£21 million written off. Again. Not a one-off. Not a surprise. Scottish Enterprise does this every year, £19m, £30m, £31.5m, now another £21m. Add it up and you’re looking at well over £100 million of public money since 2019 that will never come back. They call it “high-risk, high-reward.” The risk sits with the taxpayer. The reward, when there is one, is claimed in press releases. When the company dies, it becomes a line in the accounts and everyone moves on. If this was your money in a private fund, the people writing those cheques would be out the door. Because it’s Holyrood’s money, we get the same statement about leveraging private capital and a portfolio that’s still “valued” at hundreds of millions, right after another eight-figure hole. How many more annual write-off stories before someone treats this as a pattern, not an unfortunate cost of doing business?

19 years of SNP government and Scottish universities are £200 million in the hole, research is half a billion short, and there’s a billion-pound repairs backlog. Free tuition made a great slogan. It did not make a funded system. They cut the real-terms teaching grant, sold the “no fees” line as moral superiority, then quietly let foreign students pay the bills. Now that crutch is wobbling and the sector is cutting jobs and courses. Muscatelli calls it bleak. That’s what happens when you treat a world-class university system as a branding exercise instead of something you actually have to pay for. You don’t get a “wellbeing economy” by running the places that train the next generation of Scots into the ground. It's sad because our education system was world famous and it produced many famous Scots. Because of the SNP's stupidity, the future looks bleak.