The SNP manifesto didn’t say much on public service reform. “We will reduce the number of public bodies, better integrating services and reducing costs,” alongside fluff promising engagement with communities and trade unions “to protect and deliver modern and more efficient public services” was about as detailed as it got.

A promise that a Public Service Renewal Bill would be “brought forward” in the first year of parliament has been like chum in the water since the election. Health boards and quangos had been in the gun sights and the question left hanging over the summer recess has been – how many?

The new programme from the long-since-run-out-of-ideas Government has given us that answer. A scythe is to be taken to the former and a scalpel to the latter.

No one can argue that fundamental public service reform isn’t essential if we want them to continue without either bankrupting the country or its people to pay for them. But reform has to mean reform and not just fewer and cheaper. By concentrating on – admittedly enormously wasteful and, for some, egregiously enriching – management duplication, it suggests that despite being in power for 19 years, this is not so much fixing the house as it is changing the curtains.

Lest anyone think I’m all dewy-eyed for current structures, I’m not – and listing the multiple failures of multiple health boards and quangos would fill the rest of this column. But I have seen this script before and, however much we want reform to succeed, I’m far from convinced it will deliver anything more than a tighter Holyrood grip on the services we all rely on.

The SNP manifesto also promised to “devolve power to people and communities”, which I suspect its authors no more believed in at writing........

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