A floundering Labour leader is helping John Swinney paper over the cracks in government, says TERRY MURDEN
Before an audience at the Playfair Library in Edinburgh on Monday First Minister John Swinney set out the damage and disarray that would follow if the budget bill failed to get through parliament. He reminded those gathered that the architects of devolution were determined to avoid creating circumstances that could allow for the collapse in the delivery of public services.
Mr Swinney, therefore, must have been relieved when on Tuesday morning the Labour leader Anas Sarwar was promising not to vote against the budget bill. Even though he didn’t like it, Labour would not oppose it. With the Greens and the LibDems also unlikely to vote against the bill, the First Minister was able to tell his ministers they can all sleep soundly in their beds.
Mr Sarwar’s declaration, however, has not only given the SNP leader a free pass, it also gives him his own get out of jail card. The Labour leader may claim that he cannot support the bill because it offers nothing new, but in reality he could not afford to see the bill fail and Mr Swinney call an early election. With Labour imploding, Mr Sarwar’s Bute House ambitions are looking increasingly precarious.
There’s been a lot of talk about Mr Swinney fixing the SNP and putting it on track for an unlikely return to government next year. Stability has replaced the chaos of Humza Yousaf’s tenure, the damaging Greens have been sidelined and a budget has been unveiled that now looks to be secure.
Mr Swinney has tried to introduce a more consensual style of leadership and encouraged the party to focus on issues that matter to the voters and there are signs he is being rewarded.
Despite a record of underperformance in government, the polls suggest an SNP recovery is well under way, and even the prospect of a significant development in the Operation Branchform into party finances may not knock it off course. From the ashes of a July burn-out that routed his party, ‘Honest John’ is now among the ‘least unpopular’ leaders, and with questions being raised about the fate of the late Alex Salmond’s Alba party, he could welcome defectors back into the fold.
Yet the resurrection of the SNP is not wholly a result of one man’s re-modelling of the party. It has been sparked back into life for the same reasons that Sir Keir Starmer won a landslide election in July. An electorate disillusioned with the opposition. Mr Swinney’s rising star owes less to his own endeavours and more to a series of calamitous own goals by his biggest rival.
Apart from planning to banish poverty (a laudable, though largely impossible dream), even Mr Swinney’s most loyal supporters would struggle to identify another policy beyond the pledges made by every party to grow the economy, tackle climate change and improve the NHS.
Mr Swinney is being helped by Labour indulging in an ultimately self-destructive process of political masochism. A catalogue of London HQ policy errors, compounded by poor communication, has not helped Mr Sarwar who has been forced to flip-flop on a number of key issues including the winter fuel allowance and the Waspi campaign.
This time last year he delivered a speech in which he used the adopted slogan ‘change’ 34 times. He reiterated it ad nauseum through the election campaign. I wrote a piece warning voters of the emptiness of Labour’s pledges and to prepare to be ‘short-changed’ by a party that was getting ahead of itself.
In a speech on Monday, Mr Sarwar did make one big change. He adopted a new slogan: ‘new direction’, but continues to base his case on rubbishing the efforts of other parties.
He has offered nothing beyond saying Labour will be better than the SNP and the Tories, that he will “improve” the health service, education, the economy, blah, blah. Just how he intends to do this is yet to be explained. ‘No direction’ would be a more accurate description of a party leader struggling to convince the public that he is a legitimate First Minister who can fix the country’s problems.
It’s made worse by the ever-present potential for cross-border conflict within Labour itself. By saying he will stand up to Starmer, Mr Sarwar argues the case for self-determination, a freedom to take a different view to that expressed by Labour in London.
I have argued frequently that this makes no sense. Devolution is one thing, but having two opposing policies on the same issue just confuses voters and adds to the lack of trust in the political system. It is ridiculous to have the Scottish Secretary Ian Murray arguing the case scrapping the winter fuel payments only to have the Scottish Labour leader pursuing the opposite position.
Mr Sarwar is now facing the worst of all possible pressures: criticism from within his own party. Former Labour MSP Neil Findlay has claimed the party has “no plan, no strategy and no policies”, and said that if Labour had abstained under Richard Leonard’s leadership there would be calls for his resignation.
Scottish voters are now faced with re-electing a party that has a litany of failures or a Labour party that does not provide any reassurance that it could do any better.
If the budget represents the closest thing to putting intent behind a party manifesto, then at least we know what the SNP wants to do over the next year. It may have fallen short on, for instance, tackling housing, but business trade groups have grudgingly supported the general road map.
The Tories will continue to make the most noise and vote against the budget bill because it is not brave enough. They believe nothing short of tax cuts and stripping out regulation will kickstart the economy and provide the funds needed for public services.
Even Mr Swinney is beginning to see the folly of simply throwing more money at the health service in the hope of fixing its problems. Mr Sarwar may think likewise, but then again, maybe he doesn’t.
Terry Murden was Editor and Business Editor at The Sunday Times Scotland, Business Editor at The Scotsman, and Business and City Editor at Scotland on Sunday. He is now Editor of Daily Business.
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