Adam Tomkins: The best and the worst of Scottish politics

Let’s start with the best. Step forward Nicola Sturgeon, announcing how Ukrainian refugees fleeing war and devastating havoc in their country, can seek refuge here in Scotland without needing anyone to sponsor them. The Scottish Government will arrange for their sponsoring after they arrive here. This is warm-hearted, humane and, frankly, the least we should be doing in the face of the horrors and brutality unleashed on the other side of our continent.

I am not usually the First Minister’s biggest fan (no, really), but she and her government have got this one right. The contrast with the woeful Home Office speaks for itself. Shameful is a cliché in party political rhetoric, but in this instance it is an apt accusation to lay at the Home Office’s door.

In announcing the “super-sponsor” scheme, the First Minister was quick to thank the teams of officials in both the Scottish and the UK governments who worked so hard to get it up and running.

This is the best of devolved politics – public officials working together across the political divide to deliver at speed a policy that will not merely improve but, in this instance, will save lives. This is what devolution was always supposed to be about: cooperation. Devolution is not about silos; still less, rabbit-holes. Devolution does not imagine that these things over here are for this government alone, and those things over there are for that government. No: devolution imagines that successful policy delivery requires – demands – cooperation.

Yes, governments may be formed by competing political parties, with wildly different visions for the future and policy preferences that are sharply at odds with one another. But nonetheless, successful government in a devolved setting is not about one-upmanship or pulling apart: it is about cooperation and harnessing the combined energies and resources of both levels of government at once. This is why those of us who oppose independence say that its alternative is not some form of Scottish dependence on London, but a grown-up and mature interdependence with London. The alternative to self-rule is shared rule.

The Scottish Government’s super-sponsor scheme could not have been put in place without the assistance and support of UK civil servants, and Nicola Sturgeon was absolutely right to acknowledge this. Good for her. And good for the UK Government, too. Had the nonsense of “muscular unionism”, which threatened to take hold in London not so long ago, been the governing logic, Downing Street and the Home Secretary would have told the First Minister to butt out, to mind her own business, and to leave matters of asylum and immigration to Whitehall. Thank God those days are over (actually, don’t thank God: thank Michael Gove, for it was he more than anyone else who put an end to that way of thinking).

If this is the best of devolved Scottish politics, tomorrow we will see something so much less edifying it makes your blood boil. For tomorrow will be all about child poverty – specifically, the publication of the Scottish Government’s latest Child Poverty Delivery Plan. This will show two things. It will show that, even if some progress has been made towards tackling child poverty, that progress has been nothing like sufficient to meet the targets set by the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act, which Holyrood passed into law in 2017.

And secondly, it will show that the Scottish Government is prepared to shoulder none of the blame for missing its targets, its fingers pointing instead at the Conservative government in London. Expect lots of talk about “austerity” and “cuts” to Universal Credit, and none at all from Scottish ministers about the unprecedented interventions in economic, social and welfare policy the Chancellor has made to support families through the lockdowns of the pandemic. It will be a “Tories Bad!” day of inane shouting from the SNP front bench, accompanied by self-congratulatory hand-clapping about the Scottish Child Payment.

The Scottish Tories, as usual, will be forced onto the back foot, having to defend polices for which they are not responsible, and Labour, as usual, won’t know who to blame, sticking to the irrelevant and incredulous script that the SNP and the Tories are somehow just are as bad as each other, locked together in a twisted form of mortal combat that the poor old Labour party is permanently excluded from.

The annual dance about child poverty has become as belittling – and as enraging – as is each summer’s grotesque political treatment of Scotland’s annual drug-deaths figures.

For here is the truth. Child poverty is not the fault, uniquely, of any one government. The powers to deal with it are shared by both governments and, if they were serious about tackling it, our two governments would cooperate with one another, rather than idly pointing fingers at each other.

Critics of the DWP’s welfare reforms are right to say that more could and should have been done to put the tackling of child poverty front and centre. Likewise, however, critics of the Scottish Government are equally right to insist that focusing only on welfare benefits, and not on how education, skills and employment are the real levers to lift families out of poverty, has held Scotland back.

Child poverty targets will never be met while governments squabble. If ministers were honest about how they need to work together to solve its problems – just as they have cooperated over the offering of life-saving refuge to Ukrainian families – we might start to get somewhere.

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