THE SNP’s treatment of local government has been consistently brutal. Year after year, funding was cut in real terms, both for capital projects and service provision. Freedom to innovate and meet the needs of its own communities was steadily whittled away.

This process looks like being taken a big step further in 2023. Plans for a National Care Service would remove a service which accounts for one-third of councils’ remaining expenditure and 11,000 staff.

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, this will mean 70 per cent of council budgets being spent on education.

All other services expected of councils, from parks to libraries, street-cleaning to children’s playgrounds, will be squeezed from the remaining 30 per cent. Even then, there is minimal room for discretion or creativity. Eighty per cent of funding is ring-fenced by the Scottish Government.

In my own neck of the woods, the Western Isles, a former director of social work, Malcolm Smith, wrote last week: “What will remain if social care, community justice and childcare services are pulled to the centre? Local councils will come closer to resembling what in the 19th century would amount to an amalgam of parish education boards, but probably with less autonomy.”

Similar analogies can be drawn all over Scotland. So much good that was done over decades is being undone.

I was struck by Mark Smith’s column here a couple of weeks ago in which he held up the example of Springburn Park: “I came away from the park that day pretty dispirited and angry about what the people who use and love it have had to put up with.

“Over the years, they’ve lost one thing after another: the putting green, football pitch, bandstand, formal gardens, greenhouse, public toilets, and permanent staff, and the latest to go is the bowling green and clubhouse, which were shut down at the start of the pandemic ‘due to Covid’, never to reopen”.

That is what treating local government as John Swinney has consistently done leads to. It is no mere abstraction but a sustained, insidious attack upon those who depend most on communal provision.

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Since 2009, according to the Scottish Parliament Information Centre, per capita funding for councils has fallen by 16 per cent. Glasgow’s per capita cut is over 20 per cent. That is the road that leads to Springburn Park and many like it. Perhaps it could be called Swinney’s Way.

Is this really what Scotland wants, where once there was meaningful local government with recognisable figures making decisions that respected local priorities and needs, imbued by civic pride?

I doubt it, if anyone asked the question in that form. Rather, it has all just been allowed to slip away in the absence of meaningful resistance.

Indeed, the treatment of local government is the best metaphor for how the governance of Scotland has evolved over the past 15 years with powers drawn relentlessly to the centre and concentrated in the hands of a single political force.

That’s democracy, you may say, and there is truth in that. Enough people have voted for it and not enough people have voted against it. Local government has been one of the biggest victims.

Wherever it arises, Nationalism is a centralising ideology. When a party identifies itself with the Nation, it seeks to draw all power to itself because it alone speaks for the Nation, does it not?

The result is that Holyrood in Nationalist hands was always going to end up as the antithesis of devolution within Scotland itself and that is exactly what has happened.

The National Care Service is an audacious next step. Predictably, half a million quid was handed to KPMG to tell them how to do it. The SNP loves the big consultancy firms and the big consultancy firms tell the SNP what they want to hear. Big is beautiful.

Who needs a civil service when there are consultants to feed? Who needs elected councillors when Ministers can appoint quangos, the format proposed for a National Care Service?

According to CoSLA, it will cost £1.5 billion to create. “The establishment of the NCS national body alone will cost up to £250 million with overall NCS running costs of up to £500 million per year”. This, suggests CoSLA, “could be spent on improving service delivery and meeting current unmet need.”.

But what does that matter compared to the prize of putting the word “National” in the title and handing power to Ministers?

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In their own eyes if nobody else’s, they are making such a great success of everything they touch – including the NHS – that appointed Boards, a vast bureaucracy, the marginalisation of local councils and Edinburgh control must surely be the best way forward?

The SNP went to great lengths earlier this year to take control of CoSLA, to shut down a potential point of resistance. That has worked well for them over 15 years and the silence of SNP council leaders as funding, services and powers were eroded has been shameful.

And no, it wasn’t always like that. Anyone who remembers the big figures who ran Scotland’s councils finds it risible to suggest they would have collaborated in the destruction of local government, regardless of who was in power.

Now, even CoSLA shows signs of stirring as the realities of Swinney’s latest assault hits home.

Every council leader in Scotland united to express “extreme disappointment” with their treatment and warned: “It will be the people of Scotland and our communities who suffer as a result”.

They coupled this with a call to “pause the current plans for structural change required to set up the National Care Service and redirect funding … into social care and preventative services through local government.”

Will Sturgeon, Swinney and Co. pay a blind bit of attention or assume that, as before, their loyalists will soon shut up and swallow the patriotic pill? If that happens, councils will continue to bear the brunt of blame while the architects of “suffering” strut free and sanctimonious.