A personal question: where do you live? I ask because there’s lots of proof that your home and community can have a profound effect on your life (and how long your life’s likely to be) but it can also affect government policy. The Scottish Government in particular appears to care more about some places in Scotland than others, so it matters. Where you are affects how the government sees you, if they see you at all.

The reason I bring this up is I’ve been reading a bit about chronopolitics, which I must admit I’d never heard of until the other day when I read a paper by Hannah Graham, a lecturer at Stirling University. Dr Graham defines chronopolitics as the politics of time and the central idea is that you can use it to look at how a public figure spends their days, thereby revealing what their real priorities might be. It doesn’t provide all the answers obviously but as a way of looking at politicians, it can be interesting and possibly revealing.

What Dr Graham did in her paper, which was published in The Political Quarterly, was apply the lens of chronopolitics to Nicola Sturgeon, specifically her last two years as First Minister. Dr Graham looked at 681 of Ms Sturgeon’s diary entries between April 2021 and March 2023 and worked out which subjects appeared a lot (climate and gender equality) and which appeared much less (drug policy and housing). The diaries also show that the former FM spent more time on subjects that were partly or wholly reserved to Westminster, with devolved subjects mostly being handled by more lowly ministers. If you are surprised by this, do please write in and explain why on Earth that might be.

However, the most striking revelation from the diaries for me, especially as someone who lives in the country, was the subject that came rock-bottom of Ms Sturgeon’s priorities and time: rural affairs. Dr Graham points out that rural issues are quite often the subject of the political communications of the Tories and Lib Dems, but the analysis of the former First Minister’s diaries shows there was only one diary entry on a rural subject in the whole two-year period, or 0.1% of the total sample. Virtually nothing in other words.

Does this show that Nicola Sturgeon didn’t care about the countryside? Well, let’s try and be fair and say she only had a certain amount of time as First Minister and a lot of subjects would be fighting for her attention (the period of the diaries is covered by some of the pandemic). Ms Sturgeon is also an urban politician and was the leader of an organisation that was founded in towns and cities and is now largely focused on its two citadels, Glasgow and Dundee. Much of rural Scotland also elects Tories and Lib Dems so politically and selfishly, an SNP focus on city rather than country may have made some party-political sense.

But the fact that rural affairs apparently came so low down in Ms Sturgeon’s priorities (bottom in fact) may also demonstrate a couple of fundamental mistakes which the SNP made during her time and continues to make. The first is the myopic way in which they look at poverty, seeing it as an urban rather than rural problem, and the second is the centralising tendencies they have, which draws power away from the country to the cities to the detriment of the former. Not only are these trends obvious from public policy, spending 0.1% of your time on rural affairs isn’t going to fix them.

The evidence for the first issue, the lack of focus on rural poverty, is there for all to see in the former mining communities of Ayrshire for example or along the eastern coast of the Highlands. In these areas and others, there’s been a failure to ensure that businesses and employment aren’t centralised on urban areas. Transport, particularly buses, has also been neglected and whenever there’s funding available, it almost always goes to the high-profile areas of deprivation, mostly in the cities. Obviously, there’s a higher concentration of people in poverty in those areas, but poverty can actually be worse in the countryside because of inadequate shops, or poor transport, or a lack of access to services that can help.

The metropolitan tendencies of the SNP can also be seen in the way they’ve mishandled a couple of specific rural areas: Orkney and Arran. In the case of Orkney, so disenfranchised and ignored do they feel that the council is looking at alternative forms of governance, including a form of independence from Scotland. All they really want is greater autonomy and the chance to implement policies that are appropriate for Orkney but may not be appropriate for the centre of Edinburgh. But instead the parliament in Edinburgh has exerted greater control over council money and decision-making. It is the tyranny of the city.

Arran is an even more blatant example. I’ve spoken to lots of people on the island over the last couple of years and almost all of them talk about the problem of housing (another of the subjects that came low-down on Ms Sturgeon’s priorities); in fact, the affordability has got so bad for people on low to average incomes that the Co-op now ships staff in from the mainland. And part of the reason the ferry crisis came about was that the Scottish Government did not properly consult the islanders, almost all of whom think Arran needs quick, small ferries or catamarans rather than the great hulks that are still being built at a cost of £250m and counting. They don’t feel listened to.

There is still time, I hope, for the Scottish Government to put all of this right if they really wanted to. They could properly consult the people of Arran. They could devolve more power to councils so those in rural areas could make the decisions that are right for them. And they could acknowledge that Scotland’s countryside isn’t just where rich people go to live and that rural beauty is often hiding the worst poverty and suffering.

I fear, however, that the lack of priority given to rural issues will not be fixed by the departure of Nicola Sturgeon. The SNP is a party and a cause that was born in cities and thrives in cities and the people who run it now are, on the whole, urban creatures. To fix the problem, the SNP leadership would also have to conquer a contradiction that has bedevilled them in power and which they still have not sorted. They demand more devolution, they rail against centralisation, and they call for independence. But the great problem for Scotland is they are unwilling to grant independence to the areas of the country that need it most.