Launching the Scottish National Investment Bank in November 2020, then First Minister Nicola Sturgeon described it as one of the ‘most significant’ developments in the history of devolution.
After pledging to support the investment bank with £2billion of taxpayers’ cash over the coming decade, Ms Sturgeon said it would help tackle some of the biggest challenges facing the country.
The SNIB, she added, had the potential to ‘transform, grow and decarbonise Scotland’s economy’.
Last month, it emerged that the bank posted eye-watering losses of £137.5million during 2025-26.
A number of failed investments (or, if you prefer, reckless gambles with taxpayers’ cash) in companies that have collapsed or are underperforming has rather undermined the Scottish Government story that the SNIB would transform Scotland for the better.
But while, ultimately, it is Scottish families who’ll pay for these losses, those running the bank will continue to be cushioned from the consequences of their decisions by huge bonuses.
The bank’s boss, David Ritchie, is in line for performance-related bonuses of £34,000 in addition to his £214,000 salary.
Mr Ritchie, appointed chief executive in January, qualifies for this windfall thanks to the government-owned company’s pay policy, which includes a ‘reward framework’.
Then First Minister Nicola Sturgeon at the official launch of the Scottish National Investment Bank’s official launch in 2020
How fitting that, in the SNP’s Scotland, losses made by the SNIB have no impact on the whacking great bonuses bosses will receive.
Mr Ritchie, of course, is relatively new in the top post but other key decision-makers who were at the bank while most of those losses piled up are in line to be similarly rewarded.
When news of the bank’s losses emerged, Scottish Conservative finance and social security spokesman Craig Hoy laid the charge that SNP ministers have presided over years of reckless spending. Taxpayers, he said, were now paying the price for their failures.
‘It beggars belief’, added Mr Hoy, ‘that taxpayers are being asked to stomach £138million in losses while the bank’s chief executive is in line for a near-£34,000 performance bonus on top of a £214,000 salary.’ But does it beggar belief? Truly?
Failure has long since ceased to be a barrier to progress and, often, lavish reward in the SNP’s Scotland.
Senior politicians and public sector bosses now exist in a world where accountability is an alien concept.
Incompetence – as the long careers of a number of nationalist cabinet secretaries illustrate – need not prevent one from reaching the top.
Once one has become a fixture of the establishment in SNP Scotland, one can expect a number of privileges not afforded to the average worker.
Play the game – which has only one rule: ‘Do what the government tells you, no matter how insane the request’ – and you’ll be in clover.
Of course, some scandals are inescapable, even in these seemingly consequence-free times.
But if a member of the new Scottish establishment reaches a point of no return, he or she can expect any downfall to end on a bed of cushions.
Last year, the chief executive of NHS Fife, Carol Potter, announced plans to retire early.
There was nothing especially surprising about that. Senior public sector executives often take the softer landing of early retirement and, in many cases, we might look at their records and consider that they have earned the right for a few extra years in the garden or on the golf course.
The circumstances of Ms Potter’s early retirement provoked no such sentimentality. The former health board chief announced her retirement plans before the announcement of the judgment in the employment tribunal brought by Sandie Peggie, a nurse who was subjected to a grotesque disciplinary procedure after complaining about being expected to share a changing room at the Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy with Dr Beth Upton, a trans medic.
When Ms Potter announced her decision to step away from her position, she gushed: ‘It has been a privilege to serve as chief executive of NHS Fife and to work alongside such talented and dedicated colleagues across health and social care.’
In response, the health board’s chairwoman, Pat Kilpatrick, thanked Ms Potter for her ‘outstanding leadership and contribution to NHS Fife and to the wider NHS in Scotland’.
But behind this public display of affection were some deeply uncomfortable truths.
Ms Potter had been at the helm when NHS Fife broke the law by allowing biological males to use women’s single-sex spaces.
Ms Potter had been chief executive when Ms Peggie was persecuted for daring to demand her rights be recognised.
