WHERE'S the dancing in the streets, the cries of hallelujah, the wine flowing from fountains? It is ten years since Scotland voted for devolution and if the self-serving supporters of a devolved Scottish Parliament are to be believed, it's been a great success story.
Hmmn, I don't think so.
Other than those who have everything to gain – because it is in their economic interests or it is the political stepping-stone to full independence – all I can see is public disinterest and cynicism. Let's just look at the
evidence of Holyrood's impact rather than the hype.
We were told that the nation's culture and arts would benefit enormously but it was a sad joke. The arts world has lurched from one crisis to the next, with funding cuts for Scottish Opera and Scottish Ballet and now Scottish Screen is being merged into an all-singing, all-dancing super arts quango that would have been more appropriate in a Soviet satellite.
Oh yes, that's right, we were going to have a bonfire of the quangos – but there are more now than ever before, employing more staff, spending more money, telling us what we should be doing. All in our best interests of course.
This should come as no surprise as government has increased beyond the dreams of avarice for bureaucrats and do-gooders. The Scottish Government was spending just over £15 billion in 1999 but has grown to £33bn in a decade.
If there's an obesity problem in Scotland, it's with the Government's waistline – not our own.
This doubling of expenditure at a time of low inflation (real price increases should have taken spending to £18 billion) can only be justified if the outcomes are a marked improvement in productivity or public service delivery.
Well guess what? The indicators suggest we would have been better off leaving our Scottish Office, composed of directly elected Scottish MPs, to do the job like they did before.
Education and health spending has more than doubled, but to what benefit? Our international performance in pupil attainment shows Scotland is falling behind other nations, and that England's school reforms have pushed it ahead of us. Again, in health, the life expectancy is now worse than it was in 1999 and England's cancer clear-up rates are better.
The reason that Labour wanted devolution was to see off the SNP – and George Robertson rashly said it would kill them dead. Well it hasn't done that either, in fact the SNP is now the largest party in Scotland, running Holyrood and set to make further gains at Labour's expense when Gordon Brown dares to go to the polls.
Quite simply, devolution has been an unmitigated disaster for Labour – in political outcomes, in public service delivery and in defence of the people it claims to represent. The STUC is now closer to SNP – which is nothing other than old Labour in Nationalist tweeds – than Iain Gray's neo-Labour with its middle-class postmodernist detachment from the working classes.
It was even said that devolution would be the saviour of the Scottish Tories as it would give them an Edinburgh stage to show why the nation's oldest party had Scotland's interests at heart.
Well that idea is a turkey. At the last Holyrood elections, Goldie's Tories polled the lowest share of the vote in the last hundred years.
There have been successes – but you have to ask, could they have been delivered without the vast expense of devolution? In practically every case the answer is an embarrassing 'yes'.
Here are two. The National Theatre? Well, it was the Scottish Office that got behind Scottish Opera and Scottish Ballet – it could, and I believe would, have done the same for theatre. Even the greatest success, the establishment of a separate Auditor General supported by Audit Scotland – establishing a far stronger degree of public accountability – could have been done under the Scottish Office and the Scottish Grand Committee meeting in Scotland.
But what about all the freebies? The free tuition fees, the free OAP travel, the free eye tests, and the soon to be free prescriptions? Milton Friedman was right when he said: "There's no such thing as a free lunch." There is a price, it is called debt, and one day our sons, daughters and grandchildren will be asked to pick up the bill for the fine dining we can't afford but are gorging on.
Scottish devolution has failed to meet its own high expectations because it was founded on the conceit that someone else will pay for its decisions.
Any parliament that spends money it does not raise will be detached from reality and the Scottish Parliament is the living, breathing proof of that. It may be here to stay but that doesn't mean we can't make it work.
I do wonder if it is only independence that will bring economic reality home to the Scottish voter.
With no-one left to blame but ourselves we can then all turn against each other as the public spending cuts that Ireland and Iceland are now being forced to introduce bring real pain to real people in a manner that would make Thatcherism look like a trip to a holiday theme park.
