I've had a grudging admiration for Alex Salmond and the SNP since their victory in the Scottish elections of May last year. The honeymoon, though, seems finally to be over and clouds are on the horizon for First Minister Wee 'Eck, above.The biggest difficulty concerns money and that, sooner or later, it is going to run out. In the months after the party came to office, there were various grand gestures, made in line with manifesto pledges, such as increasing the number of police by 1,000 and cutting to 18 the size of classes for younger primary school children. The pledge on policing is little mentioned now - 500 recruited at the last count - and, as regards schools, Scotland's 32 councils don't have the money to implement the plan, though it remains an objective. One council, Aberdeen, is £50 million in the red and has warned staff this week that they are not to use their own kettles or toasters on municipal premises so that savings can be made on the electricity bill. The SNP deserves credit for helping students and abolishing prescription charges, but it is saddled with the previous Lab-Lib Dem coalition's policy of giving free personal care to the elderly, the costs of which are inflating alarmingly.
Next we come to the question of the replacement for the council tax, already frozen for three years in a deal earlier with Cosla, the umbrella group for councils. The proposal is for a 3p-in-the-pound levy on income to be collected locally, HM Revenue and Customs having indicated that they want nothing to do with it. It is quite plain that the set-up costs for this would be insane, and the policy as stated has the curious anomaly of not taking account of unearned income - IE, those fortunate enough to live on dividends from stock and so forth would pay nothing. Scotland receives £400 million a year from Westminster in council tax benefit, and the Treasury insists that if there is no council tax in Scotland, there's going to be no benefit either. That seems fair, though on the wireless last week Mr Salmond was intemperate enough to describe it as embezzlement. Large sections of the business community are also turning against the local income tax. Help may be at hand from the Lib Dems, though they favour a different scheme under which each council would set its own rate as well as collect it. Such Rococo intricacies local bureaucracy has never seen - and won't ever see.
Social policy in a nation that is naturally conservative is a bit muddled. There is a crackdown against violence, particularly in the west of Scotland, with the excellent Steve House, chief constable of Strathclyde, leading the charge. But even as he is catching neds hyped up on Bucky and other ne're-do-wells to feed to the procurators fiscal, ministers are letting felons out of jail on curfew orders, leading to opposition charges that they have created a "soft-touch Scotland". The fact is, however, that the jails are full, with 8,000 in custody - a 10th of the UK total but a worrying figure given that the inhabitants of Scotland make up 8.6pc of the UK population.
There have been some innovative ideas on health - such as paying poor persons in Dundee to stop smoking - but the real trouble is going to be drink. The announcement a couple of weeks ago of plans to end off-sales to anyone under 21 has caused a row that doesn't look like going away. Worse, in terms of alienating the core vote, are plans for booze-only queues in supermarkets and a ban on buy-two-get-one-free offers. It'll be fun watch that stand up in court when Tesco et al get their top barristers on the case; funnier to see the queues at the cash and carries that will spring up outside Carlisle and Berwick. People will only go so far with a party and tend to fall away when nannying starts to impinge on their lives. Most of Scotland's chronic alcohol problems are concentrated in a few area - parts of Glasgow, less so in Edinburgh, Dundee again, parts of the north east - so to lay the lash on the whole country will never be popular. While difficult to oppose politically, it's hard to see how they could ever make it stick without creating some sort of Free Republic of Caledonia Off-Sales Inspectorate (no 18- to 20-year-olds need apply).
It remains the case that Mr Salmond, along with Nicola Sturgeon, his deputy, and John Swinney, the Finance Minister, are the superior beings in an Edinburgh parliament of numpties, but the sureness of the First Minister's touch has slipped slightly of late with, first, ill-judged remarks in a magazine interview that appeared to approve of Thatcherite economic policies, and, second, a call - even as Edinburgh-born Chris Hoy was collecting cycling gold medals at the Olympics - for the break-up of Team GB and the creation of a, well, Team Ecosse that would go to future Games under its own steam but - given the lack of training facilities - probably win nowt. Try selling that to the athletes.
Then there is that curse of politicians everywhere - events. That a would-be police killer should abscond from an open prison and rape a schoolgirl in woods outside Cumbernauld is not a sequence of occurrences for which ministers can be held directly responsible. It just doesn't look good. There was a large hoo-har after the discovery of medical records in an abandoned hospital in Dundee (not again, surely?) and, most gravely, 18 deaths due or related to clostridium difficile at Vale of Leven Hospital, Dunbartonshire. This bounced up and hit Miss Sturgeon, also the Health Minister, late in the spring and she set in train an independent inquiry whose findings were scathing about handwashing and so on. All well and good until yesterday when MSPs voted that there should be a public inquiry into the issue.
And now we get to the point. I cannot remember an instance in the past 16 months of the parliament putting one over on the SNP like this. Miss Sturgeon is not bound by the vote, though it would bad if she were to ignore it. Could it be that opposition MSPs are getting themselves organised finally? The SNP is a minority government, relying on the two Greens and the support of one or other of the big parties to get bills through. This is why it has done so much "stuff" outside parliament and brought so little in. Will the announcement tomorrow of a new Labour leader - the third to face Mr Salmond since last May - herald a revival of what had been the Establishment party in Scotland for half a century?
Probably not, since Labour's difficulties there go deeper and are all wrapped up with the fate of Gordon Brown, the Rt Hon MP for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (brilliant names, these Scots seats!). That the SNP won the Glasgow East by-election was no surprise, and they seem certain to win again in Glenrothes - another formerly safe Labour seat - whenever that poll is held. They'd still be odds-on to win at Holyrood again in 2011 too, boosted no doubt by a Tory landslide in the UK general election of, probably, May 2010. The question is, would they and Mr Salmond enjoy such a period of grace again or has the mood shifted slightly towards indifference and annoyance?
And then maybe I've been taken in, and Wee 'Eck will simply wave the clouds away, blame all his woes on those bloody occupying Brits and lead the nation into a referendum that would undo the 1707 union of parliaments though, so as to be sure that the Queen and her heirs and successors can still go to Balmoral, not the 1603 union of crowns. That, after all, is his single policy objective: the rest - the last 16 months and the next two and half years - is just mood music.
