Leader: Whither social justice when there’s a referendum to fight?

Published on 27/10/2011 00:00

IN the context of a Scottish budget of some £30 billion, £100 million may not seem like a lot to the Scottish Government and its civil servants.

To most electors, however, £100m is an unimaginable sum, which is why it is a matter of grave concern that the Holyrood administration is being forced to pay back this amount to Europe because of mistakes made since the mid-1990s in applications for funding.

According to the ever-vigilant public spending watchdog Audit Scotland, the mistakes were made in applications for European structural funds. Implausible as it may seem, and to take just one example, Scottish officials erred in applying for agricultural funding for areas that were covered in bracken and lochs.

Audit Scotland is right to criticise lack of oversight of the applications and to state emphatically that the buck stops with the Scottish Government. And there is a compelling reason why this message of accountability should be heeded by Nationalist ministers. The Holyrood administration is having to cope with the tightest spending round of the devolution era. Now, on top of that, it will have to deal with the loss of more than £50m in repayments to Europe from its budget in the very difficult years ahead. This troubling mistake will make their task that little bit more difficult.

That is why the SNP administration should have been listening yesterday to the evidence given to the finance committee by Professor Jeremy Peat on behalf of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE), which called for “far more independent and rigorous assessment” of spending plans and pointedly said no policy – including flagship proposals such as the council tax freeze, free personal care and concessionary fare travel schemes – should be exempt from greater scrutiny.

In making its case, the RSE, a distinguished body that could never be accused of political partisanship, was only following in the footsteps of the Scottish Government-established commission led by Crawford Beveridge, which foresaw the financial troubles ahead and made similar calls before the election, calls that the SNP, for obvious political reasons, studiously ignored.

Having set the budget for the next three years, Alex Salmond and his ministers are unlikely to pay very much attention, even to the RSE. They should. For if they are, as they claim, a left-of-centre, social democratic party, the SNP must realise the contradictions in providing free care or travel or prescriptions to millionaires as well as the poorest, particularly at a time of budget constraint. That it hardly social democracy.

However, there is, of course, a reason for the generosity and their refusal to countenance alternatives: the Nationalists have one overriding aim, which is to win an independence referendum. For them, it seems social justice can wait while they attempt to lead Scotland out of the United Kingdom.