Labour housing pledge throws spotlight onto SNP's callous failure

Here’s the key figure which was the centre of all the reports I’ve written: nearly 10,000 Scottish children homeless and in temporary accommodation. For those of us fortunate enough to have never experienced homelessness, temporary accommodation means cheap B&Bs or hotels. Entire families live in such conditions.

Alison Watson, director of the housing and homelessness charity Shelter Scotland, told me this March: “If you’re a couple with children, you’re in temporary accommodation now for almost two years. We’re in danger of creating a lost generation of kids.”

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Watson rightly accused the SNP Government of “gaslighting” Scotland. Ministers claim to care about homelessness - they claim to prioritise child poverty - whilst doing nothing to improve matters, and instead worsening the situation.

We were speaking in the wake of the Scottish Government cutting nearly £200 million from affordable housing - that’s 26%. However, the housing budget was also slashed the year before, meaning cumulative cuts of 37%.

Even an idiot knows that to tackle homelessness, you need affordable homes.

Then come Tuesday, a saga of dreadful government failure and the wicked harm done to our most vulnerable citizens became more alarming. The Herald published a powerful and very necessary front page, reading “18,000 Scottish children don’t have a place to call home”.

The numbers had got worse. The scandal had deepened.

I felt a mix of pride and rage. Pride at how journalism holds government to account, and pride also when it comes to The Herald, for proving how important newspapers are in uncovering scandal and failure.

But rage too; rage at a government which has allowed this to happen. A government, for pity’s sake, which had the audacity to declare a national housing emergency back in May and then do … what?

Yet again, the SNP offers phoney promises whilst doing precisely nothing. It’s all talk, and no action. I’ve come to believe that the party is so intellectually dead it has no idea how to tackle any crisis which confronts Scotland.

In total, 10 Scottish councils have declared a housing emergency. Let’s spell this out in letters 100 foot tall for the SNP - perhaps, we should paint the words tartan so they take some notice: a home is a human right.

Alison Watson, director of Shelter Scotland (Image: Newsquest)

A homeless child is a child experiencing the destruction of their childhood. Picture the life of a child living in a hotel room with their parents and siblings for months. No privacy, nowhere to study.

Indeed, Watson told me something which made my blood boil: some families were instructed to use hotel showers for drinking water. Watson called it “a disgrace”. My feelings cannot be written here as they’d break the Herald’s guide on foul language.

When we deny people a home, we build up agony for our society. There’s a conveyor belt between homelessness in childhood, the care system, prison, addiction and death.

We hand a weapon to extremists. The Dutch far-right linked Holland’s housing crisis to immigration and came out top at the last election.

Sometimes my anger at what’s being done to the weakest and poorest in this country takes me to places I do not want to go.

Scotland's Housing Emergency – find all articles in the series here

In my darker moments, I’ve imagined every member of the SNP Government forced to live in squalid B&Bs for months on end. How would they like to watch their kids drink shower water?

But in truth, I wish that on nobody, not even the politicians failing and hurting those in need of their protection.

However, my rage at injustice doesn’t subside. So, in my world - the world I wish I lived in - such political failure would be met with public outrage so strong it breaks governments. Reducing the citizens of the country you’re meant to serve to these degrading circumstances is sinful, cruel. Unless we shout our anger at this failure, it will continue.

The one saving grace? Keir Starmer now throws the spotlight on the SNP. His government has promised to build 1.5 million homes over the next five years. Sadly, that won’t apply to Scotland. Housing is devolved.

For the hard-of-thinking in the SNP: building homes reduces homelessness. Cutting the affordable housing budget doesn’t.

Evidently, the SNP will whine about how the wicked Tories were all to blame. But the Tories didn’t cut Scotland’s affordable housing budget, the SNP did. The state of housing and homelessness in Scotland is a political choice. And it’s the Scottish government which made that choice.

In case anyone needs reminded: the Scottish Government underspent its budget by almost £300 million last year, despite endlessly yelping about lack of funding from Westminster.

Here’s a political choice for the SNP: spend every damn penny you have on making the lives of desperate children better, or just get the hell out of the way and let someone who cares take over.

Now, Labour may clearly fail in its promises to address the housing crisis. But at least it’s made a start. I won’t hold my breath. I lived through the disillusionment of the Blair years.

However this is clear: there’s only two years until the next Holyrood election. Starmer is in his honeymoon period and will be unveiling policy after policy. His action will stand in deadly contrast to years of failure from the SNP. The Scottish Government now perishes in Starmer’s shadow.

Simply by trying, Starmer underscores the inadequacy - the policy desert - of what passes for government in Edinburgh. Meanwhile, what does the SNP do? It tears itself apart, indulging in civil war so deep there’s no time to even attempt to govern.

Instead of understanding which way the political wind blows - that people want action and change - the SNP remains the same: a party of indolent ideologues who don’t just fail Scotland, they now actively make the lives of our weakest citizens worse. They’ll be damned for that in 2026, and deservedly so.