Keir Starmer beware! John Swinney has good reasons to threaten early Scottish election
John Swinney is threatening a snap Holyrood election unless another party helps him pass the Scottish Budget in December. This is ritualistic stuff which crops up most years. Until now, come the day and come the hour, either the Tories or Greens have helped the nationalists out.
The same can happen again, after a decent period of sabre-rattling and doom-mongering. A few token concessions will be awarded to the lucky winners and no more will be heard about them. Then it will be back to the usual moans and grievances about not being given enough money. Holyrood will limp on.
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At this week’s First Minister’s Questions, even the hitherto inexhaustible patience of the Holyrood presiding officer was tested beyond limit by a backbench SNP dullard reading out a prompt for Mr Swinney to denounce “austerity”. An early escape from this calibre of Scottish politics would indeed come as a blessed relief.
And who knows? Mr Swinney might turn into a political gambler and sniff an opportunity. The Scottish Budget could, in these circumstances, become an excuse rather than a reason for summoning voters to the polls in grim mid-winter and hoping for the best. A low turnout, keeping it down to a modest swing and they might scrape through.
That early election probably won’t happen because it goes against Holyrood decorum which decrees a fixed-term parliament except through inability to pass a Budget. Moreover, there are plenty SNP MSPs, including 28 ministers, who would rather guarantee their wages until 2026 than risk premature unemployment.
Labour’s inexplicable performance
However, the reason an early poll begins to make rational sense for the SNP, three months after a general election near wipeout, should not be shied away from. It is entirely due to the inexplicable performance of the Labour government. When the 100-day milestone is reached next Sunday, the headlines are unlikely to be flattering, so I might as well get in first.
The winter fuel payments announcement has been a political disaster which almost nobody with the exception of Chancellor Rachel Reeves believes was necessary or desirable in the form she rushed into. How it got through any level of political scrutiny as the first substantive action of an incoming Labour government will remain a mystery.
Reform of this universal benefit was necessary and desirable, but not in this way. Anyone with an ounce of political nous could have foreseen the damage that would be created, both by its timing and the failure to pre-empt a cliff-edge effect which takes money from some pensioners who need it as well as many who patently don’t.
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Hide AdBetween them, this wrong signal and the feeding frenzy around “freebies” have blocked public awareness of positive changes Labour has already made and will continue to introduce. If there is anyone in charge of communications, they should be transferred to other duties, while rebuttal seems to be an entirely lost art.
Very high stakes
None of this is irrecoverable but they had better get their act together soon. The conference in Liverpool was largely a missed opportunity and the UK Budget will provides the next one. Despite inherited fiscal limitations which everyone can understand, even if they involve a bit of pain, there must also be messages of positivity and hope.
We hear a lot of the mantra that the Labour government will be judged over one term or, optimistically, two. In Scotland, they don’t have that much time. The Holyrood elections in 2026 (or before) are likely to be as much a judgment on the performance of the UK Labour government as of the nationalist one at Holyrood. The stakes will be very high.
If Mr Swinney is seeking encouragement for a gamble, he need look no further than Dundee where two local by-elections were held on Thursday. In both wards, the SNP had comfortable majorities on first preference votes in 2022. This time, their vote share decreased but not by enough and they won both contests.
In July, Labour came within a few hundred votes of winning the Dundee seat on a 15 per cent swing. Half of that would have secured both these local by-elections. But the positivity of July has largely dissipated. I am told winter fuel payments and “freebies” were the subjects that dominated on the proverbial doorsteps – confirming how these 100 days have been squandered.
No apology from Swinney?
There is no enthusiasm for the SNP, either in Dundee or nationally. The by-election turnouts on Thursday barely cleared 20 per cent while most registered disapproval of the available options by staying at home. That served the SNP’s purposes but was not good enough for Labour – nor would it be in a Holyrood election. Change does not arise out of apathy.
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Hide AdAnother plausible reason for Mr Swinney to fancy an early election is that Operation Branchform has gone away with no certainty about when it will return, or in what form.
If and when the lid comes off the true story of how the SNP was run, a great deal will also emerge about how Scotland was governed over the past decade, with Mr Swinney at the heart of it.
Incidentally, it is a bit rich for him to berate the new Tory leader, Russell Findlay, for having supported Liz Truss. Mr Findlay has put his hands up as a repentant sinner, though he was scarcely a leading player. Mr Swinney on the other hand was chief architect of the Bute House Agreement, which gave us Lorna Slater and Patrick Harvie. Has he ever apologised, since being awarded the brush to clear up the mess?
I will be delighted if Mr Swinney calls an early election which offers the opportunity to pull Scotland out of mediocrity. The fact it is even plausible that he might do so must also act as an urgent wake-up call to Labour, at every level – including the highest.
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