Health Secretary faced huge scrutiny over an £11,000 bill run-up on an iPad during a trip to Morocco
And Ms Potter was already, comfortably, on the way out before, inevitably, it was found that Ms Peggie had been a victim of discrimination. In the foreign country of the past, where accountability was a real and tangible thing and not a concept described but never enacted by politicians, Carol Potter and others at the top of NHS Fife – including the board members who said nothing while a dedicated nurse was hounded for refusing to accept she should undress in front of a man – would have found themselves in the office of the Cabinet Secretary for Health being asked to explain why he should not kick them all out on their backsides.
Fortunately for Ms Potter – and any other generously rewarded public servants on whose watch things go south – the death of accountability happened long ago in the SNP Government.
Ms Sturgeon may be best known now as a kind of living soap opera, a one-woman reality show with an insatiable need to be liked, but for a long time she wished Scots to consider her a politician of substance and focus.
She communicated this message by declaring her commitment to improving education standards and narrowing the attainment gap between pupils from the richest and poorest backgrounds.
In a skilfully delivered speech in 2015, Ms Sturgeon said: ‘Let me be clear – I want to be judged on this. If you are not, as First Minister, prepared to put your neck on the line on the education of our young people, then what are you prepared to? It really matters.’
What followed was the continued failure of the SNP government to improve the state of education in Scotland, along with the continued insistence of the then First Minister that she wished to be judged on the matter.
Of course, with the SNP politically dominant and the constitution the party’s only real concern, Ms Sturgeon could demand to be judged on how she dealt with Scottish education because she knew this would never, in any consequential way, actually happen.
But Ms Sturgeon is far from being the only senior SNP politician who has benefited from a culture where neither failure nor ineptitude is considered a reason for their removal from office.
The case of former health secretary Michael Matheson looms large in the memory as a moment when it seemed all standards in public life had been forgotten.
When it was revealed in November 2023 that Mr Matheson had claimed almost £11,000 in expenses for roaming charges incurred while using his parliament-provided iPad during a family holiday in Morocco, he insisted that the bill had been run up while he attended to constituency work.
Then First Minister Humza Yousaf – guileless, at best – described this as a ‘legitimate parliamentary expense’, despite the fact Mr Matheson’s bill was more than the combined total for all MSPs’ mobile expenses claimed in 2022-23.
On November 16, 2023, Mr Matheson stood up in the Scottish parliament and admitted the roaming charges had not been run up by him while he was conducting constituency business but by his sons, who had live-streamed football matches while in Morocco.
NHS nurse Sandie Peggie was at the centre of a high-profile legal row overa trans doctor using female changing rooms
Had accountability mattered to the SNP, Mr Matheson would not have been able to make that statement while health secretary. The very second it became clear he had misled parliament, the press and the public about his expenses claim, Mr Yousaf should have sacked him.
Instead, Mr Matheson clung on, pocketing his ministerial salary until he resigned on February 8, 2024, ahead of the publication of a report into the matter by the Scottish Parliament Corporate Body. That report – which upheld three complaints against Mr Matheson – was passed to MSPs on the standards, procedures and public appointments committee, who recommended a 27-day ban from the parliament, as well as the deduction of 54 days’ salary.
By the time that sanction had been proposed, John Swinney had replaced Mr Yousaf as First Minister, promising government of integrity.
But Mr Swinney’s commitment to the very highest standards did not stretch to him supporting measures proposed by the committee. Mr Matheson, he said, was a ‘friend and colleague’ who had ‘made mistakes’.
Beyond this irrelevant waffle, the First Minister tried to undermine the integrity of the committee process, describing it as ‘prejudiced’.
Politics and public life once operated on simple, clearly understood rules.
A politician who failed – either professionally or morally – would do the right thing and fall on his or her sword.
A public servant on whose watch millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money was lost would not be rewarded with a massive bonus.
Things are very different today.
There was cross-party support for the establishment of the SNIB six years ago and there remains a mainstream political consensus that, run well, it could make a difference to our national wealth.
But in the SNP’s accountability-free Scotland, where misdeeds are ignored and incompetence excused, why should those in charge care whether it succeeds or fails?
