Michael Kelly: SNP already passing the buck and the blame

'A WEEK'S a long time in politics,' remarked Harold Wilson.

It hasn't even taken a week for the fig-leaf of Crawford Beveridge's Independent Budget Review to have been stripped from finance secretary John Swinney, exposing how badly he is equipped to deal with the cuts imposed by the Westminster budget.

The review told us nothing new. It merely listed the options the government might take to bring expenditure into line with income. It was designed, first to suck the other political parties into discussion so that the SNP could blur the lines of responsibility for Scotland's cuts. The other parties, particularly in an election year, will not fall into that old trap. They will point out that it is up to the government to draw up its budget and take responsibility for it.

And, of course, it was also designed for the government to hide behind when it does announce an unpopular budget. 'It was not me,' Swinney was hoping to say. 'That's what these experts proposed.'

But unbelievably after spending thousands on this unnecessary report, he threw most of that defence away when he immediately ruled out four of it most significant conclusions. His knee-jerk reaction was to ringfence the NHS, universal free personal care, free eye tests and concessionary travel.

So while the SNP continues to blame the irresponsibility of the (whisper it, Scottish) banks for this crisis, it is now endorsing policies which mean that these very bankers can get all these basic care and services at the state's expense and use their multi-million pound bonuses to buy yachts and race horses!

But if the middle class are to be the winners out of these decisions then it is the poor and deprived who will suffer. It is the local authority services - particularly social services - on which they depend that are going to be the hardest hit by the cut-backs.

Not that this will come as a shock. The chief executives of local authorities have been discussing expected cuts for many months now. Glasgow has told all of its departments to prepare for cuts of up to 20 per cent - the figure that Swinney's stance now indicates. So the plans are in place and reductions in manpower have been thought through and can be carried out relatively smoothly.

That is not to say that they are being shepherded through willingly. But local authorities have no power to resist. The government is not going to supply the money and has pledged to continue its freeze on council taxes - a freeze extended from 'temporary' to one covering the lifetime of this parliament when the SNP discovered that its proposal for a local income tax wouldn't work.

This makes resistance by the trade unions difficult, too, because if they strike against their employers they will be exerting no pressure at all on the decision-makers.

But the savage attack on local government is much more of a political problem for the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (Cosla). This body, since the introduction of proportional representation into local elections, no longer has an automatic Labour majority.

For that reason, but also because it had already had angry confrontations with the former Lib-Lab administration, it fell immediately into the arms of the SNP government signing up to an agreement, the ‘concordat', which it saw as a protection for its powers and status but which has now turned into its prison.

Promising great freedom to local authorities with an absence of micro-management from the centre both government and Cosla agreed that the concordat ‘taken as a whole, the package will lead, over time, to significant benefits for users of local government services.' How hollow the opening paragraphs sound in the light of John Swinney's recent pronouncements.

Much of the blame for Cosla's docile attitude - at least according to Labour - has been the performance of their party colleague Pat Watters, in his role of Cosla's President. They see his role as political - after all if he wasn't elected by Labour voters in South Lanarkshire, he wouldn't be in his job. He appears to regard himself as a neutral chairman of a body in which every other member is behaving politically.

Labour is becoming increasingly critical of the way he leads policy. What they want is for him to try and persuade Cosla to take a Labour view and then try to sell that to the government. His preferred option appears to be to do it the other way round - to agree policy in cosy chats with John Swinney and sell that to his fellow Cosla members.

At least one council, North Lanarkshire, is so disgusted at the way things are working out that senior members of its administration are pointing out that it was Cosla that signed the concordat, not their council and that they do not feel bound by it. What practical action that can lead to is unclear.

However, the SNP's behaviour over the last few days appears to be too much anti-local government even for Watters. He has foreseen the carnage to services to vulnerable families that will result from Swinney's rejection of the independent budget review proposals for spreading the pain across the whole of the public sector.

He has spoken up in defence of local government services. He has even been so daring as to mention council tax rises as an alternative to the deepest cuts. But he argues only for ‘a slight rise' which will hardly mitigate against the impact on social care services which he sees causing bed-blocking in our hospitals. Maybe slight attacks on the vulnerable are acceptable.

In this review the government have simply wheeled out their old tactic of passing the buck and the blame. The only effective opposition to imposing gargantuan cuts in local government services can come from Cosla, which the government ‘respects as a partner'.

And that opposition will only be effective if Cosla stops acting as the protector of the SNP's political posturing and devotes itself to defending local government. That might need a new President. We'll see what next week brings.