Food for thought

Could the prospect of free school meals for primary 1-3 pupils from next January help influence the outcome of the Cowdenbeath constituency by-election (your report, 11 January)? It depends on two main factors. The first is how effective the SNP campaign machine can be in identifying it as the party with real measures to help keep the cost of living down. It has a positive message to convey on the council tax freeze, free tuition fees and now an important move to improve dignity and nutrition for a lot of schoolchildren throughout the country.

It can claim credit for keeping the concessionary travel scheme and free personal care going too, although these are policies with which the other parties can rightly claim to identify.

If SNP candidate Natalie McGarry is to have any chance, she must highlight Labour’s weaknesses and her own strengths on these key points, and much more vigorously than was done in Dunfermline last October.

The second point is just as crucial. She highlighted it in an article for this newspaper (Perspective, 19 June, 2013). It is that the SNP has to reach out to voters of a more conservative disposition in the general case for independence. This might be difficult in a constituency that contains parts that are Labour to the core.

Her party won well throughout Scotland in 2011 because many middle income voters in marginal areas gave it the benefit of the doubt. They have drifted away from the SNP because of uncertainty over Scotland’s future.

Her only hope of victory is if she can somehow reassure them that both their household incomes and their children’s future after autonomy can be guaranteed.

Bob Taylor

Shiel Court
Glenrothes, Fife