That was the question addressed by the writer Gerry Hassan in his Bella Caledonia article earlier this week (After Sturgeon & “Sturgeonism”: facing up to the undemocracy of Scotland). Tackling the legacy of the long Nicola Sturgeon administration, he characterised the SNP’s time in government as the “…politics of caution, management and administration”, and described its governance as “Conservative with a small c”.

Both of these definitely apply, not just to the Sturgeon administrations but to every administration since 1999. Part of this is I think structural – because devolution is by definition power-limiting (power devolved is power retained, as Enoch Powell famously remarked).

You got the impression she enjoyed the administrative side of being FM and never truly believed in or perhaps truly wanted independence. And she was never happier than when saying “stop Brexit”, which of course was never going to happen, and she wasted two years that should have been spent conducting the proper post-mortem on the 2014 defeat that might eventually have led to a coherence strategy for delivering independence.

Incidentally, I was struck when listening to PMQs earlier today by the number of Scottish MPs inviting the PM to give the SNP a shoeing over things like ferries. It occurred to me that a Westminster that really respected devolution would be led by a Prime Minister (and a Labour one at that) who wouldn’t entertain questions about wholly devolved issues like transport. It confirmed to me what I’ve long thought – Westminster has no respect for devolution. In fact, it goes further. Westminster and the London media hardly ever think about it at all, to the extent that Emily Maitlis appeared recently to have no idea that Scotland elected its MSPs by proportional representation. Some might even argue that far from advancing the cause of independence the SNP has actually allowed devolved powers to be rolled back on its watch.

For all of our bombast at Burns Suppers – “Wha’s like us?” – and for all our historical radicalism Scotland is actually quite a cautious sort of a place. I see it in my industry – farming, where our union leaders claim things like an extension to a post-Brexit visa scheme as a big win, when in fact the target ought to be a return to the single market and free access to a customer database of half a million.

Yesterday, a friend who is standing as an SNP candidate in 2026 asked me for my support.

Here is my reply.

“Good to hear you’re standing. For a rural area like here, I genuinely think the party needs to reset its relationship with the farming community. It always feels like “jam tomorrow” and I feel like we should be making the case that our industry is much better served by a cabinet secretary within a parliament within a fully self-determining democracy. I honestly can’t remember the last time a cabinet secretary for rural affairs – or indeed anyone – made that kind of perfectly reasonable argument. It feels like we’re happy being obedient devolutionists and while we’re good at using the available powers to bring about things like the calf scheme, the bigger picture is that we don’t control the decisions of Westminster. And Starmer’s austerity as well as his utter refusal to countenance a return to the single market means that we will be unquestionably worse off as a country and as an industry.

So I will support anyone who makes this argument every day and who puts independence front and centre. What is the party for if not for that? As Harold Wilson said in a different context, we are a cause or we are nothing.

And this week’s announcement of a massive infrastructure spend in Kent and Essex shows again where our resources are being used.

Seriously, if we can’t make a case for self-determination out of all this then I don’t know why I bother”.

In short I believe that the last few years of Scotgov have seen a hollowing out of any remaining radicalism in Scottish public discourse, but this is hardly a uniquely Scottish thing. When I turned on PMQs earlier, what was Starmer, the leader of the party that once brought about the NHS and the post-war rebuild, blethering on about?

Potholes. Attlee et al must be turning in their graves.

That great radical Tony Benn once said there were two types of leader – signposts, who through good and ill pointed to where they thought we should be heading, and weathervanes, who pointed to wherever the political climate told them to.

We need more than ever to find our direction, because it feels like democracy, in Scotland and in the western world, is birling in the breeze.