SCOTLAND DESERVES BETTER
The 'Sturgeon generation' have been utterly failed by an SNP catastrophically failing Scotland's youth. We all deserve better than youth service cuts, hungry kids, policy failure and ingrained poverty
Nicola Sturgeon insists she is proud of her legacy for young people when she stood down as First Minister, but the evidence suggests otherwise. A glance at the education attainment gap and child poverty figures prove no progress has been made throughout her eight years in the top job. However, far from Ms Sturgeon’s legacy being one of big promises made but undelivered, she actively made policy choices that hurt young people and families. Her cuts to youth work and early years services reveals a politician who actively dismantled critical scaffolding around families. As Ms Sturgeon seeks to define the parameters on how we view her political legacy, the facts matter more now than ever. The ‘Sturgeon generation’ is one let down by sixteen years of failed SNP governance.
Dismantling the scaffolding
Warnings about the impact of cuts to youth services is nothing new in Scotland. As far back as 2019 we discover the impact of SNP cuts to youth services. Unison’s 2019 report ‘Youth Services at Breaking Point’, showed £11,147,600 cut in local authority youth service spending in Scotland between 2016-19.
That report revealed the continuation of an already existing trend toward youth work cuts across Scotland’s local authorities. For example, Unison 2016 ‘Scotland’s Damage’ report showed 83% of youth workers who responded to the survey said they had experienced cuts to budgets since 2010. So we know the 2019 Unison findings built upon previous findings.
In 2016 alone 68% of youth workers said there had been cuts to staffing, impacting frontline services. So thanks to Unison’s data we can categorically state that between 2016-2019 in Scotland cuts of over £11 million hacked away at critical youth work services.
At the time Tim Frew CEO, YouthLink Scotland said:
“Increasingly issues of poverty and inequality, limited employment prospects and lost learning will have a significant impact on our young people in the long-term, all affecting their mental health and wellbeing.
Young people deserve a commitment to the continuation and enhancement of the services that supported them before and during the pandemic.
“I would expect politicians at a national party level to step up their support for our sector, investment is needed if we want to make sure young people are not further disadvantaged. That’s why I have also written to all 32 council leaders emphasising the precarious nature of the situation and the need for urgent action to secure youth work services.”
At this point twin questions arise:
why blame the SNP at Holyrood for local authorities making cuts to youth work services?
Did SNP politicians at a national level insist on sector investment?
We know for a fact that the SNP has for a decade imposed severe cuts on local authority budgets. In 2021 it was revealed that for eight years until that point the SNP had imposed nearly £1bn of cuts on local government’s non-ring fenced budgets. Fast forward to more recent budgets and we learn the nationalists have continued to hack away at Scottish local government finances. Scottish Labour’s Anas Sarwar highlighted more recent budget cuts amounted to more than £300m lost to local authorities. And this year Jackie Baillie warned SNP mistreatment of local authority finances puts 7,000 more jobs going as even nat councillors finally begin speaking out.
The point is obvious, a decade of Freddy Krueger cuts imposed on Scottish local authorities from before and after the health pandemic has made it inevitable local government’s cut youth work services. You can’t spend money you don’t have, and under Salmond and Sturgeon the SNP have made sure our councillors have an ever-diminishing pool of cash at their disposal to allocate for themselves on the issues they deem a priority at the local level.
This has all been a conscious policy choice by the SNP, to dismantle local government fiscal autonomy in favour of centrally directed ‘ring fenced’ financing set to the preference du jour of Nicola Sturgeon. The price for the control freakery has been paid by the youth in the form of lost youth services.
But hey, free school meals! Thank goodness the kids of rich Edinburgh bankers now get taxpayers funding their kids meals at school…
Attainment gap woes
Beyond wilfully opting for policy choices that have hurt young people, the SNP under Nicola Sturgeon has also completely failed to live up to its own big talk.
The former First Minister famously proclaimed that her "number one priority" and one she wished to be judged on - was closing the gap in educational outcomes between school pupils from better off and more deprived areas.
So how did that go?
Some argue that the impact of the pandemic means some allowances should be made for the complete failure to narrow the attainment gap in Scotland. But we know that under Nicola Sturgeon policy delivery at best stuttered and usually failed. Let us not forget the ignominious collapse of her much-vaunted 2018 Education Reforms, when she was forced to shelve her own big reform agenda.
It would not be unfair to say that Nicola Sturgeon may be an excellent politician in terms of winning elections; but as a technocrat she was woeful. If you want a political leader who can kiss babies, deliver the empty platitudes and smile on cue, Ms Sturgeon was your choice. But if you wished for someone capable of pulling the levers of power, actually affecting change and successfully delivering a comprehensive policy agenda she was a disaster zone.
Child poverty shame
As Ms Sturgeon settles into her routine of driving lessons, rare appearances on the Holyrood back benches (and not talking to her husband about anything to do with SNP finance) we can easily discover why she doesn’t talk about child poverty much anymore.
Despite launching the Scottish Child Payment, a top-up only made in Scotland, the SNP have completely failed the poorest youth in Scotland. 24% of children living in Scotland were in relative poverty, after housing costs, between 2019 and 2022. The proportion was exactly the same between 2007-2010, so zero progress was made throughout the entire lifetime of her premiership as First Minister.
Scotland’s young people clearly deserve better than this. Even the number of kids suffering food insecurity in Scotland has ticked up under the SNP.
The highest levels of food insecurity according the Scottish Government’s own data reveals that among single parents 34% were worried that they might run out of food because of a lack of resources at some point in the previous 12 months. Meanwhile 23% had eaten less than they otherwise would, and 12% had run out of food. If the single parents are suffering like this, you can bet their kids are also experiencing the stress, especially as food prices spiral amid a horrific cost of living crisis.
At this point this is when an SNP mouthpiece will usually start pointing to their drive to achieve universal free school meals. So let me be abundantly clear on how I feel about universal free school meals: it will not tackle food insecurity. Let me explain
Expansion of free school meals? Yes, expanding the access to free hot meals will contribute to easing the food insecurity crisis vulnerable young people are facing. However this is not the same thing as universal free school meals as advocated by the SNP administration in Holyrood. Making sure the kids of the bankers, solicitors and politicians across Scotland get a free school meal isn’t going to tackle food insecurity, not least because of the obvious point these sorts of households aren’t the ones experiencing food insecurity.
In conclusion
As writers begin drafting up the historical legacy of Nicola Sturgeon alongside 16 years of SNP governance in Scotland the facts are stark. Under the SNP the youth have experienced two decades of policy failure. There has been big talk coupled with a complete failure to follow through effectively with legislative achievement. In the case of youth work, we can even see a deliberate SNP policy of imposing cuts which has proven detrimental to young people and their families going back many years. There has been zero progress reducing the education attainment gap or reducing child poverty. The SNP can’t even prioritise resources to feeding the kids that actually live in households experiencing food insecurity, instead pushing for free meals for children of the wealthiest.
Scotland deserves better, and if you think Humza Yousaf is the answer you need to rethink the question you’re asking.
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Brilliant again 🥂