Scotland enters 2025 in conflicted spirits. It has decided that independence isn’t, for now, a priority. It played its part in electing a new Labour government and removing the Tories from office.
This would suggest some certainty of purpose, but that would be to misunderstand the national mood. Keir Starmer has so far been largely disappointing. The SNP is once again ahead in the polls, suggesting many Scots have yet to give up on Holyrood’s governing party, even as it enters its 18th year in office and after a couple of years that have largely been dominated by scandal and policy failure.
And voters are now looking ahead to next year’s Scottish parliament election wondering what they should do. Hope that Anas Sarwar’s new broom can revitalise the ailing economy and public services? Give the still relatively fresh leadership of John Swinney and Kate Forbes a mandate of its own and the opportunity to rethink the SNP’s tired approach to government? Or is it time to register the general mood of disillusionment and stick an X in Nigel Farage’s box? If enough people do that, it will almost certainly produce a result that would throw Holyrood into chaos.
Such is the playing field confronting the politicians as they shake off their Hogmanay hangovers. The next 17 months will be fraught, complex and studded with potential pitfalls. Hopes are not high – Scotland today does not feel like a modern, exciting, adventurous state that is taking advantage of the opportunities provided by technological progress. It lacks the pep and the courage.
When it comes to public services, our leaders seem scared of their own shadow, at best fit only to manage decline. In his new year message, Iain Kennedy, chair of the Scottish British Medical Association, warned that the NHS will struggle to make it through another year without urgent reform. This might sound over the top, but inaction by successive health secretaries in the face of previous warnings has left the health service facing a crisis that it teetering on existential: eye-watering waiting lists, enormous gaps in staffing in key areas, bed blocking still a major problem, more people choosing to go private, the issue of social care still stubbornly unaddressed.
The teaching profession is rudderless and in growing despair, aware they are unable to provide the quality of education they would choose for their pupils, due to a curriculum and centrally set rules that prevent them from doing so. Indiscipline and absence are up, Scotland is down and falling in the international charts. And at the heart of government, seemingly nothing continues to happen.
Nobody thinks the solutions to these problems – and all the others facing the nation – are simple or easily achieved. But there should at least be a leadership cadre, across all parties, that openly confronts the scale of the problems and doesn’t hide behind empty rhetoric or carefully selected data that paints the reality in a better light that it deserves.
And the longer this goes on, the more disenchanted the electorate is becoming. Reform UK’s poll ratings seem to click up a few points with each new survey that is conducted. It is doing well in local by-elections not just in the Brexity north-east of Scotland, but in Glasgow and the wider west of Scotland. “Things are going to get worse before they get better,” one senior Labour figure predicted to me recently, talking of the Reform threat.
So what are the mainstream parties going to do about it? They continue to play the old game of one-upmanship with each other, pointing out this bad choice or that silly policy, and promising that only they can run things better, though how this would work remains shrouded in mystery. There is no real dynamic of change, no momentum behind creating a 21st-century state, no vision of where Scotland is going and what it might achieve. To be generous, our leaders might have such thoughts in their heads, but, if so, they fail to communicate them to the rest of us.
As so often, Tony Blair is one of the few political figures who sees the challenge clearly, and his analysis is as relevant to Scotland – perhaps more so – than it is to the rest of the UK. As he wrote recently, “Any politician today who is promising management of the status quo and not fundamental change of it, will lose. Our taxes are high; our spending and levels of public debt are high; and our service outcomes are poor.”
Blair is not wrong when he talks about the importance of AI and broader technology in transforming the performance of the state and the public’s experience of engagement with it. In Scotland, the NHS isn’t technologically streamlined – there are different parts of the service that are unable to communicate with one another because they use incompatible systems. There isn’t even an app for patients to use. Their experience remains rooted in the 20th century: slow, frustrating, as if the internet had never been invented.
In a nation as small as Scotland, the possibility for innovation and experimentation should be obvious. Many other small countries, from Estonia and Israel to Ireland and the Scandinavians, have led the way in using tech to create a modern and efficient state. Blair proposes ID cards for the UK, which would realistically amount to giving the citizen possession of their personal information, which they could choose to share with public services as and when they need to. This is the norm rather than the exception in so many other countries, and it makes everything easier. If England is still stuck on a “papers, please” rejection of the idea, why doesn’t Scotland show how it can be done?
Why not hire a battalion of computer scientists to work at the heart of government, and drive the transformation? Elon Musk may try to do something like this in the US. It’s being talked about at a UK level too. Will Scotland, as it so often does, just choose to wait, with raised eyebrow, tutting as it watches other try, to varying degrees of success? Why are we seemingly incapable of seizing the initiative?
An embrace of tech and all its potential, a real injection of energy into modernising the state and the public experience of it, is one response to the frustration and rage that is driving voters towards Farage and friends. As Blair puts it, “Lower taxes, reduced spending and improved outcomes have often seemed like the Holy Grail of governing: desirable but impossible. Modern technology puts it within reach.”
Alternatively – and this seems more likely – nothing can continue to happen, and the old games can continue to be played. But that is no recipe for solving what ails us.
[See also: The year ahead: Can Kemi Badenoch rescue the Tories?]
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