15 years: people feel that at least its heart is in the right place.

Can the same be said of Westminster? It cannot. The Tories, elected on 43 per cent of the vote, have a huge majority in Parliament and have pursued increasingly niche policies that do not reflect the priorities of the majority. Liz Truss’s term of office epitomised how unaccountable it had become with plans to lower taxes on the rich and roll back laws intended to protect ecosystems.

In Scotland, where 64 per cent of voters think tax and spending on education, health and social benefits should increase, such a right-wing UK government feels like a democratic abomination.

Importantly, though, that disillusionment is matched elsewhere in the UK. Significantly more people at the last election voted for parties of the left and centre-left than for the Tories – they just didn’t see their choice reflected in Parliament because of first-past-the-post.

English voters are a bit less progressive and bit more conservative than Scottish voters, but the differences are less significant than many believe. And we know that British voters are now almost as mutinous about the Westminster Government as Scottish voters are. YouGov surveys have shown for many months that people in the Midlands, north of England, London and even the south of England disapprove of the Tory Government by huge margins.

That disillusionment helps explain why the British Social Attitudes survey, for the first time, has recorded majority support across the UK for changing the voting system to proportional representation.

It’s just fairer. Scotland should rightly have 10 or 11 Labour MPs: instead it has one.

PR needs to happen and looks increasingly as if it will. Then we will see how the people of Scotland feel about their two parliaments.

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