If the SNP is going to go down, at least go down swinging

Critically, for our purposes here in Scotland, it will be tolled in order that it can be paid for quickly, with the excess reinvested. Without tolling, it likely would not be built at all because, like Western governments across the world, the Taioseach is not sitting on large reserves to throw at infrastructure projects.

This is not unusual in European terms. It’s hard to find a European country which does not have tolls on its major highways. Germany, France, Spain, Italy all do. The smaller continental countries, too. All the Scandinavians.

Projects like the Irish one are run of the mill to these countries, particularly the Scandinavians. The Norwegians have three tolled remote island tunnels on the go this decade:  the Langfjord (a six-mile tunnel with a three-mile branch), the six-mile Trollheim and the now-open Nordoy, a multi-tunnel/bridge link to connect four remote islands.

The Faroese, of course, are internationally known for their tunnels. There are 23 of them, in all. The most famous, with its underwater roundabout, is the Eysturoy, but the newest is the 11km Sandoy, and there are another six under construction.

How different we are here, in Scotland. Not far from Ireland geographically, but a million miles away in terms of our infrastructure. Our motorway network stops in Perth to the north, Kilmarnock to the south west, and Edinburgh to the south east.

We build very little, here. That the Queensferry Crossing remains the jewel in the crown of the last 25 years, with small improvements to the M74 and M8, is a source more of national embarrassment than of national pride.

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The A9, rightly, is the humiliating focus. A relatively simple dualling process will now take 25 years, at best, and the absence of a clear programme to dual the A96 in the north-east, the A82 to the west Highlands, and the A75 and A77 to the south-west would be anathema in Ireland, Scandinavia or throughout continental Europe.

Here, we have become one-dimensional and ambitionless, on infrastructure and beyond. There are a number of reasons for this; too many to go into in this column. But in this malaise lies opportunity for a political party which wants to grasp it. For Labour, buoyed by the General Election result and now determinedly and excitedly looking towards the possibility of taking the keys to Bute House in 2026, there is opportunity in everything from pledging infrastructure investment, to housing, to renewing school education, to acknowledging the collapse of the NHS and rescuing state-funded healthcare.

But those keys currently belong to John Swinney, and together with his Deputy Kate Forbes he now has to make a decent fist of trying to hold on to them. In a way, the cloudy demolition of the SNP at the General Election may have a silver lining. Mr Swinney and Ms Forbes can now, with complete justification, go to those in their party who think that continuity is a winner and tell them the electorate disagrees. And they can go to the civil service, where increasingly good ideas are going to die, and reaffirm that the elected politicians are in charge and the civil service must do what the elected politicians tell them.

The lack of progress on the A9 is painful (Image: Colin Mearns)

If they are going to go down in 2026, then they should at the very least go down swinging and ensure they leave a legacy beyond just being a party which was good at winning elections for a while.

There is no shortage of available options, beyond being more ambitious on infrastructure. It is difficult to find anyone, in any of the housing sectors, who thinks that the government’s rent controls have been successful. They have created huge rent spikes in between tenancies. They have caused small-scale landlords to exit the rental sector and sell their properties to the owned sector. They have locked out private investment, which now takes it money and homes to less hostile environments. Supply is down, and as a result rents are up. It has failed, and Mr Swinney and Ms Forbes should make a virtue of this by admitting it and scrapping rent controls.

Reversing tax increases would be similarly popular and would lead to a similar uptick in investment, making at least some progress to improve our dismal economic growth. This is a government which has been taxing for show, not for dough, and centrist economics has been sacrificed at the altar of so-called progressive taxation, which raises little money at best, and less money at worst, and can easily be exposed as superficial anti-wealth, anti-growth politicking.

This is difficult for many people in the SNP. The truth is that huge sections of the party’s membership, MSP group, and even the Cabinet, had not experienced a political loss until two weeks ago. They are post-2014 political animals who have been schooled to believe that social policy matters more than economic policy and virtue matters more than action, and that this is how to win.

That is all fine when your political competition is the Tory party, chaotic at Westminster and with a single-issue anti-independence campaign in Scotland. However as soon as something more credible presents itself, in the form of Sir Keir Starmer and Anas Sarwar, the electorate breathe a sigh of relief and vote for change. For action.

Centrist economics and lower taxes. Focusing on the priorities of people, such as health, education, transport and housing, not the priorities of the party, from independence to gender recognition reform.

That is where the political gap is now. The winner, in 20 months’ time, is the person who steps into it.