When political incompetence and fiscal incontinence collide, you end up with Shona Robison’s statement to Holyrood: a miserable patchwork of blame-shifting and false excuses for a mess overwhelmingly of their own making.

The SNP’s case is that if it had more powers, this would mean more money and Scotland would be a blissful place. There is not an iota of evidence to support this thesis. On the contrary, more powers and money mainly enhance the potential for even bigger failures.

Take the case of the ScotWind money; a matter entirely within the control of the Scottish Government since Crown Estate Scotland was devolved. As readers of this column may recall, the Scottish Government was saved by good fortune from an act of fiscal folly which would have put even ferries and unspent EU funds in the shade.

Read more by Brian Wilson

To recap, the original intention was to cap the leases at £10,000 per square kilometre which would have brought in £75 million. Fortuitously, the Crown Estate in England and Wales went first, uncapped, and raised such a fortune that even the dimwits in Edinburgh realised they had been conned by whoever advised them and suspended the process. They then multiplied the cap by 10, to raise £750 million which was still far too little.

The SNP loves ring-fencing when it applies to local authorities, who are hamstrung in respect of 80 per cent of what they receive. Ministers are less keen on it when it should apply to themselves. If ever there was a case for ring-fencing, it was for every penny of that £750 million one-off windfall to be reserved for infrastructure which will make or break the prospects for maximising ScotWind benefits.

No such thing happened. This week, Ms Robison told MSPs that they were “reluctantly planning on the basis of utilising up to £460m of additional ScotWind revenue funding”. There were headlines yesterday about a “Green Fund” having been raided.

The truth is that there never was a “Green Fund” and the raid on the £750m began the moment it entered Scottish Government coffers, to be utilised for whatever took their fancy, to plug a hole or catch a headline. It was an irresponsible disgrace, as I pointed out at the time. This one-off bounty essential to an energy transition was about to be squandered.

Please do not take my word for any of this but refer to the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee at Holyrood on January 23 when the Labour MSP, Monica Lennon, pursued the fate of the ScotWind money with admirable tenacity through questions to Ms Robison who eventually came reasonably clean.

“The ScotWind resource has proven to be a really important resource in supporting the budget”, she averred. “Any money that is drawn down from ScotWind is used to support the budget so, in essence, it is used to support public services”. In other words, there was no ring-fencing, no “Green Fund” and half the money was already gone.

This episode alone blows a coach and horses through the SNP’s defences. While raiding this one-off windfall to make the books balance, it was continuing to be in denial about the need to limit spending or focus it on areas of greatest need. There would always be someone else to blame - until scales lifted from eyes.

The biggest failing of the Scottish Government is not a shortage of money but poverty of ideas. At whom, among the 28 ministers at Holyrood, would anyone look and say “Hey, there’s someone I would trust to come up with good policies and drive them through in order to make a difference”? It is an entirely alien concept.

There are many policy areas in which Scotland did things differently before Holyrood was heard of, under both Labour and Tory governments, which put us ahead of the rest of the UK and in some cases the world. Nobody batted an eyelid or saw it as a competition, rather than an entirely normal entitlement.

Off the top of my head, Scotland without political devolution created the world-leading Children’s Hearings system; the great Special Unit experiment of the 1970s; the Highlands and Islands Development Board and later the uniquely federal University of the Highlands and Islands, now squeezed and centralised. I could rhyme off another dozen if space permitted.

But even against that short list, what truly distinctive policies has the SNP Government come up with in 17 years, with far more powers and money at its disposal than the old Scottish Office dreamt of? Baby boxes, ok. And fair enough the Child Payment, though even that is only possible through the largesse of the Barnett Formula. Next?What has happened after after 25 years of a Scottish Parliament and 17 years of the SNP?What has happened after after 25 years of a Scottish Parliament and 17 years of the SNP? (Image: Newsquest)

The other side of the old coin, which political devolution was supposed to address, was that other areas of policy spilled over into Scotland without accountability. The poll tax was the most obvious and ill-judged example which probably clinched the deal for devolution. Yet what has happened since?

Is it not remarkable that after 25 years of a Scottish Parliament and 17 years of the SNP, there has been no significant change to the council tax which John Major rushed into existence 32 years ago? Meanwhile, local government is reduced to its lowest level of resources and powers to improve people’s lives in my memory, abetted by regressive council tax freezes.

Something else we have become absolutely hopeless at under the “wha’s like us” school of government is learning from others. Does it never occur to an SNP politician tip-toeing through the debris of Glasgow that there might be lessons to learn in Manchester? Or that there is more to Norway than an Oil Fund to moan about? Maybe look at how it decentralises to its periphery. And so on.

Until we return to the principles of Scotland doing things differently and creatively where beneficial, living within our means and learning from the experience of others, there will be no better outcomes than the dire fate of listening to Shona Robison reading a script about who else is to blame.

Brian Wilson is a former Labour Party politician. He was MP for Cunninghame North from 1987 until 2005 and served as a Minister of State from 1997 to 2003.