Better Nation

On Wednesday John Swinney will start the long election campaign with the publication of his draft Budget, and his usual deft political sense appears to have deserted him.

We can tell a fair bit about his plans from the detailed advance briefing provided to the newspapers. First, and most inevitably, he will seek to continue the Council Tax freeze. The share of local services being funded through local taxation is diminishing, and so too their responsibility and accountability to local voters: but the advantage of this for the SNP is pure politics.

Having spent previous campaigns making a progressive case for fairer taxes and protecting public services, the SNP have apparently decided they can only win by claiming a crude low-tax position. Labour have rightly recognised that the freeze is untenable, given the consequences for local services, but their position still feels weak and nervous. If you’re aiming to top the poll, raising taxes may well be a brave move, but there has never been a greater need for devolved Ministers to find ways to raise more revenue.

The second frankly bizarre proposal from the SNP is to shift revenue spending into capital projects. Revenue spend is what pays the wages, and this shift is what is driving the cut in public sector pay they’re also floating – a cash freeze of course being a real terms cut.

Ministers would have us believe that the boost to capital budgets means “schools’n'hospitals”, but a quick look at the actual figures shows where this money will go in the longer term. By 2011-12, next year’s Budget, the absurd additional Forth Bridge will begin to be a massive drain on the capital budget, costing almost 50% more than the current total capital spend on education across the whole of Scotland. By 2015 it will be costing us almost £400m a year, assuming the costs don’t rocket and it’s somehow managed better than the SNP/Lib Dem coalition are managing the trams.

For SNP Ministers, that’s what capital is, roads. If they were honest, they’d say “roads and roads”, not “schools and hospitals”. That’s their priority, hardly a surprise given their own lifestyles – I would say the most common single story I get asked for a Green comment on is an FOI request showing SNP Ministers’ absolute addiction to the car. The most recent one showed Alex Salmond being driven from Holyrood to Holyroodhouse. Literally across the road and the First Minister was either too lazy or too regal to consider a two-minute walk.

This is a government of back-seat policy-makers, where the world passes by through the car window, not the bus or train window, let alone being seen from the cyclist’s or pedestrian’s perspective. And a dire squeeze on public funds is being aggravated by their absolute road-building obsession. The last lot were bad enough for it, with the M74 extension and the Aberdeen Western Peripheral, but now it’s front-line services and public sector staff that will really pay the price.

That £400m a year cost for the additional Forth Bridge is, by coincidence, what the Treasury estimated a penny on the Scottish Variable Rate would bring in this year. Next time you hear Ministers object to using the tax-varying powers they once supported, remember you’ll be paying the equivalent of a penny more on income tax simply for Alex Salmond’s contract-signing photo-op, an event already scheduled for the election campaign and bizarrely backed by the non-Green opposition parties.

And so we know what’s coming. As Brian Taylor said on the Politics Show today, cuts, cuts and more cuts. Tory-led economic illiteracy driven from Westminster with Lib Dem assistance. Those Tory cuts now being handed on by the SNP, apparently to woo the Daily Mail. A Tory austerity drive which will apparently be accepted by Labour too. If the Scottish Greens’ conference hadn’t decided to offer the public an alternative, the chance to use the existing powers to raise revenue rather than waiting for Calman (let alone independence), then the public would be looking forward to a choice of five Parliamentary parties with nothing different to say, no alternative to passing on a variation of the same cuts.

Scotland is a country which voted by 63% to 36% in favour of a tax-varying power. A country which has consistently voted for more progressive politics than England favours. A left-wing nation led by Ministers determined simply to implement Tory cuts, afraid to use the powers we endorsed in 1997. A governing party obsessed with independence as the universal panacea but who cannot see how the case for self-governance is undermined by their refusal to use the powers they already have. Ministers who behave like the Daily Mail speaks for Scotland. A country whose two largest parties dare not look at an alternative to the Coalition’s cuts.

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