A calamitous Sunday in Glasgow should raise more than an eyebrow over the consequences of the Government’s policy decisions in the areas of health, fire and policing, argues Herald columnist Calum Steele

Governments reaping the whirlwinds of their political choices are quite a rare thing. The electoral cycle always moves on, leaving the long-term consequences of short-term policies a problem for future administrations to face and try to deal with. There are, as always, exceptions that prove the rule – to a point at least – as the miner’s strike for Margaret Thatcher showed. But even then, the generational poverty and all the problems that brought, created by massive unemployment and deindustrialisation, continue to be felt to this day.

So too the depletion of our armed forces, which have been in steady decline ever since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and whilst almost all the cuts have taken place under Conservative governments, it is Keir Starmer who is now in the hot seat as the barrage of criticism over the capability of the nation to protect itself comes sharply into focus at a time of unprecedented global instability. As two things can be true at once, it is the Trump presidency that has simultaneously exposed the fragility of the nation’s military capacity whilst contributing exponentially to the chaos underpinning the urgency with which it undoubtedly requires to be addressed.

When you add the austerity policies of George Osborne and Danny Alexander, the chaos and devastation of Iraq, the Brexit “success” of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, and the economic incoherence of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng into the mix, it would not be unfair to conclude that decades of cumulative policy........

© Herald Scotland