CROFTERS in the Scottish Highlands live many miles apart, but they are a tribe nonetheless. At Dingwall Mart—a centre for the cattle trade since the days when man and beast travelled by foot down the old drove roads—backs are slapped, weather-beaten hands grasped and relatives asked after. The auctioneer, singing out bids as each lot of cows or bulls is herded into the pen, knows everyone by sight. Most folk here inherited their land and tenures, explains Roddy, who rears shorthorns and limousins (“limmers”) on his croft near Brora. “We do things our way.”

So it was with consternation that crofters learnt in 2012 that the government in Edinburgh would appoint the first head of the new Crofting Commission rather than letting their representatives choose. Tavish Scott, an opposition member of the Scottish Parliament, spoke of a “Saltire underpants test”, accusing the Scottish National Party (SNP) government of politicising the body that oversees the allocation of crofting land. Sure enough, the crofters found Susan Walker, the SNP pick, too obedient to Holyrood. Facing a vote of no confidence, she resigned in May.

The saga reflects a broader story. Even as the SNP preaches freedom, devolution and pluralism in Britain, within Scotland it hoards power, stamping on regional differences, tightening the state’s control and marginalising critics. One would never know this from its left-liberal message at its annual conference starting on October 15th. This rhetoric has helped give the party its political dominance (it has 56 of Scotland’s 59 seats in Westminster and a majority in the Scottish Parliament that may grow next year).

To observe Scotland’s public sector is to witness the SNP’s control-freakery. Where councils once held sway, SNP ministers oversee hospitals, police departments, regional development agencies, fire services and even local tax levels. COSLA, the local authorities’ representative body, calls Scotland “the most centralised country in Europe”. In Inverness the fire-control room has been closed. The constabulary, with responsibility for an area the size of Belgium, is going too. The SNP has concentrated cuts on local, frontline services (Scottish councils are twice as indebted per head as English and Welsh ones, despite the country’s disproportionately generous funding). From the centre, meanwhile, it has doled out lavish universal goodies such as free university education, medical prescriptions and care for the elderly.

The SNP government has extended its reach into non-fiscal realms. One proposal enables ministers to force landowners they do not like to sell up. Police officers can patrol sleepy Highland settlements with guns and use stop-and-search powers more than before. From next year, every Scottish child is due to have a state guardian. An Orwellian national identification register is in the works. Ministers pillory sceptical academics, civil servants, journalists and judges, give orders to councillors and, it is said, bully firms and voluntary bodies that demur. Rigid discipline prevails within the SNP: prominent dissenters are ousted, while bosses rarely rebuke the party’s online activists for abusing heretics and peddling conspiracy theories.

Unsurprisingly, the result is poor government. Tax receipts frittered away on “free” middle-class giveaways, combined with a snooty rejection of England’s decentralising public-sector reforms, have seen hospital waiting lists grow. Literacy rates are falling while class sizes rise. Fewer Scots from poor families go to university than their English equivalents, and the gap is growing. In August the European Commission suspended regional-development payments over doubts about Edinburgh’s ability to spend the money wisely.

Yet the opposition is weak. That is partly its own fault; both Labour and the Tories have long overlooked Scotland, notwithstanding recent attempts to make up for it. The SNP’s pre-eminence, boosted by a surge in support after its failed secessionist referendum last year, sidelines alternatives. The party dominates a legislature that has no upper house and provides its speaker, its members having defied a convention that would have seen a Labour representative take the post. Scrutiny committees are mostly in SNP hands—and it shows. Last year the Public Petitions Committee crushed a proposal for a separate independence plebiscite for Scotland’s (broadly unionist) outer islands. Four of the country’s daily newspapers backed the party in May’s general election; only one backed any other party.

Vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself

Ironically, the Scottish government’s underperformance rests precisely on the formula that makes it dominant. Special-interest groups are indulged, populist spending protected, services left unreformed for fear of making enemies, tabloid-friendly changes embraced and an “other” (the English, represented by Westminster) fingered for every failure or disappointment. The SNP’s soft autocracy in Scotland is the thread holding together the party’s distinctive tartan of universal handouts, leftist posturing, melodramatic flag-waving and structural conservatism. It amounts to a style of government that is more akin to Argentina’s Peronists than to the reformist Scandinavian social democrats to whom SNP politicians flatteringly compare themselves.

Push SNP types and they fall back on independence. A free Scotland, they say, can improve public services, experiment and let a thousand flowers bloom. For now the country must stand together. Bagehot does not doubt the good faith of the thousands who campaigned for the party, still less of the millions who voted for it. Yet he cannot but notice that a centralised government, stringent uniformity and unity above all else works nicely for the SNP. Tight control in the name of separation has made it one of the most successful political forces in the West. Touring the Highlands, where Edinburgh looks as imposing, and as distant, as London, a thought comes to mind: it is less that the SNP is pro-independence than that the struggle for independence is pro-SNP.