SCOTLAND – or the SNP’s version of Scotland – likes to celebrate itself as the most progressive part of the UK, if not indeed the world. It isn’t just that the Scottish people are supposedly kinder, more accepting of immigrants, more left-wing, more “right-on” – even though survey after survey proves there is little difference in the social attitudes of Scots compared to people in the rest of the UK.

The main part of this myth is that the Scottish state is correspondingly the most progressive in the UK – the unspoken assumption behind this is that it is also the most successful. One of the ways this assumption manifests itself is in the proof offered up by politicians: it almost always consists of money spent on public services – or to use their favourite word “invested” – in excess of what is spent by the Westminster government in equivalent areas. The Scottish government spent around £1.3 billion above the UK funding baseline on devolved social security benefits in 2025-26. A pre-eminent example is the Scottish Child Payment, a weekly payment of £27.15 for each child under 16 in families already on benefits – a payment that does not exist in the rest of the UK.

The go-to argument for nationalist politicians is rarely outputs – as opposed to inputs – in other words, what all this extra money achieves. When outputs are mentioned by the Scottish government, they are cherry-picked statistics which are subject to many caveats. Despite Scotland historically spending more per person on healthcare than England, the NHS in Scotland has lagged behind England in recovery after the pandemic, with longer waiting lists for elective care and outpatient and inpatient treatment. Similarly spend per pupil is higher in Scotland than in England, yet Scottish pupils perform worse in international assessments than their English counterparts.

The commentator Stephen Daisley recently observed that the Scottish government “has become a vehicle for pursuing the ideological pet projects of graduate activist progressives within the civil service, the spad racket, the government-funded ‘non-governmental’ organisations, and those expensive hubs of miseducation, the universities.”

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