“ALL WE ask is the opportunity to serve,” said Humza Yousaf on becoming SNP leader. 

That he chose to quote Labour’s John Smith was a marvellously telling moment. 

Not, though, because there is much political overlap between Smith’s mildly reformist social democracy and the SNP’s palliative neoliberalism. Rather it was illustrative of the gulf between appearance and reality in governing Scotland. 

The SNP of course is not “seeking an opportunity to serve” — but is entering the second half of its second decade in power, with Humza having been a minister for 11 of those years. 

For the SNP opportunity has done considerably more than knock, and their model during these years has been far more Blair’s Labour than Smith’s. 

New Labour has had no more dedicated acolytes than the SNP. In government they have been relentless in their pursuit of “big tent politics.” 

On the one hand Nicola Sturgeon can talk of tackling child poverty being her “defining mission” (one of several of those over the years), while every single SNP finance minister boasted of Scotland having lower business taxes than the rest of the UK. 

This isn’t the only resemblance. The SNP has had an impressive and effective mastery of message discipline and communications — or “spin” as it’s usually rendered. 

With New Labour, though, the spin was an adjunct to delivery. With the SNP, government is becoming increasingly performative. 

It seems at times that ministers believe that by making the announcement they have actually changed things. 

Making sure the policy is implemented effectively seems to be of almost no concern at all. 

Thus much was made of every child in Scotland being given a library ticket — while all across Scotland libraries have been closing. Free bus travel starts aged 60 in Scotland, with free travel for children introduced recently. 

The bus network however is left in the hands of parasitic monopolies which have been reducing services while taking ever greater subsidies. 

We are constantly reminded that Scotland has legislation with world-leading climate targets. That Scotland has come nowhere close to meeting these targets does not prevent them being trumpeted as an achievement.

This seeming lack of concern with detail or delivery is more and more being reflected in legislation itself. In recent years the Scottish Parliament has passed a series of Bills that have proven unfit for purpose. 

The so called Named Persons Act was found to be in breach of GDPR, and an Act to incorporate he UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was deemed incompetent by the Supreme Court.

Two years ago Holyrood passed an “urgently needed” — according to the then justice minister Humza Yousaf — Hate Crime Act. 

This is so poorly drafted that to get accompanying secondary legislation and regulations into a form that police can work with, means it won’t go into operation until next year. At the earliest. 

This though looks positively dynamic compared to the Railway Policing Act of 2018. Having failed to break up Britain, as a consolation prize the SNP decided to break up the British Transport Police. 

This idea was comprehensively rubbished by everyone with any grasp of the topic. It was, however, taken through Parliament by the then transport minister, Humza Yousaf. 

Now it sits on a shelf and there are it seems no plans for it ever to be implemented.  

The trend continues with the National Care Service Bill. This aims to transfer statutory responsibility not just for social care but also social work and community health from local government, and where necessary the NHS, to new quangos — care boards. 

These will deliver services by procuring and contracting from the private, voluntary or public sector.  The only transfer of ownership envisaged in the proposals is out of the public sector.  

The legislation is a roundly condemned shambles. Even parliamentary committees chaired by SNP MSPs have criticised the proposals. 

The legislation is now being delayed, with even the measures’ author, the then cabinet secretary for health and social care Humza Yousaf, admitting the proposal needs changing.     

Meanwhile a ministerial “opportunity to serve” has been handed to Yousaf’s parliamentary supporters. 

Past failure to deliver, or indeed past delivery of failure, is no barrier to advancement. 

Lacking any sort of strategy to deliver Scottish independence, the SNP has little to offer but performance. As it might have been put in Braveheart: “They may take our lives. But they will never take … our photo-ops.”