Sturgeon is right on one thing, there is no vision in SNP

“It’s GERS next week, we better get our messaging right. We’re spending money like water…”

“I’ve got an idea… Can we do a deal with the English now they’ve got the worst drought since 1976? We could trade more water for all that tax money from London we need to pay the bills?”

“Nah, it won’t wash. But relax, just dig out last year’s statement and fill in the new numbers. No-one’s paying any attention any more, so we can just say what we said last year. No-one will notice….”

And that’s pretty much how the publication of the annual Government Expenditure & Revenue Scotland report on Wednesday went; what at the height of the independence debate was an eagerly-awaited and hotly-contested assessment of the gap between Scottish public spending and taxation, now barely registers on the political Richter scale. We might not know the numbers, but we know what they say, that public expenditure in Scotland is far higher per head of population than in England (£2,720 higher, seeing as you ask) but the average tax burden per person is about the same, £17,700.

And yes, we know the figures just show what the position is just now and doesn’t tell you what things would be like under independence, and sure, as deputy first minister Jenny Gilruth claimed, “With the powers of independence we would be able to chart a different path, ensuring we grow the economy to allow Scotland to reach her full potential.”

Yadda, yadda, yadda, whatever Jenny. Heard it before. Every August. But when a group of people who knew what they were talking about were asked by then First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to chart that very path, the resulting 354-page Sustainable Growth Commission report was clearly not what was expected when it was published in 2018.

Unhelpfully for the SNP, the Commission, led by economist, communicator and former-SNP MSP Andrew Wilson, was much more realistic than the 2014 independence manifesto and pointed out the case for independence wasn’t just a question of claiming everyone could have unicorns and happiness if it wasn’t for the UK Government.

But rather than inspire, its no-gain-without-pain, hard-but-worth-it, approach scared the bejesus out of Team Sturgeon, which had banked on Scotland’s overwhelming support for Remain in the 2016 Brexit vote making the case for independence irresistible. The paper was quietly shelved and is no longer available on the SNP’s website.

Eight years on and the fiercest political exchanges are not between Nationalist and Unionist about the whys and wherefores of independence, but the sides in the independence movement’s ongoing nervous breakdown, in which the same Ms Sturgeon has attacked her own party’s election performance in May for lacking “vision or big-picture thinking.”

But hold on, wasn’t that precisely what the Growth Commission delivered? It certainly fitted the bill for big-picture thinking, just not the picture in Ms Sturgeon’s head. Similarly, the claim in the expanded foreword to her memoir “Frankly,” that the SNP’s election pitch was “detached from the big issues bearing down on people’s lives,” is more a reference to the big issues in Ms Sturgeon’s life, not those of the majority of people who became scunnered with her administration’s failure to deliver on practical pledges, like the education attainment gap, national care service and “the promise” to care-experienced children. And she got out before her bitter obsession with virtue-signalling policies like gender self-identification and unachievable net zero targets and their demonstrably negative impacts were put to an electoral test.

Maybe it’s because it’s August and the politicians are either on their jollies or, like Ms Sturgeon, appearing on the Fringe or at book festivals, but even the rise of Andy, King of the North, does not appear to be injecting much excitement into Scottish politics, certainly not the lacklustre Scottish Labour leadership campaign, again more about internal bickering than the vision thing.

But Ms Sturgeon has unwittingly put her finger on the problem, that the parties in position to deliver something visionary will instead produce the opposite, just more ways to spend public money while getting into difficulties with the unions and client pressure groups as both left-wing governments face up to the harsh truth that they cannot tax and spend their way to prosperity.

Neither Labour in London nor the SNP in Edinburgh has anything to offer but one tax raid after another to keep the welfare and public sector gravy train rolling, and GERS revealed the extent, with Scottish tax revenue increasing by £6.3 billion in 2025-26, largely from higher national insurance contributions (up £2.4bn) and frozen income tax thresholds (up £1.5bn). The biggest beneficiaries were welfare (up £2.1bn) and the NHS (by £1.5bn), and nothing from either government suggests the approach will change. Not wealth creation, just more guff about broad shoulders bearing burdens.

Hardly a ringing endorsement for the new man, but latest polling show the Burnham Bounce is real, with this week’s LBC/IPSOS survey putting UK Labour ahead on 28 per cent against Reform’s 25, and a YouGov/Times survey has Labour on 24 ahead of Reform on 22, with Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives between 18 and 21. But if the right wasn’t split the picture would be very different.

Without new Scottish data, presumably the visionless (Ms Sturgeon’s description), lacklustre SNP is still leading, and the next big political event is First Minister John Swinney’s Programme for Government launch in September, guaranteed to be another “haud me back” moment.

Thank goodness for Count Binface. And he lost.