UNUSUALLY for me, unusually for almost anyone really, but when the party political broadcast came on I didn’t immediately change channels. Instead I watched the SNP’s pitch. It was, I have to say, highly informative, but not perhaps in the way its producers intended.

A man walks through a rural landscape intoning a long list of Tory failings and misdeeds, almost all of which are well known to everyone who hasn’t been in a coma. The bearded protagonist points to an elderly woman, Betty, further up the hill he is climbing.

She, a trifle incongruously, is sitting in an armchair knitting. A waxwork with a blue rosette is brought into frame. Betty attempts and fails to throw the waxwork. Cut to “Vote SNP.” Remaining viewers are then told that was a party election broadcast for the Scottish council elections on May 5.    

Now, I’m as much a fan of absurdist theatre as the next person. Which is to say, that I’m not really. There is a time and a place for it though, but I’m fairly sure that it isn’t when it is crucial public services that are at stake.

But here we have the party dominant at every level of Scottish politics, putting out a broadcast for the council elections making absolutely no reference to councils or council services. None, not even schools, far less trivialities like refuse collection or libraries. It says quite a lot, that — none of it good.

The SNP though have good reasons for trying to make the council elections about anything other than councils. They can’t really stand on their record, which is one of deliberate underfunding and undermining, or their plans for the future — which is evisceration.

Holyrood, whoever has been in charge, has never been particularly kind to local government. The decade and a half of SNP government has though witnessed an unprecedented attack. This can’t be blamed on Tory austerity either — it is a conscious choice by the SNP administration in Edinburgh. Between 2013 and 2020 the percentage cut to the local government budget was greater than the drop in the Scottish government’s settlement.

This was accompanied by a ruthless control of councils’ capacity to raise their own revenue. Council tax was frozen for a decade. Technically this was optional for councils — but the SNP government in Edinburgh publicised the penalties that councils would face if they had the temerity to decide their own council tax rates. Councils unsurprisingly treated this offer from Mr Swinney as though it had been made by Mr Corleone.

Ringfenced funding is provided to deliver Scottish government policies — meaning that as budgets tighten, all of the cuts have to be made in locally determined services. Meanwhile the council tax freeze, whose replacement was an SNP election pledge in 2007, is still there. Plans for reform are located in a place where budget restrictions mean the grass isn’t cut.

This track record however looks positively wholesome compared to the SNP’s plans for the future. What they amount to are essentially the end of councils as a tier of government altogether.

Under the guise of a National Care System (NCS), Nicola Sturgeon’s government are planning to remove statutory responsibility for all social care services from councils and transfer them to the Scottish government.  

This isn’t to be thought of as equivalent to setting up an NHS. The NCS won’t deliver services itself. Instead local boards will commission and contract services from private voluntary and public-sector bodies. Council staff might well still provide services — but only if their council has won the contract to do so.

This is totally different from the situation in Labour-run Wales. They have an expert group working for the Welsh government looking at how a real “national care service” could operate.  Its terms of reference include both an explicit commitment to keeping social care as a local government responsibility and increasing the amount of care delivered by the public sector.

There are a myriad of issues that could and should be at the heart of these elections; policy and resourcing around education, housing, community wealth building and far from least, respect and reward for an overworked and underpaid council workforce. These should be central to the pitch from anyone seeking support. That the party that runs so many of our councils and controls the institution that determines their funding chooses to ignore all of them speaks volumes.