Ex-Health Secretary Michael Matheson's no 'vision' admission shows why SNP shouldn't be running NHS

When Nicola Sturgeon, Michael Matheson and Humza Yousaf all sat down for their fireside chats reflecting on their time in government, the headlines focused on the break-up with the Greens and Matheson claiming his £11,000 iPad expense was “blown out of proportion”.

A close read of these interviews, though, also reveals much about the story of how our public services ended up in such a poor state in the nearly two decades of SNP rule. All three interviewees were Health Secretary – Sturgeon from 2007 to 2012, Yousaf from 2021 to 2023 and Matheson from 2023 to 2024.

‘Emotionally attached’?

Sturgeon told her interviewer that she was “very emotionally attached to that job, so it was quite a wrench to leave it” – but leave it she did, when she was asked to lead the SNP’s referendum campaign.

The SNP’s willingness to redeploy their Health Secretary to a then-embryonic campaign showed where its priorities lay. Over the next seven years, the SNP could have been preparing the NHS for the challenges that lay ahead.

Instead of doing that, the SNP focused on replaying the referendum debate and running an eternal constitutional campaign. In his interview, Yousaf blamed the social care crisis on the pandemic.

But while the pandemic caught almost everyone by surprise, the pressures from Scotland’s aging population were as predictable as winter rain.

Lack of a ‘clear vision’

Yet when Matheson, who had once served as a public health minister, became Health Secretary nearly a decade later, he was struck by “how many things had not changed”. He told the Institute for Government: “We still had too many people waiting. We still had tensions between primary and secondary care. We still had a social care system that felt completely undervalued… I was struck by how many of the same things were still there and the challenges that were still there.”

Matheson even commissioned a report on what the NHS would look like in 10 years’ time because “there wasn’t a clear vision”. Which begs the question, what myopic party was in power a decade earlier? The SNP, of course.

Swinney the invisible man

But the interviews are also revealing in who they don’t mention. The invisible man in the background of all these interviews was John Swinney. For 13 years, it was Swinney who turned the tap on Scotland’s Budget and decided how much money poured into the NHS.

And although you wouldn’t know it if you listened to his NHS recovery plan speech last week, Swinney was the Cabinet Secretary for Covid Recovery back in 2021.

Apart from one year when he lived quietly on the back benches, Swinney has been at the heart of the SNP government for nearly 18 years, a government that has perfected the art of secrecy and spin.

That’s why Swinney is incapable of delivering a new direction for our NHS. He is the past, not the future. It’s time for his exit interview.

Jackie Baillie is MSP for Dumbarton, Scottish Labour’s deputy leader and her party’s spokesperson for health