Does SNP deserve yet another chance to fix Scotland?

Healthcare, education and the economic pressures faced by so many families and businesses have to be the priority for those who want to serve at Holyrood.

After 19 years of SNP governance, it's time to decide whether that party deserves yet another chance to get it right, or if it's time to consign them to the dustbin of political history and forge a new, better path for Scotland. To date the voters have had little to go on. Manifestos are only just being opened up for initial inspection by commentators.

And the public has had to discern what they can from the speculation around how votes will fall on May 7 now we have six serious players in the game: SNP, Labour, Tory, Liberal Democrats, Green and Reform.

It’s that last newcomer’s influence that has excited so much comment and so little substance. It seems every time I turn on the radio another Reform candidate has bitten the dust or there is another row about a distasteful comment by one of their number.

Conservative voters must be totally scunnered that the party Ruth Davidson revived so effectively as a centrist force has lurched so far to the Right in pursuit of the votes it has lost to Reform.

Where those disillusioned voters turn could be crucial. As unionists I think it is unlikely they will seek solace in the SNP.

They might also find it difficult to turn to their historic adversaries in Scottish Labour, even if that party has finally, as some claim, turned the corner.

As former partners of the SNP the Greens will, of course, have to overcome the fallout from being part of a less than successful Holyrood administration and failure to implement their flagship recycling policy.

My own party, the Scottish Liberal Democrats, are confident that we can repeat Ed Davey’s demolition of the so-called blue wall in the South of England by smashing the yellow one up here. Alex Cole-Hamilton has made no secret of the fact he is hoping for a bounce in our regional vote to back up the success we have seen in constituencies in the past 15 years.

Of course, when the SNP came to power in May 2007 it was a Labour and Liberal Democrat coalition which it replaced. The Nationalists made big promises then, and in the 19 years since, but have failed to fulfil so many of them.

Looking back to that morning in the first decade of the century I remember feeling, despite personal defeat, that my country was entering a new era.

As I watched Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon in that famous welcome from the helicopter I wondered what their time in office would bring. I knew independence would be an issue, but I did not expect failures in education and health to dog us for two decades or for it to descend into personal acrimony and scandal.

If that victory was a time of hope, this time there is less of that in the atmosphere.

We have serious problems which demand serious leaders and an electorate willing to turn the page.

Christine Jardine is the Scottish Liberal Democrat MP for Edinburgh West