Analysis: Cover-up put SNP under a cloud - but tax blow had a silver lining

JOHN Swinney's decision to end his attempt to block publication of the Scottish Government's local income tax (LIT) memo had a certain shutting-stable-doors quality to it. He took the decision because the figures on how much extra the taxpayer would have had to pay to meet the SNP's plans had already leaked out in April.

Given that continuing the legal challenge would also have added to the cost of the case, which has already run into six figures, it would have been unwise to pursue the matter further.

While the headline figures on the SNP's LIT plan did, indeed, emerge in April - and caused more damage to Alex Salmond because of the attempt to have them blocked - the full memo does provide some further illumination of the behind-the-scenes calculations going on about the policy. It shows clearly how estimates of the amount ministers would have had to cough up to keep it at 3p went up markedly during 2008 and early 2009 - from 281 million to 380m in the space of a year. The revisions came as the recession kicked in, and it became clear taxpayers would not be handing over quite so much lolly as was hoped. Thus, the Scottish Government would have had to step in with extra funds. This would no doubt have made the policy far more unattractive for ministers at a time when they were already aware their budgets were getting squeezed.

The attempt to block the publication of all this detail has not been one of the Scottish Government's best moments, to put it mildly - particularly when their main claim for doing so - to ensure there is "private space to encourage free and frank discussion on the development of policies" in government - is not borne out by the content of the documents themselves. There is nothing in them that would amount to a breach of the private bond between a civil servant and his minister. Indeed, large sections are blacked out. The SNP has suffered far more damage from accusations of a cover-up than it ever would have done had the papers simply been published like this several years ago.

The problem ahead for the SNP is that the full technical difficulties of its planned LIT - which the party still hopes to introduce after this current parliament - are out in the open. They will have to be resolved.

The irony is that the failure of this policy led directly to the SNP's most popular election pledge; only by keeping the council tax were they then able to woo voters in May with a pledge to freeze it. Some policy flops aren't too bad.