SNP's independence paper on education shows Scottish nationalism is running out of ideas – Euan McColm

The truth is that the white paper was full of unsupported assertions and gross distortions of the negative impact on Scotland of membership of the UK. The document may have been 650 pages long but, well, length is no guarantee of quality, is it? Hundreds of pages of nonsense is just hundreds of pages of nonsense.

A decade after that white paper failed to persuade a majority of Scots to vote Yes, the Scottish Government is now producing a series of documents which ministers claim – entirely falsely – answer key questions about independence. That would be well and good if any of these publications even began to fill in the gaps in the SNP’s case.

Education in crisis

Of course, none of these papers has provided any new information that might bring round sceptics. Instead, we’ve seen the same old claims about the benefits of independence reheated. The latest document is an especially poor instalment in the series. Focusing on the subject of education, the paper explains that – with independence – the potential of young Scots could be fully realised.

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In her foreword to the document, Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth writes: "Devolution has delivered transformational improvements in the life chances of our children and young people. We can proudly show how decisions made in Scotland have improved the lives of our young people and independence would give us the opportunity to make all decisions in Scotland, rather than leaving far too many of them to a UK Government whose actions are holding us back.”

This is embarrassing stuff. The truth us that, under the SNP, education is in crisis. And the current constitutional settlement has precisely nothing to do with that reality.

Lack of intellectual might

Education is fully devolved and not one single decision made at Westminster has held back the Scottish Government. Falling standards in literacy and numeracy are the responsibility of the SNP and the idea that breaking up the Union would somehow empower failing ministers to make our schools more successful is just fanciful.

In rare moments of reflection, more thoughtful SNP politicians will concede their failure to provide compelling and straightforward answers on a range of subjects from borders to currency to pensions. I don’t think it’s too much to expect that, a decade on, the SNP might have begun to fill in the blanks. A lack of intellectual might and curiosity among senior nationalists means there has been no progress on answering difficult questions and no number of government produced papers can change that.

As he approaches the first anniversary of his election as First Minister, Humza Yousaf struggles to convince that he has either the ideas or dynamism required to energise a flagging independence movement. As this latest Scottish Government paper on independence shows, Scottish nationalism is fast running out of ideas.