For a decade, the Scottish National party has successfully fused the agenda of Scottish interests and social democratic values, leaving once-dominant Labour looking unsure and wrongfooted. But the tide appears to be turning. When asked how they would vote in a general election, more Scots in the latest opinion polls backed Labour than the SNP. Things look certain to take a turn for the worse this week when the SNP announces plans to fill a billion-pound hole in next year’s budget with tax rises and spending cuts.
Unlike the UK government, Holyrood has few options but to balance its yearly budget. Inflation produced £580m more in tax receipts than projected and the SNP gambled that this would be enough for outlays, such as £100m for NHS waiting lists and higher than expected pay awards, to bolster its flagging appeal. This was a costly bet to lose. The Fraser of Allander Institute warns that the public sector workforce – which accounts for one in five jobs in Scotland – may have to shrink to fill next year’s £1.5bn gap between spending commitments and state revenues.
Egalitarian values have long been the rhetorical basis of Scottish nationalism. The SNP’s policy differentiation did see free university tuition as well as increasing benefits for poorer families. Scotland has a legacy of deep poverty and deindustrialisation. Without more cash from Westminster, the Scottish government’s choices are limited, as its borrowing options are constrained. Humza Yousaf, the SNP first minister, might say higher taxes on the rich build a “fairer society”. Scotland, it is reported, will see a new 45% tax band introduced for earnings over £75,000. But, if this policy is announced on Tuesday, Mr Yousaf will have been forced into it.
Voters can’t help but notice the gulf between what the SNP says and does. When the party lost a byelection in October it put down its defeat to the loss of “aspirational” voters. The result was that Mr Yousaf announced a few days later at the SNP party conference a council tax freeze, costing £300m, that would benefit the better-off while requiring cuts in public services. Kate Forbes, on the SNP’s conservative wing, is not wrong to say that the Tory chancellor’s decision to cut taxes and “pay for” this via spending cuts puts pressure on Scotland to follow suit. But hers is a voice of peripheral discontent in a party that associates itself with metropolitan collectivism.
The party’s splits had long been papered over. But they burst out into the open during a bad‑tempered leadership campaign in which Mr Yousaf beat Ms Forbes to succeed the SNP’s talismanic leader Nicola Sturgeon. Scandals have since then sloshed around the party. The SNP is now viewed as being incompetent, with a majority of voters who expressed a view disapproving of their handling of the economy and the NHS. Occupying the minds of Scottish voters are the cost of living crisis and the decrepit state of the nation’s public services rather than independence. Even the party’s most loyal supporters have had their confidence in the SNP’s effectiveness as a political party shaken. A programme of austerity is hardly likely to win them back.
